Emmanuel Jambo: Top photographer who has worked with Uhuru, Ruto, Raila, Karua

President William Ruto during a photoshoot with Emmanuel Jambo. [Emmanuel Jambo, Instagram]

"After that, I did a couple of functions for the family and from the minute I decided I was running, I was called right away."

He met President Ruto through President Kenyatta, and when President Ruto started his campaigns, Jambo was called for the job. He has also worked with Raila Odinga, Martha Karua and others.

"It feels good," he says. "I mean, it is about somebody believing in your work. It is not even all about work, but relationships too, because there are a thousand people who can do a portrait. It is not magic. But there is a relationship and there is that trust that makes somebody call you."

While he frequently walks the corridors of power, he does not enjoy getting caught up in the trappings of it so he does not travel with them.

"There is something about me. I do not enjoy travelling with dignitaries. I do not enjoy motorcades, I do not enjoy tight security, I do not enjoy controlled movement. I have done that before and I know I am truly a freelancer. I do not want to be controlled," he says.

He never saw his life turning out this way - he was on track to becoming a basketballer in the National Basketball Association (NBA). We are seated on retro seats in his cafe, Nomad Cafe, a quaint little place that he describes as having a bohemian, vintage African aesthetic. It is a month old.

It is full of antique items he has collected over the years - a radio from the fifties right next to us. An old singer sewing machine in a corner, below a large, ancient-looking clock. An old typewriter sits on the bar counter, beneath which is a vinyl player in the style of the sixties.

Overlooking us is a gallery wall full of individually framed pictures of people he admires and people he grew up watching - Bob Marley, Diana Ross, Tupac, Red Fox, Mohammed Ali, Malcolm X, Bruce Lee, Patrice Lumumba, Maya Angelou, Eartha Kitt, Marcus Garvey, Fredrick Douglass, Snoop Dog, Peter Tosh - the wall goes on.

He recently became a citizen of South Sudan but unlike some internet sources say, he has never actually lived in South Sudan or Juba. He was born and grew up in Khartoum, Sudan.

"We moved during middle school to Egypt. We lived there for five years then went to the states (US) for high school and college," he says.

He played a lot of sports as a child but narrowed in on basketball, being so serious about it that he went to college on a basketball scholarship. The tallest player in the history of the US NBA, Manute Bol, was one of his trainers in childhood and was the one who gave him the nickname 'Jordan'. People who knew him from back then still call him Jordan or 23.

A knee injury stopped his NBA prospects in their tracks and he ended up in an IT job at Nordson Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia.

It was then the photography career sneaked up on him. He was visiting his sister here in Kenya when a friend of hers saw him editing photographs on the computer and asked for his business card. He had just started doing photography as a hobby on the side and had been at it for about six months.

"The next day I got a call from Connie Aluoch, the fashion editor for True Love magazine. She said they had gone through my website and Carole Mandi wanted to meet me. I had no idea what True Love or who Carole Mandi was," he says.

After the meeting, he was not 100 per cent convinced that he wanted the job, but Carole said that her colleague, Oyunga Pala wanted to talk to him as well.

"I walked in next door, and he said he liked my stuff, but we started talking about pan-Africanism. He was like, 'We have this magazine called Adam magazine, we are going to be travelling around Africa'. We talked about John Garang, he had a picture of John Garang in his car and I was like, 'that's my role model!' This was the official interview, and he said, 'Go grab your s*** and come home!' That is exactly what I did," he says.

He had done a photo of one of his colleagues back in the states and when his manager saw it, he had predicted that they were going to lose him, so when he went back and told him he was quitting, his manager said, "I knew it" and wished him the best.

That was in 2008, and, now 45, he is amazed by how differently his life turned out from what he had imagined it was going to be.

"I never saw it this way. When I picked up a camera, I wanted to take good photos. That is all. I wanted you to take a good picture for me. It never crossed my mind that I wanted to work for a magazine, a newspaper - I was not thinking that way," he says.

In future, he would like to do photography books, coffee table books and his documentaries of things he believes in and admires, concluding, "I think I am happy. If there is anything I would like to do more it is just to impact more people in the future and make a difference."