In the Nairobi neighborhood of Korogocho, Kenya there exists a group of grandmothers skilled in the ancient art of Kung Fu. This secretive society of women, the “Shoso Jikinge” or Swahili for “Grandmother, Protect Yourself!”, was created by its members to help defend against gangs who prey on the older women after dark.
Tobin Jones, an award-winning documentary photographer based in Nairobi, had been eager to document the awe-inspiring story ever since hearing of the group’s existence. As part of a self-assigned project, Tobin created Super Grannies — a collection of NFT trading cards depicting individual members of the Shoso Jikinge self-defense society — to highlight the strength and power the women wield in their everyday lives.
I had long wanted to do a story about the group, but had just never quite figured out how to photograph them in a way that I thought would do the story justice.
Several years ago, the Shoso Jikinge self-defense society took up martial arts in order to defend themselves against young men in the neighborhood who were targeting the elderly. Having mastered the skills of punching, kicking, slashing, and screaming, the women have become formidable foes that few dare to challenge.
The grannies in this project were such good sports about everything and really played along when it came to making intimidating poses for the portraits. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun on a shoot before.
Korogocho is one of Nairobi’s toughest neighborhoods and is nestled in a part of the city few people dare to travel. The roads tend to be clogged with traffic and a neighboring dump often engulfs the area with a pungent odor. About 200,000 people live in the slums, most in semi-permanent structures made out of corrugated metal.
Initially apprehensive about how the grannies would react to him, Tobin soon felt at ease as the grannies welcomed him into their community with open arms eager to participate in the project.
In this case any nerves I may have had were quickly cast aside though, as this group of women couldn’t have been a more inviting bunch and it was in fact the two eldest grandmothers – Tutu and Wambui – who seemed to be the most enthusiastic!
The biggest challenges of this project were almost all technical, as Tobin experimented with a variety of photographic techniques – from shooting on medium format film, to developing the film himself, then colorizing the film digitally, and finally turning the images into a series of trading card NFTs. Each trading card corresponds to the original black and white film photograph taken by the iconic Rolleiflex (later colorized digitally to create the image seen on the card).
The final step was to make a trading card template for each of the ladies and figure out how to mint NFTs – which was a bit of a process in itself – but a real eye opener into the world of cryptocurrency.
Over the last year, Tobin has become increasingly interested in the world of NFTs and was eager to experiment with the novel technology. He foresees a huge amount of potential for photographers to sell their work on these platforms that hasn’t quite been realized yet. NFTs not only allow photographers to sell their images straight to the consumer and keep track of their work, but they can also continue to profit through royalties if that NFT is sold onwards. Another advantage is the artist can share profits with the subjects of their work (in this case by sharing a percentage of the royalties), which is also an exciting prospect.
The reason I specifically chose to make the trading cards is because that seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment in the NFT space and I thought it would be a little funny to make superheroes out of these grannies and have them traded in the same way as baseball cards.
A selection of the Super Granny trading cards are now on Opensea as NFT trading cards and available to buy. Tobin has also partnered up with the Streaming Museum to sell four of his favorite and one-of-a-kind cards on the NFT trading platform Foundation. In addition to the NFTs, owners will have access to a higher-res version of the original colorized photograph that they can print and frame like any other piece of artwork. Each time Super Grannies cards are traded a 10% royalty fee will be applied – with 5% going back to the artist and 5% directly back to the Shoso Jikinge society of women.
I’ve learnt a huge amount from this project and feel like its been a project that has connected different types of photography from across the ages – the analog, the digital, and the blockchain.
Credits
Photographer: Tobin Jones