Botswana-born artist Thero Makepe presents 'We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here: Inherited Frequencies' at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, an exhibition running until February 13, 2027. The show combines staged portraiture, archival imagery, and documentary photography to explore themes of memory, migration, and political inheritance, focusing on the intertwined histories of Botswana and South Africa. Makepe traces his own family’s anti-apartheid struggle, including his grandfather Hippolytus Mothopeng’s flight from apartheid South Africa and the legacy of PAC leader Zephaniah Mothopeng, treating history as fragmented and continuously reassembled rather than fixed.
The exhibition matters because it offers an intimate, intergenerational perspective on the emotional residue of apartheid and exile, reframing political history through personal and familial memory. By involving family members as collaborators and blending music, activism, and photography, Makepe challenges monumental narratives of the past and asks how images can hold grief, tenderness, and resilience simultaneously. This work contributes to ongoing conversations about inheritance, freedom, and the unfinished contradictions of post-colonial identity in Southern Africa.