A Photographer Illuminates Histories in South Africa and Botswana

The protagonists in Thero Makepe’s photographic collection It’s Not Going to Get Better (2024) avert their eyes in pensive avoidance. Some exhibit muted misery or are captured in states of adrenaline overload, oblivious to scenes elsewhere in the identical tableau. That the dysfunction stalks moderately than overwhelms these photographs is intentional, however so is the counterbalancing po-faced denial of tangible proof. It’s Not Going to Get Better is maybe the closest Makepe has come to a social-documentary type, but satirically, it’s the work’s fictive strands that accord a measure of fact. 

Completed largely in 2024, the identical 12 months that residents of a number of African nations took to the polls in fateful elections, It’s Not Going to Get Better properties in on the squandered guarantees of long-held incumbency. It’s a well-recognized story all through the Frontline States (the clutch of southern African nations, together with Zambia, Botswana, and Angola, that collectively opposed apartheid), the place the wheels of democracy have turned full circle, quickening expectations whereas heightening the feeling of free fall. In Botswana, Makepe’s house nation, the Botswana Democratic Party loved fifty-eight years of uninterrupted political energy till November 2024, when a three-party coalition led by Duma Boko gained the favored vote. Once thought of one among Africa’s extra secure economies (diamonds had been found in 1967, a 12 months after independence), Botswana endured the tumult of Seretse Khama Ian Khama’s rule from 2008 to 2018, and the following years that tore that legacy asunder. 

Born in 1996 to oldsters who each labored as accountants, Makepe studied pictures on the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, the place he started to refine a visible language that features staged portraiture and reenactments that typically reference fables, present affairs, and household historical past. His dynamic, long-form method provides viewers a number of entry factors to the maze of political, skilled, and private ties that preoccupy him, flattening the boundary between South Africa and Botswana. 

Makepe’s maternal grandfather was Hippolytus Mothopeng, a jazz musician who left apartheid South Africa for Botswana in 1958 and labored in each Francistown and Gaborone. Hippolytus’s uncle was Zephania “Zeph” Mothopeng, a instructor and president of the liberation motion Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, a person with unflinching eyes fittingly nicknamed “the Lion of Azania.” Zeph’s son, Johnny, performed with the influential Afro jazz bands Batsumi and Marumo. With a lot of this lineage to unpack, the long-form essay has been Makepe’s most well-liked mode of operation, encompassing diorama, immersive set up, and lighting experiments, each in reference to pictures’s historical past and as commentary on the current. Forlorn afternoons and twilight are recurring motifs in Makepe’s oeuvre, evoking interiority versus illuminating his scenes.

It’s Not Going to Get Better, initially conceived for a solo exhibition at Vela Projects in Cape Town, is a departure level for the artist. Brevity replaces the speculative sprawl of collection comparable to Music from My Good Eye (2019) and its companion piece, We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here (2020–ongoing), which each grapple with the legacy of his matrilineal household’s twin heirlooms, music and resistance. This tighter focus led him to current the work as midsize prints. “I’d never made work in that format before,” Makepe advised me not too long ago. “I knew that, okay, these are the sorts of themes that I want to touch upon. These are the different people I know in my life, and I’m drawing upon their real lives and their situations.”

The seed for It’s Not Going to Get Better was planted in 2023 by Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 movie Burning. “I was like, Wow! This feels a lot like Botswana, in terms of the conservatism that you have in [South] Korea; the military influence, the surveillance on people, and the way in which Koreans are very within themselves.” Makepe says Burning additionally provided a searing tackle the elusiveness of sophistication ascendancy, which surfaces in his photographs as each an embodied angst in his friends and a sort of intergenerational fallout.

A landlocked nation of fewer than 2.5 million individuals, Botswana has a GDP of 19.4 billion {dollars} and an unemployment price of nearly 30 percent—a determine president Duma Boko characterized as “a ticking time bomb.” The nation’s shrinking economic system (it registered unfavourable three p.c development in 2024) has been overly reliant on diamonds on the expense of broader financial growth, leading to instability as artificial diamonds more and more erode their worth. Botswana exported around five billion dollars price of diamonds in 2022, however since then world costs have fallen by around 40 percent. Mining Weekly reported that Debswana, a three way partnership between De Beers and Botswana’s authorities, noticed a 52 p.c drop in gross sales in the course of the first 9 months of 2024—all whereas the federal government pushes for a controlling stake within the firm and a diversification of its economic system.

“In my lifetime there’s never been a more hopeless time when it comes to what you can get from politicians,” says Makepe. “There’s always been some sort of symbol of hope. It started with Nelson Mandela, and then, by the time I was a teenager, came Barack Obama. And then, you know, from my late teens to early twenties, there hasn’t ever really been a hero or icon figure like that. So when I listened to a song by rapper billy woods, whose father was part of the Pan-African struggle in Zimbabwe, he says, ‘It’s not going to get better,’ I was like, Yeah, that’s it. There’s a sense of grounding in not pretending.”

While Makepe attracts from a large pool of references—Alex Webb’s densely composed avenue scenes or his fellow artists of TBP Artist Collective, like Rrangwane, Kim Karabo Makin, and Legakwanaleo Makgekgenene—he at all times cites South African artist Lebohang Kganye, whose work has been on view not too long ago in exhibitions on the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Fotografiska Berlin. “She was instrumental to my development as a photographer and what I perceived as what could be done within this medium—that you don’t have to just be a traditionalist,” he says. Makepe’s earlier work, significantly Monna O Montsho (2018), which makes use of cardboard cutouts and miniature furnishings to reconstruct mythological tales from his childhood, borrows from the trajectory of Kganye, who has more and more integrated theatrical units, three dimensionality, and variations of scale into her work. For now, Makepe is definite that he needs to proceed within the vein of experimental works like Fly Machine/Mogaka (2018), which makes use of diorama and a digicam obscura to reconstruct the 2018 airplane crash of Botswana Defence Force pilot Major Cliff Manyuni. “I want to get back to doing things that are a little bit more surreal,” he says. Given the burden of shared histories between Botswana and South Africa, maybe this resolution is as a lot about artistic enlargement as it’s about self-care.

Read extra from our collection “Introducing,” which highlights thrilling new voices in pictures.