how Thero Makepe's lens keeps the past in focus
Fifty years after the Soweto Youth Uprising, Thero Makepe’s exhibition, "We Didn't Choose to be Born Here" reminds us that the past is never that far away
It was on June 16th 1976 that Antoinette Sithole found herself running alongside a stranger, carrying her brother in his arms. 12-year old Hector Pieterson would be among the first to lose his life.
Sam Nzima’s piercing photograph has become a symbol of the tragedy and courage of South African school students whose blood was shed in the fight for better education. Though depicting the death of only one child, it carries the weight of hundreds lost in the Soweto Youth Uprising, resurrecting history in the hearts and minds of the living.
It is perhaps fitting that it was a movement led by South African youth which prompted Botswana-born artist Thero Makepe to delve into politics. During the 2016 #FeesMustFall protests, in a moment of serendipity, Makepe encountered a protester wearing a screen printed t-shirt of apartheid activist Zephaniah Mothopeng — his great grand uncle. Coming from a privileged, sheltered background, Makepe “had no incentive growing up to be involved in politics”1... until this moment.
Grown from this early seed, Makepe’s carefully staged photography in his current exhibition, We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here, forces you to slow down. To look. To listen.
And to remember the past as if it was still alive.
We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here: Picturing Future, Present and Past
Sam Nzima’s famous photograph has become a form of shorthand for the events of June 16th, 1976. But when was the last time you engaged with it? Asked questions about it? It’s easy to scroll past this image every Youth Day, taking for granted that you know what it signifies. Thero Makepe’s solo exhibition, however, is a reminder to look again.
Curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg, We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here is an ongoing photographic project through which Thero Makepe explores the deeply interwoven threads between his family history and the politics around it. The exhibition features private and public archival material, films and staged photographs, in which Makepe places himself and his family members in moments and scenes of contemplation, recalling what has passed.
The exhibition spans the Dippenaar and Javett Family galleries, moving from present and future to past, disrupting how you’d expect a timeline to unfold. Framed by the emotional difficulty of the exhibition’s title, the room explores the family’s grief, longing, anxiety and spiritual grounding, meditating on the hardships of the present and future.
The vinyl wallpaper, The Place That Dried Up (2023) for instance, emanates the orange and red hues of an artificial landfill in Botswana, intended to starkly contrast the peace and calm of Botswana’s blue and white flag. A portrait of Makepe’s maternal grandfather titled Modimo a mo tlamele (2025) (loosely translated to “May God provide for him”) interrupts the terrain, picturing him after he received treatment from Botswana’s public healthcare system. In early 2026, a national public health emergency was declared in Botswana, with a fall in diamond revenues reducing the capacity of the country’s public healthcare system to offer needed care2. Through these two photographs, Makepe exposes these difficulties, raising concerns about the future of his country of birth.
Makepe’s concerns however, are not limited to economics or healthcare. Vulnerable, expressive portraits of his sister and uncle titled Wait (2021), Confusion (2021) and Sello (2021) capture the emotions of dread, anxiety and ennui experienced by the children and grandchildren of the family, intimately tied to the lives of two paternal figures in Makepe’s ancestry. His grandfather, Hippolytus Mothopeng, left apartheid-era South Africa in search of a better life in Botswana, which he achieved — yet his grandchildren, as Makepe expresses, must navigate having to pursue tertiary education in South Africa, with his country of birth not having the courses they want to study.
The second figure is his great grand uncle. Political activist. Founding member of the ANC Youth League and Pan-Africanist Congress. Known as the ‘Lion of Azania’ — Zephaniah Mothopeng.
Threads of Education, Fabrics of Resistance
Before becoming part of South Africa’s armed struggle, Zephaniah Mothopeng was a teacher.
He received his training at Adams College, Natal, where he became one of the first students to study for a post-matric teacher’s diploma. He began teaching at Orlando Secondary School in 1941, where he spent about 13 years before becoming Vice Principal3.
However, his vocal opposition to apartheid systems began early. His heavy pamphleteering in rejection of the Bantu Education Act lost him his position, foreshadowing years of relentless resistance that would follow. He would later be arrested and sent to Robben Island multiple times — including his imprisonment after the Bethal Trial from 1977-1979, where Mothopeng and 17 others were convicted with various charges, including allegedly “fomenting revolution”4 in the form of the June 16 Soweto Youth Uprising5.
Providing the core context of Makepe’s exhibition, the second room of We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here gives you a glimpse of the lives of Hippolytus Mothopeng, Zephaniah Mothopeng and their family.
Documented through black and white snapshots, newspaper clippings, film interviews and old records in conversation with staged photographs, Makepe creates an archive that lives and breathes, laying out evidence of life lived. A simultaneous history unfolds, guided by the lives of the two men in Botswana and South Africa respectively.
But instead of becoming swept up in the turbulent politics that looms over the family, We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here highlights something much more intimate. It looks to the little moments of joy. Resistance. Music. Whether in the form of a black and white photograph from Makepe’s mother’s wedding, the overwhelming simplicity in the photograph of Hippolytus and Zephaniah Mothopeng meeting for the first time in years or the jazz band begun by his grandfather’s brother, John, called “Batsumi”.
On a little television in the centre of the room plays an interview with Urbania Mothopeng, former president of the Pan-Africanist Women’s Organisation and wife of Zephaniah Mothopeng. It was conducted by Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms in 1986, well into her husband’s second sentence on Robben Island. A teacher by profession, Mothopeng shares the realities of choosing to be politically involved, spending years at a time without her husband, raising their children alone. Despite this, she still pursued her own studies, and believed in its power, speaking passionately on the importance of the next generation of South African youth receiving quality education.
This is a sentiment shared by Thero Makepe’s mother, too. A small photograph of Agnes Pinkie Kholisile Mothopeng-Makepe depicts her in Canada, where she completed her diploma in accountancy… an accomplishment evoking no shortage of pride from her father. At the time, she received redacted letters from the then imprisoned Zephaniah Mothopeng, who wrote from Robben Island.
It’s fitting that next to this photograph is Makepe’s photograph of a limestone quarry on Robben Island. Mothopeng and other prisoners would not only be forced into rigorous manual labour, but would also partake in regular, secretive lectures where they would discuss politics, ideologies and philosophies. The quarry would come to be informally known as ‘Robben Island University’, a place where “the spirit of a university reigned”6.
Makepe’s carefully staged photographs converse with this archive, revealing the simple fact that politics, at its core, is about people.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here addresses the person, the political and the present with care and empathy. Bringing together a nuanced presentation of histories that often go overlooked, the exhibition asks for both contemplation and conversation.
It is also a potent reminder that this history is not a thing of the past. The past shows up to shape the future in ways that are sometimes subtle, but ever present.
Fifty years after the Soweto Youth Uprising, South African students still face student debt amounting to billions, consequential food insecurity and insufficient funding resources that stand between them and their education, preventing some from graduating and leaving many entirely excluded7. The obstacles in the path to education were never left in apartheid; they just evolved… requiring different action but action nonetheless.
Today, Antoinette Sithole is a tour guide at the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto and co-founder of Driving Education Culture, a joint initiative between China and South Africa that raises funds and resources for schools in Gauteng and the Free State. You can find her on LinkedIn. For Sithole, commemorating those who have passed also takes the form of action.
“What I can say to young people as we commemorate or celebrate 50 years of the Soweto uprising, is that they must take their placards to Parliament and other public spaces. They must drive the change they want to see.”8
In the face of lingering hardship, one photograph may not make much difference. But the opportunity it offers for us to remember, to listen and to act, most definitely does.
The only question left: What will you do with it?
An Interview with Urbania Mothopeng (1986)
Former president of the Pan-Africanist Women’s Organisation and wife of Zephaniah Mothopeng, Urbania Mothopeng, sat down with Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms, a Dutch film collective involved in global activism
Visit We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here (2020-ongoing): Currently on exhibition at the Javett Art Centre, University of Pretoria, 23 Lynnwood Road, Hatfield, PTA. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 - 16:00.
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Sources
PhMuseum 2025 Photobook Award. 2025. We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here. https://phmuseum.com/submissions/we-didnt-choose-to-be-born-here-4 Accessed 19 June 2026.
Boko, Pres. Duma Gideon. 2026. Botswana’s diamond-funded healthcare failed: it needs to be reformed and rebuilt. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/21/botswana-diamond-funded-healthcare-failed-reformed-rebuilt Accessed 19 June 2026.
Mothopeng, Zephaniah. 1989. Zephaniah Mothopeng: A Personal Account. Searchlight South Africa 1(2):87-91.
SABC Truth Commission. n.d. Bethal 18. https://sabctrc.saha.org.za/glossary/bethal_18.htm?tab=report Accessed 18 June 2026.
SA History. n.d. The Bethal Treason Trial resumes. https://sahistory.org.za/dated-event/bethal-treason-trial-resumes Accessed 18 June 2026.
Hallengren, Anders. 2001. Nelson Mandela. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/mandela/article/ Accessed 20 June 2026.
Bhoola, Sheetal. 2026. The Hidden Crisis at South African Universities: Hunger, Debt and Student Exclusion Behind the Excellence. https://iol.co.za/dailynews/opinion/2026-06-05-the-hidden-crisis-at-south-african-universities-hunger-debt-and-student-exclusion-behind-the-excellence/ Accessed 19 June 2026.
Sithole, Siyabonga. 2026. Antoinette Sithole urges youth to honour Soweto uprising through action. https://independentonsaturday.co.za/capetimes/news/2026-06-08-antoinette-sithole-urges-youth-to-honour-soweto-uprising-through-action/ Accessed 17 June 2026.
A special thank you to artist Thandi Baloyi for her insight and aid.