Donnerstag, 28. Mai 2009

Ancient photos of Mahajanga, Madagascar - Part One

During the last 2 weeks, I had been working voluntary for a little aid organisation. When I was about to leave Mahajanga as everything was done, I was waiting for my "Taxi Brousse" in an Internet Café from one of my friends. Whilst being bored and "surfing" trough the public folders of other clients, who have downloaded stuff some day from the net and leaved it on the computer I was sitting on, I stumbled upon an indubitable interesting collection of very old photographs of the district of Mahajanga. If you want to see some pictures of today, you may visit my deviantArt gallery or simply Google for "Mahajanga" or "Majunga".

Of course I copied all files onto my MP3 player. For me, it was beyond question that I would simply leave this treasure on my personal computer, waiting for the next HDD crash to come. So at the beginning I thought that it would probably the best thing to upload them all to the "Wikimedia Commons". But, although the authors of these photographs are defintively dead since a long time, I wasn't still 100% sure about the copyright issue. It is impossible for me to mention the author of some of these photos.

I simply found them on a public computer. For some of them I don't know who made them, I don't even know who has scanned them. Probably most of them would get quickly deleted at Wikimedia, therefore I decided to put them into my blog, with the notice that I would delete them immediately as soon as somebody claims and proves his personal rights on these photos - apart from that I don't see any reason at all why I should detain them. The only modification I've done to the original files was to remove some annoying white borders.

Here we go:


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As there isn't anything written down on these photos, the file names are the only description which is left for me. Neither is there any date mentioned. I guess they've been all made in the 50's, because the second photo was made in 1956 (inauguration of the secondary school "Philbert Tsiranana").

Continued:

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Now these are a bit more interesting. Some of these photos must have been made between 1890 and 1910 or earlier. Funny to see that the "Tribunal" and the "Bazary Be" are still exactly the same buildings today in 2009, with the tiny exception that they're heavily damaged and shabby. Unless I'm very much mistaken, the "Comptoir National d'Escompte de Paris" is now a little nightclub in the ground floor, and a bar for prostitutes and strangers in the first floor. The street on the picture "Les nouveaux quais" looks still almost exactly the same, too. In march 2004, Cyclone Gafilo destroyed the lovely promenade on the photo "Corniche 1962", which then had been completely replaced by the European Union with a new one which is even more beautiful and very robust.

Putting all these photos on-line is a real bunch of work (especially with my current internet connection), that's why I'll take a little break now and upload more photos in a few days.

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