Guillaume Bonn’s Mosquito Coast: Travels from Maputo to Mogadishu follows the eastern side of Africa between two cities that give the book its geographic span. Published by Hatje Cantz in 2015, the 112-page volume considers a region undergoing conspicuous material and social change. Bonn photographs established cultural forms alongside skyscrapers, highways, and technologies presented as signs of progress, keeping incompatible versions of the present within the same frame of inquiry.

Born in Madagascar, Bonn has documented social and political events in Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Somalia. That experience informs a project grounded in both reportage and personal attachment: East Africa is described as his home, even as his life extends between Nairobi, Paris, and London. Rather than reducing the territory to conflict or development, the photographs attend to the friction between continuity and disruption—between ways of life that persist and structures rapidly remaking their surroundings.

The title provides the book’s uneasy conceptual frame. It invokes the colonial-era Miskito or Mosquito Coast, named after its Indigenous inhabitants, and relocates that historical association to contemporary East Africa. Bonn connects the region’s transformation to malaria, the residues of dictatorship and war, and the influence of Western commerce and consumption. His position is not detached: the work arises from sadness at what may disappear, balanced by close observation of what is emerging.

For a photobook collection, Mosquito Coast merits attention as a sustained, authored account of a specific historical transition. Its significance lies less in offering a comprehensive portrait of East Africa than in preserving the tensions of Bonn’s perspective—documentary knowledge, familiarity with the region, and ambivalence toward modernization. The result is a focused photoessay about how landscapes and cultures absorb change without surrendering their histories all at once.