Africa Is a Country

Freedom, youth and remembrance

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Freedom, youth and remembrance

By
Sean Jacobs

In the documentary "Remembered Futures" the filmmakers interrogate the ways South Africans understand their own history and how this affects their futures.

This image which appears in the film is by Sibu Mpanza.

Yesterday, June 16th, South Africa celebrated Youth Day in commemoration of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, a massive student protest against the apartheid government which ended in the killing of hundreds and after the Sharpeville massacre, globally cemented apartheid South Africa as a morally indefensible pariah state.

In the spirit of youth and resistance, writers Tseliso Monaheng, Andrew Miller and Kagiso Mnisi (Monaheng is also a filmmaker and photographer) have put together a documentary project called “Remembered Futures,” which explores ideas around freedom, youth and remembrance in contemporary South Africa. It uses Freedom Day, the commemoration of South Africa’s first democratic elections, as a starting reference.

The film kicks off with the story of the defiant Chief Langalibalele of the amaHlubi. Via the country’s premier hip hop gathering, Back To The City Festival, the film looks at what freedom means to South African youth today. It ends off by exploring the current socio-political climate, using the recent xenophobic attacks and the student-led Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town as vantage points.

Featured are the historians Prof. Jon Wright and Dr. Nomalanga Mkhize along with Back To The City festival’s co-founder Osmic Menoe and artist Quaz Roodt. The documentary first aired on Soweto TV on 27th April this year. That date is called Freedom Day in South Africa to commemorate its first democratic elections in 1994. Here is the full film.

Further Reading

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As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

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As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.