Thero Makepe on family archives, political memory, and reimagining Botswana’s place within Southern Africa’s liberation histories
5 August 2026
In ‘We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here’, Thero Makepe transforms family photographs, oral histories, documentary images and re-enactments into a powerful meditation on migration, resistance and belonging. Rooted in the intertwined histories of Botswana and South Africa, the exhibition traces the lives of his family across generations, revealing how personal memory is inseparable from broader political struggle. Makepe reflects on photography as a form of historical inquiry, the enduring influence of Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness, and why remembering is both a personal responsibility and a collective act.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: ‘We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here’ brings together family histories and broader political narratives across Botswana and South Africa. How did you balance the personal and collective without letting either overshadow the other?
Thero Makepe: I firmly believe that the personal is collective and the collective is personal. That is to say, no individual exists in isolation. We all have a family, village, neighbourhood, suburb, town, city, country, island, continent, etc. that we belong to. Inevitably, when I speak about myself as a Motswana photographer, for example, it immediately gives the impression that my work would reveal something about Botswana just by mere virtue of that being my national and cultural identity and place of origin. So, in the case of my work, We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here, I didn’t worry about one overshadowing the other. My family’s lives and their migration from one place to another were forced by broader structural forces. I can’t tell the story of their lives and choices without telling the story of white settler colonialism in Southern Africa.
Your project moves between staged portraiture, documentary photography, archival material and re-enactment. What does each photographic language let you say that the others cannot, and how do they build the exhibition’s non-linear narrative?
I use every different form of imagery to build a holistic narrative and experience. The first place I began was with archival material: private family photos that I found in my grandmother’s wardrobe. Then I moved on to public material like documentaries, posters and newspaper articles about different members of my family. From there it became a case of filling in the gaps of history that weren’t present in the archival material that I was gathering. So, documentary photography serves the purpose of me retracing the steps of different members of my family to document the different places they have existed, i.e., Robben Island. Re-enactments function similarly, in that present living family members, including myself, perform as ancestors that are no longer here. I mainly rely on oral history to recreate different scenes and moments, and these are to illuminate personal memories that speak to collective history. Staged portraiture is my own intervention into the different narratives and history that my work covers. How do I interpret what I’m seeing, learning and inheriting? Also, how do others of my family feel about themselves, their ancestors and the things that have happened to them?
The phrase “We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here” carries ideas of displacement, inheritance and circumstance. How has its meaning evolved as you have developed this body of work since 2020?
Initially, I came to this phrase when reflecting on the coming of age of my siblings and maternal cousins. We were all born and raised in Gaborone, Botswana and had to go to South Africa for tertiary education because the courses we wanted to do weren’t offered in Botswana. We also had the economic privilege to do so. So, there’s an irony there. Our grandfather left South Africa to go to Botswana seeking a better life and a middle-class lifestyle, and for us to maintain what he built in terms of class security, we have to go the opposite direction from where he came. Later, the title came to encompass choice and responsibility. In terms of comparing the lives of my grandfather and his uncle. One chose to leave where he was born to seek a better life elsewhere, whilst the other remained and dedicated his life to the struggle for liberation. It also speaks to the consequences that our parents, grandparents and ancestors make and how it has an impact, positively or negatively, on our lives. Ultimately though, I think the title also implies broader structural forces are at play that coerce us into making choices. At least I hope, and I would encourage people to think about things in that way.
The intertwined histories of your grandfather, Hippolytus Mothopeng, and your great-uncle, Zephaniah Mothopeng, reveal two distinct responses to apartheid: one through migration and one through political resistance. How has tracing these lives changed your understanding of family, history and belonging?
Doing this project has strengthened my interpersonal relationships with my maternal family in South Africa. But it also revealed to me the difference between relatives and family. Relatives are people we are born with: cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, etc., but they aren’t always going to represent the people who we have the strongest connections to or share the same beliefs. There are families we meet throughout life that are closer to us than our actual kin. Tracing my family’s history and asking questions showed me that. I’ve always been interested in history and, by extension, narrative. Growing up in Botswana, I received a lot of oral history about where I’m from and how my ancestors came to be. Being in university in South Africa during the #FeesMustFall era and then subsequently embarking on the journey of this project forced and provoked me to engage the political history of Africa extensively and deeply. I initially didn’t want to take this project on in as far as exploring the radical political figures in my family or the trauma they had experienced because I thought it wasn’t my place. But throughout the course of doing it, I realised the responsibility I had, and that we all have as Africans, to engage in our collective histories and to scrutinise what we’ve been told about ourselves. I’ve always viewed myself as an African and a Motswana (citizen) second since I was young. I was implicitly raised that way by both of my parents. Learning deeply about Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness for this project further entrenched me in those philosophies.
Music and activism recur throughout the exhibition and your forthcoming photobook. What links do you see between artistic expression and political action across generations of your family, and how have those histories shaped your practice?
When I was younger, still in my early years of university, I had a narrow- minded view of what activism is. I thought it was only physical protesting and militancy, but a movement like #FeesMustFall taught me that the agenda of revolution is also an intellectual endeavour that has many arms, including cultural production. Before my great-granduncle, Zephania Mothopeng, was a member of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, he was a high school teacher in Soweto in the 1950s. When he was forced to teach Bantu Education, he first protested it by producing pamphlets with his colleagues advocating against it. Later on, his son John Mothopeng was a musician during the Black Consciousness movement with his two bands, Batsumi and Marumo. In Uncle John’s music there’s no overt political message per se, but the mere fact that their songs were recorded in indigenous African languages (Zulu, Shangaan, Tswana, Sotho, etc.) was radical for the time of political repression, black subjugation and censorship. In my own practice, I’ve responded to and highlighted the political and artistic actions of my older family members. And in my forthcoming book for this project, I’ve traced my own trajectory and how my ideas, desires, and ideology were shaped by structural forces around me, and how my understanding, analysis, and knowledge later evolved as I’ve had access to more information over time.
You draw connections between inherited histories and your own experiences during the #FeesMustFall movement. What does it mean to place student activism within a longer lineage of resistance across southern Africa?
I think it’s important for us to contextualise who we are and how we came to be. Speaking strictly for myself, my knowledge of the history of Botswana, especially when it came to activism and cultural resistance, was non-existent before I started university in South Africa. I learned about the Medu Art Ensemble, a collective of anti-apartheid cultural workers operating in Botswana, from a course I was doing in my second year. Otherwise, I would have no idea of them at all; it’s not a history that is widely known, never mind commemorated in Botswana. And to that, I have to say Botswana has a very sterile history of how it achieved its independence. Objectively, it is so: there was no violent revolution necessary to end political colonialism. But the issue then becomes that the history we focus on begins in 1966 or just a few decades before that. Moreover, we have to really investigate our shared lineages to understand why and how the settler colonial projects in South Africa and Zimbabwe were different from Botswana, Zambia or Namibia.
Although the exhibition confronts migration, loss, and political violence, you have said you want audiences to leave with a sense of hope and celebration. Why was it important for joy and resilience to remain central rather than let trauma define the narrative?
I’ll refer to a quote from my great-grand-aunt, Urbania Mothopeng. In 1986, Uncle Zeph’s wife, Urbania ‘Bebe’ Mothopeng, gave an interview to Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms, a Dutch activist film collective in Paris, France. The interview was filmed in a big, luscious park on a relatively sunny day. At the end of the interview, she was asked if she had any regrets, to which she answered, ‘I don’t have any regrets for the life that I have led. It has only been an inconvenience as far as, particularly, my family is concerned. But I do not regret the role that my family has played in society. Even if I had to divorce and start all over again, and say, ‘Could I marry this one or that one?’, I think I would still say, ‘No! This is the man for me.’ I’ve seen great things. Financially, I’m poor, but spiritually I’m very rich. At the time of that interview, the armed struggle was at its peak in South Africa; her husband was still imprisoned on Robben Island after rejecting a deal for conditional release, and she had long forfeited her job as a teacher. So, we have to always mourn the sacrifices our ancestors made but also commemorate and learn from them to aid us towards a better future.
As your first institutional solo exhibition and alongside the release of your first monograph, this moment marks an important point in your career. Looking back at the journey behind ‘We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here’, what conversations do you hope this exhibition opens about Botswana’s place in regional histories and contemporary photographic practice?
Locally in Botswana, I hope people can deeply engage with this work to unpack our collective history. Botswana turns 60 years old this year in the midst of economic crises with the decline of diamond sales and high youth unemployment. We are constantly asking ourselves where we are going next. I think we need to look to the past and lesser-known histories in search of some solutions – at the very least to help us analyse the problems. In Botswana, we have a phrase we use among ourselves – mockingly, jokingly and angrily, depending on the context: Batswana ba lebala ka pele. From Setswana, this directly translates to: Batswana forget quickly. Locally, this phrase is used as an idiom or social commentary to describe a tendency among the public to quickly move on, forgive, or forget past grievances, broken promises, or national controversies surrounding corruption. I hope my photography and visual archival material encourages people to pause, remember, imagine and look deeply. Regionally in Southern Africa and Africa at large, I hope it gives some context into Botswana’s history that’s not extensively told or accessible.
This exhibition is on view at Javett Art Centre, Pretoria University, until 13 February 2027.
