On the Cusp: Saying the winners of Female in Focus 2025

The second sequence winner of Female in Focus 2025, Giya Makondo-Wills’ New Scramble, is equally compelling, exploring how tech giants threaten to duplicate patterns of colonial exploitation in South Africa. Predominantly set in Johannesburg, whereas additionally branching into the Limpopo and Cape provinces, the undertaking paperwork the proliferation of knowledge centres in South Africa, utilized by the likes of Microsoft and Google as a part of a “new scramble for Africa”. A contemporary race between nations and firms for a foothold on the continent’s sources, the advantages of this tech increase are debatable. 

Some argue it could possibly assist financial progress in Africa, however others level out it locks nations into unequal relationships by which outdoors powers extract worth with out giving sufficient in return. “People are coming to take the gold like they did before,” writes the British-South African photographer in a letter to her Gogo, or grandmother, which accompanies layered and evocative images – younger boys who dream of being tech engineers; seaweed that eerily resembles subsea cables. “But now instead of taking from the ground, they take from the head.”

At its core, New Scramble considers how knowledge centres – which home 24/7 servers to course of knowledge, fuelling the web, cloud providers, streaming, AI, and past – pressure native infrastructure and pure sources, with a value to the land and other people. “They use huge amounts of water, huge amounts of energy; especially in a hot climate, they need to be cooled much more,” explains Makondo-Wills. Meanwhile in South Africa, over 3.5 million folks don’t have any entry to protected consuming water, and three.5 million households go with out entry to electrical energy. 

Then there’s the problem of possession. “If we don’t own the channels we use to communicate, we don’t own the stories, language, identity, culture,” says Makondo-Wills. “What are the implications of this in 100 or 200 years? Could it erase our history, our culture?” With this in thoughts, New Scramble additionally attracts on ancestral practices, folklore and creation tales, exploring how narratives rework over time, how we talk forwards and backwards by means of our lineages and histories, how we move on info and obtain it. 

“The stories that would be told through the fire, in the kitchen… They are travelling,” the photographer writes to her grandmother. “Now they are travelling in another way. From the phone to the computer. From the fingers to a screen.”

“We used to tell stories of gods and demons and the land to help us make sense of the world around us,” Makondo-Wills muses. “And now, as we tell other stories in other ways, with other sorts of information, how does that help us understand?”