in Africa.

Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher give us a glimpse into worlds quickly slipping away.

What’s wonderful is what these ceremonies illustrate is that every stage of life mistaken very seriously rituals and ceremonies from one to the other.

We’ve learned what’s important to what’s expected so that you go into each stage of life the sense of confidence and a sense of understanding your role.

We show you a group of Sumburu the cousins of the Masai who many people have heard of and every 14 years they go through a ceremony where the Warriors become elders.

But every single age grade the moves out and her elders become senior elders.

Children become warriors etc.

and this happened every fourteen years we felt that if we were going to complete the cycle of ceremonies birth to death we had to get the ceremonies that no one had seen that we knew existed but we had to figure out how to get into.

And that hadn’t been touched by the 21st century where traditions were still very much intact.

And for example eight to 10 years for us to get permission to go into the D.R.

Congo through photographs of Kuba kingdom and it was only by chance that we met in London.

The prince whose son of the king in line to inherit the throne for another two years to get permission from the secret council of elders he kept saying no this can’t happen.

We have to perform rituals in the sacred forest before any of the sacred masks can come out and be seen in public.

I mean there were hundreds of reasons and Angela and I are characterized by never being defeated the great revelations in life is actually living with a group of people who look radically different in person.

I spent six weeks living with the Soma people of southwest Ethiopia and the women were very large plate the size of which indicates how many cattle their parents require for their hand in marriage and it’s very sweet.

We stayed with Suma and made a film and a book on them about 20 years ago and they never really seen white people except for one mission and we’re camped with them and we give each other a peck on the side of the cheek we go to bed at night and saw a woman saw this day and she thought this is just some enchanting.

So she came up to us and she took her plate out and gave us a kiss on the cheek and you realise this huge wet lip is this sort of eating up your face in it and it just that moment so you think oh my God we all have the same emotions you can look totally different for.

But she had that same feeling that she wanted to just portray friendship and say goodnight and be love.

And you know it was so sweet and think then how would you ever guessed if we hadn’t been to Africa that a lip plated woman who looks so totally different to us is going through the same emotions as we are every minute of the day in the morning to symbolise the timidity his grand jury his power his majesty the grander of the elephant is symbolic of the king this or indeed.

Well this is one of the smaller kingdoms of Bofute surrounded by hundreds of very powerful wooden sculptures carved sculptures Africa is a huge continent.

We tend to think of it as you know here’s a country you have these particular tribes but it’s huge.

And you can’t really talk about it.

This is typical all that’s typical.

What’s happening typically now is that you could say Africa is changing and the thing that really is accelerating the change now is the mobile phone and we could say that sorry 40 per cent of what we’ve recorded in Africa over the last 40 years doesn’t exist.

Visually you have over the last 40 years develop an archive of over a half a million images thousand hours of video film and 200 detailed illustrated journals covering every single field trip and for traveling exhibitions and we’d like to find a home in the world for this.

Any place where it could be our gift to future generations.

We’re actually all African.

We all come from Africa.

So this is really the story of our human heritage.

Carol and Angela decided years ago to completely share credit never delineating who took what picture those who wrote which words.

To learn more log on to Carol Beckwith dash Angela Fisher dot com