The Story
Working with Africa Unite, UNICEF, the Bob Marley Foundation, and the JRDC School. Community storytelling at its most purposeful — giving young people in rural Ethiopia a platform and a voice.
Shashemene, Ethiopia. 2005.
A town with a history unlike almost anywhere else on earth. A school founded by a community that had been waiting to come home for generations. A partnership between UNICEF, the Rita and Bob Marley Foundation, and a digital media organisation from Hull. And at the centre of it all — young people with stories that the world needed to hear.
Africa Unite
In 2005, Cafe Society travelled to Shashemene in southern Ethiopia as part of Africa Unite — a major cultural and educational event organised by the Rita and Bob Marley Foundation in partnership with UNICEF. The event brought together artists, educators, and community organisations from across the African diaspora to celebrate, connect, and create.
Shashemene is no ordinary town. In the 1940s, Emperor Haile Selassie granted land in the region to members of the African diaspora — an invitation to return to Africa that was answered most prominently by members of the Rastafarian community from Jamaica and beyond. For decades, families made the journey and built lives in Shashemene. The town that grew from that migration is one of the most culturally distinctive and historically layered communities on the African continent.
Africa Unite was rooted in that history — a celebration of the community’s journey, culture, and continuing presence in Ethiopia.
The JRDC School
Cafe Society’s workshop programme was based at the JRDC School — the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community School — which served the children of the diaspora community in Shashemene. The school was a remarkable institution: a living expression of the community’s commitment to education, cultural continuity, and the next generation.
The students were articulate, curious, and had plenty to say. They had grown up in a community that carried a profound sense of identity and historical purpose. The digital media workshops gave them the tools to express that in their own way — on camera, in their own voice, on their own terms.
What was made
Working with students from the JRDC School, Cafe Society produced a series of short films that documented the students’ lives, their community, and their own perspectives on the world they inhabited. The films weren’t scripted or shaped by outside hands. They reflected what the students themselves wanted to say — their experiences of growing up in Shashemene, their connection to the diaspora community’s history, their aspirations for the future.
The work was consistent with everything Cafe Society had done in Arizona, Withernsea, and the Seychelles — technology as the vehicle, the community’s own story as the point. Give people the tools. Create the space. Step back. Let them make the work.
The wider context
The Africa Unite event in Shashemene in 2005 was significant beyond the workshops themselves. It brought international attention to a community that rarely featured in global media — and it did so through celebration and creativity rather than the poverty narrative that too often defines how Africa is represented to the outside world.
Cafe Society’s presence as part of that event was consistent with a decade-long commitment to taking professional creative tools to communities that didn’t always have access to them — not as charity, but as collaboration. The same instinct that had driven the work in the Navajo Nation and the Seychelles was alive and well in the Ethiopian highlands.
The Our Ethiopia films
The workshop programme produced more than individual student films. It also produced Our Ethiopia — a documentary film capturing the experience of the community, the event, and the creative work that emerged from the workshops. The film brought together voices from across the Shashemene community — community elders, young people, educators, and the diaspora families who had made Ethiopia their home — into a single, sustained portrait of a unique place and a unique moment.
The connection to Digital Schools
The Ethiopia project sits in the middle of a decade of international work that took Cafe Society from the Holderness coast to the Arizona desert to the Indian Ocean to West Africa and back. Each project was different in context, culture, and community. Each one was built on the same foundation — the belief that every community, however isolated or overlooked, has a story worth telling and deserves the means to tell it well.
That belief is the foundation of Digital Schools. The schools of East Yorkshire are the community now. Their stories — their pupils, their staff, their values, their achievements — deserve to be told brilliantly. That’s what Digital Schools was founded to do.
Africa Unite brought together young people, artists and educators from across continents — continuing the belief that creativity and storytelling could connect communities in ways traditional education often could not.
The people who made it possible
No creative project of any scale happens alone. Across thirty years — from Cafe Society’s first darkroom sessions in 1997 to the Digital Schools portfolio of 2026 — the work has always been shaped by the people who brought their skills, their networks, their energy, and their belief to it.
One of those people deserves particular recognition here.
Karl Byron — colleague, friend, and co-producer — brought something to the international chapter of this story that no amount of planning or preparation could have replicated. From Martinique, with deep roots across the African diaspora and creative communities that stretched far beyond what any visiting filmmaker could have built alone, Karl was the person who made things happen.
As audio specialist and co-producer across some of the most ambitious projects Cafe Society undertook, Karl’s contribution went far beyond the technical. His connections — to musicians, community leaders, fixers, studios, and creative organisations across Nigeria and beyond — meant that doors opened that would otherwise have stayed shut. Projects that might have taken months to establish found their footing in days. Communities that might have been cautious welcomed the work because Karl was part of it.
In the world of international community filmmaking, who you know matters as much as what you know. Karl Byron knew everyone worth knowing — and had the generosity to share those connections freely in the service of work that both of us believed in.
To Karl — thank you for the hookups, the friendship, the music, and the years of keeping it moving. The work was better for having you in it.
Jon Robson — photography, direction, production. Shashemene, Ethiopia, 2005. In partnership with Africa Unite, UNICEF, and the Rita and Bob Marley Foundation.
