How we media: South Africa

Made for Medicinal Media by Rob VanAlkemade. Music: Amapiano Beta by DJ Demubi. Footage from: SABC, NEMISA. Our nonprofit generates funding in multiple ways, including through affiliate linking. When you purchase something through an affiliate link on this site, the price will be the same for you as always, but we may receive a small percentage of the cost.

Independent filmmaker Bhuti Mopai was born in industrial Witbank and raised in Middleburg, South Africa during the government of Apartheid. The Apartheid (1948 to 1994) in South Africa was the systemic racial segregation and persecution of the Black majority under the all-white government, which, among countless other systemic oppressions, banned all television until 1976. When Mopai did start watching TV as a child, it was only when he could pay five cents to the one neighbor with a battery-powered set. Even then, he was unable to connect emotionally to the few dramas on the air, which featured Black Africans but were entirely written and produced by white people with drastically different experiences than Mopai or his people, growing up mainly in impoverished rural townships. Mopai went on to work in television and even make his own historical documentary once Apartheid was abolished, but still found himself alienated from the broadcast media of his day, which he feels continues to obsess on Black divisions and capitalist materialism. He refers to the current state of South African television as a form of “disposable media.” Mopai now struggles to provide for his family, in a nation with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, at over 36% for Black South Africans according to Statistica.