Miriam Makeba

A Soweto schoolgirl named Sarafina is galvanized to protest apartheid after her teacher is arrested for her activism, leading her to join the student resistance movement.

This is a montage of different images from the JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy triumphs and assassinations, all three events being observed by Lyndon Johnson as the dark figure who is plotting the anti-black rights movement.

Come Back, Africa chronicles the life of Zachariah, a black South African living under the rule of the harsh apartheid government in 1959.

A rural teacher discovers the harsh realities of his South Africa.

Over two days at De Appel, ‘Collective Study in Times of Emergency’ brought together texts, voices, music, films, artworks, digital images, and printed materials – creating a space where individual and collective research and archives came into dialogue. This video reflects on moments when international solidarity with the Palestinian resistance intersected with solidarity against South African apartheid. These encounters revealed the archive not just as a site of preservation, but as a living network – crossing borders of geography, time, and form. What futures do these archives hold? What kinds of solidarity will we imagine and practice in a distant future, once these materials have decomposed and become part of us? As Matter Speaks moves across different traces of the 'Collective Study' programme, summoning a space between permanence and fragility, where archives circulate endlessly.

Have You Seen Drum Recently? is a 1989 film which uses photographs from the Drum archives to tell the story of the magazine and documents its contribution to the cultural and political life of South Africa.