“We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here”: Thero Makepe on Memory, Migration, and the Politics of Seeing
Botswana-born photographer Thero Makepe reflects on family archives, Southern African history, and the quiet politics of slowness across Gaborone, Johannesburg, and Cape Town.
An interview with Botswana-born photographer Thero Makepe, examining identity, migration, archives, and contemporary African photography across Gaborone, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, with reflections on history, politics, and visual memory in Southern Africa.
His images do not rush to explain themselves, nor do they compete for attention in a visual economy built on speed, shock, and spectacle. Instead, his practice insists on duration — on sitting with complexity, contradiction, and unfinished histories.
Born and raised in Gaborone, Botswana, and now working between Gaborone, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, Makepe occupies a liminal position within contemporary African photography. His work emerges from movement: between cities, between generations, between personal memory and collective history. Home — both as a physical place and a psychological anchor — remains central to how he sees and how he photographs.
Photography, for Makepe, is not merely a representational act. It is a way of thinking through identity, belonging, and inheritance in a region shaped by colonial borders, forced migration, and political erasure.
“I don’t see photography as freezing a moment. I see it as opening a conversation that time hasn’t finished yet.
Gaborone: Slowness as Foundation
Gaborone is often absent from dominant narratives of African urban culture. Overshadowed by cities like Johannesburg, Lagos, or Nairobi, it is frequently described through what it lacks rather than what it offers. For Makepe, that absence — the slowness, the quiet, the familiarity — became foundational.
Growing up in Gaborone meant growing up with time. Time to observe. Time to listen. Time to return to the same people and places again and again. Long-term friendships shaped his understanding of continuity and care, while the city’s scale allowed for a sense of intimacy rarely afforded by larger metropolises.
“Growing up in Gaborone taught me slowness. That slowness shaped how I remember, how I see, and how I photograph.”
This slowness continues to inform Makepe’s working rhythm. While global art circuits often reward constant production and visibility, Gaborone offers him distance from that pressure. It allows him to create without performing — to exist as an artist without being consumed by the identity of one.
Living in Botswana also anchors him in a social reality outside the art world. Daily life — family obligations, friendships, ordinary routines — keeps his work grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction.
Johannesburg: Inherited Tensions
Johannesburg entered Makepe’s life not as a destination, but as inheritance. His maternal family is based in Gauteng, and he has been moving through the city since birth. Johannesburg is not a place he discovered later — it is a place embedded in his personal history.
Coming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Makepe witnessed a city negotiating its post-Apartheid identity. The promise of the “Rainbow Nation” existed alongside deeply entrenched inequalities. Black wealth and black poverty were not opposites; they coexisted, often within the same neighbourhoods, sometimes within the same families.
“Johannesburg was the first place where I understood that black joy and black pain could exist side by side.”
These contradictions left a lasting imprint on his visual language. His photographs often resist clean binaries. They acknowledge beauty without romanticism and hardship without spectacle. Class, aspiration, and precarity surface subtly — through gesture, posture, setting — rather than explicit narrative.
Johannesburg taught Makepe that progress is uneven, and that history rarely moves in straight lines. That understanding continues to shape how he approaches both documentary and staged photography.
Cape Town: Political Awakening
Cape Town arrived later in Makepe’s life, and with it came rupture. First visiting in 2015, he returned the following year to begin his undergraduate Fine Art degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. It was here that he encountered the sharpest articulation of Southern Africa’s unresolved histories.
Removed from the familiarity of Botswana and Johannesburg, Cape Town confronted him with spatialized inequality — a city where colonial architecture, economic exclusion, and racial segregation remain starkly visible. For Makepe, this was not an abstract lesson; it was a lived experience.
“Cape Town is where I received my political education. It forced me out of the bubble I didn’t know I was living in.”
Being one of the few Black African students in his graduating class intensified his awareness of access, representation, and institutional power. Questions of who gets to produce art — and under what conditions — became unavoidable.
This period marked a shift in his practice. Photography became more explicitly political, not through slogans or didactic imagery, but through research, archives, and the interrogation of inherited narratives.
We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here: Family as Archive
These layered geographies converge most clearly in We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here (2025), Makepe’s recent solo exhibition. The project originated in 2019 under the title Music from My Good Eye, developed during his final year at Michaelis.
At the time, Makepe began reflecting on the invisible scaffolding that had supported his journey: family sacrifice, migration, and unrealized dreams. This reflection led him to his grandfather, Hippolytus Mothopeng, who fled South Africa in the 1950s to escape Apartheid.
“The project started as a conversation with my grandfather and became a conversation with history.”
Mothopeng settled in Botswana, where he worked to support his family while pursuing music as a passion rather than a profession. Jazz became both an escape and a form of resistance — a way of asserting humanity in a system designed to deny it.
By the time Makepe was born in 1996, his grandfather had lost his sight to glaucoma. Yet their bond deepened through sound, memory, and storytelling. Music became a bridge between generations, and photography emerged as Makepe’s response to that inheritance.
“I realised I was living the dream he never had the chance to fully pursue.”
The exhibition weaves together staged portraits, archival references, and performative gestures, collapsing past and present into a single visual language. Family history becomes a lens through which broader narratives of migration, displacement, and belonging are examined.
The Personal as Political
For Makepe, there is no clear boundary between personal experience and political reality. His work rejects the idea that politics exists only in public institutions or protest movements. Instead, it emerges in domestic spaces, family stories, and intimate moments.
“The personal is political, and the political is personal. None of us exist outside history.”
This philosophy shapes his approach to archives. Rather than treating archives as static repositories of truth, Makepe views them as contested spaces — shaped by power, exclusion, and selective memory. His work often fills gaps left by official histories, privileging lived experience over institutional authority.
Visual Language and Method
Makepe’s photographic language is deliberately hybrid. He moves fluidly between documentary photography, staged portraiture, re-enactment, and archival material. Each method serves a specific purpose, chosen for its emotional and conceptual resonance rather than its genre classification.
This refusal to hierarchy reflects his broader resistance to rigid categorization — whether aesthetic, political, or cultural. Photography becomes a flexible tool, capable of holding contradiction and uncertainty.
Gen-Z, Disillusionment, and the Future
In It’s Not Going to Get Better (2024), Makepe turns his attention outward, responding to Botswana’s national elections and the first full participation of Gen-Z voters. The title reflects a phrase circulating among young people — a sentiment shaped by unemployment, class barriers, and political stagnation.
“I wanted to photograph a feeling before it hardened into history.”
Rather than documenting events, the project captures mood. Anxiety, apathy, hope, and exhaustion coexist within the images, mirroring a generation navigating inherited systems with limited agency.
Collective Practice and Home
As a founding member of The Botswana Pavilion (TBP), Makepe’s commitment to collective practice reinforces his grounding in home. TBP operates without rigid hierarchy, emphasizing mutual respect and individual autonomy.
“We work together because we respect each other’s voices — not because we want to sound the same.”
Despite international recognition — including the Prince Claus Seed Award (2024) and inclusion in Foam Museum’s Talent 2024–2025 programme — Makepe continues to live in Gaborone.
“Living in Botswana keeps my ego in check. I can breathe here.”
Legacy as Permission
When asked about legacy, Makepe avoids the language of permanence. Instead, he speaks of permission — the permission for Batswana artists to tell their own stories honestly, without sanitization or external validation.
“We live in a divided world, but we still have to believe things will get better — because we are all we have.”
His work does not offer resolution. It offers presence. And in that presence, it insists that memory, however fragmented, still matters.
FAQ: Thero Makepe and Contemporary African Photography
Who is Thero Makepe?
Thero Makepe is a Botswana-born photographer and visual artist working across Gaborone, Johannesburg, and Cape Town. His work explores identity, migration, archives, and Southern African history.
What themes define Thero Makepe’s photography?
His practice centers on memory, family history, political inheritance, migration, and the relationship between personal experience and collective history.
What is We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here about?
The exhibition examines migration, family legacy, and historical displacement through the story of Makepe’s grandfather, a South African exile and jazz musician.
Why is Botswana important in his work?
Living in Botswana grounds Makepe’s practice in slowness, community, and everyday life, offering distance from global art market pressures.
What role do archives play in his photography?
Archives are treated as contested spaces. Makepe often reimagines or fills gaps left by official historical records using personal memory and lived experience.
Beautiful work capturing how Gaborone's pacing shaped Makepe's visual language. The framing of slowness as deliberate resistance to the speed economy of modern art markets is kinda radical tbh. I've noticed how returning to the same subjects over time reveals layers invisible in one-off encounters, something Makepe's practice seems to embrace. His willignness to stay grounded in Botswana while the global circuit demands constant presence elsewhere speaks to deeper comitments than just aesthetics.