Mirella Ricciardi

Mirella Rocco was the middle child and elder daughter of her parents' three recorded children. Mario Rocco (1893-1975), her father, came originally from Naples and is described variously as an Italian cavalry officer who had taken part in the First World War as a pilot,[4] and as an "Italian rancher [who operated] 3,500 acres near Nairobi".[5] Her mother, Giselle Banau-Varilla, was a French born sculptress who had once been a pupil of Rodin.[4] Both her parents had been "married for many years" when they set off for Africa at the end of 1928, but "not to each other."[6] The idea, according to one source, was to elope to the Belgian Congo and make their fortune by killing elephants and selling the ivory. However, after a "year-long foot safari" Giselle became pregnant and the couple "headed for Kenya to find a hospital".[4] It was in Kenya that they settled. Mirella's elder brother, Dorian Rocco (1930-2013), was born first. The youngest of the three children, Orla, was born in 1933.

Mario Rocco acquired 5,000 acres on the shores of Lake Naivasha which he farmed. The children enjoyed the privileged childhood familiar to many "white" Kenyan contemporaries in the 1930s. Mirella would later look back with dismay but also with a singular candour at the racial precepts with which she had grown up: "I had always been a white African, a product of the colonial system I had been raised in... I considered the Africans as my servants, not human beings like myself."[2] War came to Kenya in 1940, when Mirella Rocco was just nine, and her father was forty-seven. Kenya was then British and Mario Rocco was an Italian; he was arrested and taken to a camp at Kabete, before being transferred to South Africa for four years, returning home, in June 1944, as, according to one source, an "old, toothless and a broken man." Between 1940 and 1944, the three children were not permitted to attend school, so were taught at home.[7] After July 1944 they were permitted to attend the Kijabe Rift valley mission school, following which their final school years were spent in Nairobi.[7]

For two years during the 1950s, Mirella Rocco undertook an internship in Paris with the fashion photographer Harry Meerson.[8] In 1957, a press photograph of her sitting in front of a tourist poster for Uganda and Kenya—taken while she was on a visit to New York—bore a caption stating that back in Kenya she had already "acted as cameraman, guide and hunter on more than 15 safaris".[5] But, it was clear by then that the camera was more important for her than those other safari accessories.[7]

In 1971 she published, in London, her first volume of photographs, entitled "Vanishing Africa". Her stated intention was "to photograph the tribal life and customs of the people of Africa before they changed forever".[1] The result was an immediate commercial success.[9] By 2014, there had been four further photo-volumes. The couple by this time reportedly divided their lives between homes in London and in Italy.[1]

Mirella Ricciari's family life is well chronicled in her own published works. Mario Rocco suffered increasingly poor health during his final years and died aged 82 in a Nairobi hospital, on 5 May 1975, a month after being rushed in with a broken femur. Mirella's mother died, also in Kenya, soon afterwards.[7]

Mirella Rocco married Lorenzo Ricciardi. They had met when he had recruited her as the "stills photographer" in connection with a movie that he was shooting in East Africa. Various sources describe Lorenzo Ricciardi as "an Italian adventurer." He has led much of his life pursued by a succession of seemingly fantastical anecdotes.[10] Despite his Neapolitan familial provenance, he was reportedly born in a Milanese prison because there was insufficient time for his mother to reach the hospital.[10] As a child, he had watched Nazis burn down the family home.[10] Later, he made so much money by playing roulette that he purchased a boat and, until it sank, used it t0 "sail through a string of monsoons on" an "ocean-going dhow".[10]

In 1990, Lorenzo's "brief but tempestuous affair" with Georgiana Bronfman (née Rita Webb), the former wife of Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (now married to actor Nigel Havers), had led to him being "arrested in 1990 for trying to kill her."[11] Mirella has written of their adventure-strewn marriage with some candour: defining it as not always the most stable or monogamous of partnerships.[1] Nevertheless, it is as Mirella Ricciardi that she is identified in almost all of the accessible sources, which take their lead from her own published output. Over the next few years some sources indicate that the couple lived for a time in various African countries while, elsewhere, it is stated that they made their home in Rome[7] or in London. In any case, extensive travel remained integral to their lives, although the childhood assumption that the Rocco children "belonged" in Africa[7] was progressively set aside after the so-called Mau Mau Uprising and, more particularly, in Mirella's case, after she married Lorenzo.

After her "troubled marriage" collapsed, she fell in love with an illiterate native African, Shahibu, whom she had hired as her assistant during a photographic expedition in Kenya. She later wrote that, though he spoke no English, "In the course of time, the relationship took an unexpected turn when he became my lover. He was 16 years my junior,” and that the affair had “banished the taint of racial discrimination which afflicted almost every white person living in Africa then and with which I had certainly grown up.”[12]

The marriage with Ricciardi produced two daughters, the elder of whom, Marina, predeceased her parents when she was 36, with the cause of her death is given, variously, as cancer[1] and/or "Africa’s sunshine."[10] Ricciardi has written extensively of her grief and the sense of guilt that she suffered following her child's death.[7]