In 2002 I was teaching photography in Nairobi when I met George Mureu. I had learnt about his work as a Taekwondo instructor in an old, battered copy of Time magazine. The article was illustrated with a photo showing a man in a tracksuit demonstrating a martial art kick to a group of young children. It told of how Mureu was helping Nairobi’s street kids escape cycles of abuse through Taekwondo. I was intrigued.

Three years earlier, I had started to develop a project that I would come to call Healing Sport. It began when I became involved with an ex-combatant football team in Liberia. The images became a sort of ‘Trojan Horse’ that conveyed information about war and conflict through a different conversation. I later accompanied the same team on a ‘far-side’ football tour of the UK.

I met George, and we got on far too well. He introduced me to everyone at the National gym, and later to his squad of acolytes, cryptically known as the ‘George Taekwondo Academy’. They came from an array of under-privileged backgrounds, ranging from mere poverty to abandonment on the streets. We formed an uneasy relationship that dwelt on our surface levels. But having worked in Africa for the past four years, I’ve become pretty used to this initial atmosphere, if only to know that it doesn’t last as long as people always think.

Working on the Taekwondo gym injected impetus into the Healing Sport project. But it was three years since I’d started, and I’d begun to question the effectiveness of black and white photography in representing African issues. In an attempt to mirror how I felt, I worked across a range of media. I produced a traditional black and white photoessay in 35mm, I made video sequences, sound samples, animations, and medium format colour work. It was also a good time to experiment, since I was also coming and going with the teaching.

I still look at the work and feel as if they are two sides of the same coin: the black and white convey a story, but the colour feels like how it really is. There just seems something more real about it. You don’t see many people combining colour and black and white effectively, but I’m fascinated with how you can create a sort of interior/exterior dynamic between the two.

I became more involved with the squad. After a couple of months, George contacted me with his intentions of taking a team to the 6th World Taekwondo Federation Championship. I threw caution to the wind and told him I’d come too. I also wanted Healing Sport to develop this sense of Africa as being in this world. Not just a place that magazines pull from under the bed to remind distant readers of their relative security. And so I was quickly propelled into the post of ‘team manager’ without fully comprehending the subtle permutations of this lofty position. Basically it meant that I had to deal with getting the team from A to B… with airline staff, officials, time zones, culinary preferences and translation techniques. I soon realized that the only thing I really knew was that Kenya and Korea began with the same letter.

It took us two days to get from Nairobi to Seoul via a string of places and a 13 hour stop-over in Bangkok airport. Thai immigration nearly prevented the team from proceeding, believing that we were all caught up in some incredibly elaborate immigration scam.

We also took the festival organisers by complete surprise. They had not expected our arrival, but soon saw the potential media benefits of having the only representatives from sub-Saharan Africa. We were duly registered and given accommodation: all seven of us sleeping on the floor of a small, cramped room. In the ensuing days, we were trailed by National TV and appeared in newspapers around the country. Despite being predominantly from the Kikuyu tribe, the team was asked to perform traditional Masai dances. They would dress up using their checked towels as cloaks, and hanging beads around their ears, as if auditioning for a Carry-On film. Sometimes they would be asked to sing. They would do so until we were all in hysterics while the polite Koreans tried in vain to get the microphone off George.

It would be easy to interpret such exotic misrepresentation as a sad state of affairs. As the only black team from over 60 nations represented at the festival, Kenya certainly stood out. And I don’t think anyone really expected them to take the three golds, three silvers, numerous bronze medals, as well as the trophy for the best team and best coach.

Nowadays, people are always concerned about your ‘personal relation’ to the subject matter. Usually, this involves some simple equation to decide whether you have the right or not to photograph the ‘other’. I could say a lot of things about working in Africa, about race and my relationships there, but in the end it’s not so simple.

The human connections that I am able to make through the process of photography, are among the most valuable things to me. Although I know it’s almost impossible, I secretly hope that my photography passes on to the viewer the rich experiences that my subjects have passed on to me.