What Is the Cost of Sustaining South African Visual Culture?

Diliza Moabi is a maverick. Over three decades, his career has run the gamut of the film world: television, cinema, the festival circuit, and even advertising. He has worked as a producer, director, editor, and cinematographer, making work that interrogates the Black condition, particularly in South Africa and across the continent more broadly.

Yet despite the acclaim, he struggles to earn a comfortable living from his craft, and he is not alone. Deep cuts across the broadcasting sector have narrowed the field. Showmax — which had reached 2.1 million subscribers across 44 African markets by the end of 2023, briefly overtaking Netflix as the continent's biggest streamer — was shut down in April 2026, eleven years after launch, its new French owners writing off a R4.9 billion annual trading loss as, in Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada's words, an "expensive failure." The national broadcaster, meanwhile, struggles to commission new work.

Lately, our conversations have circled around how Moabi plans to earn money from the vast archive he has built as an independent filmmaker. "I'll license it to the SABC," he tells OkayAfrica, before listing the artists he filmed on the cusp of their breakthroughs: Simphiwe Dana, Bongeziwe Mabandla, Cassper Nyovest, AKA. The list is long.

The bitterness that used to flavor those calls and color our exchanges has given way to the acceptance that comes with age. Now in his mid-forties, Moabi wants different things. He is more the homebody who takes his son to the park on a Saturday morning than the camera-wielding adrenaline junkie who would board the first flight out of South Africa on a whim — to Maputo with 340ml, to Senegal with Tumi and the Volume. "The only thing I would do differently is come up with more of these cultural stories," he says, then adds, disparagingly, "For someone who thought they were woke, I was dumb enough to work from an individual's perspective, where I thought if I wanted to tell the story of a particular culture, I needed to do it through a particular person."

His problem, he tells OkayAfrica, is that the idea of being a rock star has never excited him. "I don't have a picture. It was just me pointing my camera, because my mission was to capture and document that world and tell that story. It was never about that. The way my work has always been, I wanted to see those worlds I've been capturing flourish and become as big as I think those worlds are. And those individuals are. Whether I got credit for it or not, it's never been something I thought long and hard about. I mean, I put my own money into shooting these things, you know?"

"Everybody's chasing whatever's already established. The numbers, I get it, but it's not sustainable. It's no different from sport: if you don't put money into development, you're not going to have the facility. The same goes with culture. If you don't create spaces for the talent, new talent doesn't flourish."

His vision runs directly against the grain of superstardom, where it is every person for themselves. But he sees the flaw in his own approach, too: he never learned to speak the language of the boardroom — to wear a suit, as it were.

"I can't blame that world one hundred percent. I need to shoulder the blame too. And that's part of me growing up, getting a bit of wisdom. After so many experiences, you learn that you're not that special because you're an artist. Artists expect a lot of people; they expect people to adhere to their standards. I'm an artist, but at the same time, the way the ecosystem is built, both worlds need each other. The suits need the artists to make money. The artist needs those spaces built by the suits to flourish," he says.

"So if you're going to walk into an office where you're calling somebody a suit, you better put on a suit as well and meet them halfway. You might not like it, because artists are like that. If you walk into my studio, don't come wearing shoes and expect me to change my studio because I'm an artist."

Lerato Pakade's archive is only a few years old. A photographer with a wide skill set built in the corporate world, she brings a clear sense of what is at stake for people in positions of power. Yet she is still willing to go in heart first — "the heart first," she tells us — because that is what it takes for the work to be honest and reflective of the times. It also means she is free in who she associates with, that her outlook hasn't been soured by decades of unsavory encounters. When she talks about her relationship with Titi Luzipo, whom she has been documenting consistently for over three years, there is a love that can't be quantified in money, in how much one can afford to pay the other.

"We've traveled such a long road together," she says warmly. "She calls me for the things that are closest to her heart. We did the Joy of Jazz, the Gloria Bosman tribute. I'd say to her, man, I'd love to be in rehearsal. And every time I'm reminded — fuck, this is a generational voice. This is not just my friend, is it? There's an anointing here. There's a reason we are together."

Like Moabi, Pakade centers care over money, community over commercial viability. "It was very interesting in the beginning; people didn't trust it. In Joburg, you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I think if you have a heart for people, and you've told yourself that you're going to tell their stories, you're supposed to see them as people, first and foremost. Particularly people with public platforms — I think to be put on a pedestal is just as dehumanizing as to be looked down upon. So there's a thing about consistently recognizing the humanity in people that shows up in both the photos and the relationships," she says.

For designer and creative director Phenyo "iindman" Kgaffe, the cost of visual culture isn't a single line item you can tally. "For a single song, you're making the cover, the animated version, the teaser, the lyric visuals, the story assets, the ad creative, all of it built to feel like it came from the same world. Then you do it again for the next song, and the next. So the real cost isn't the design itself, it's the consistency," he says.

An edit he did for the rapper AKA when he was 16-years-old broke the internet, and he never looked back. That one moment of fame let him work on projects with the likes of Kwesta and Kabza De Small. He’s also Maglera Doe Boy’s right-hand man for all things visual. 

“The biggest concession is time. Sometimes you work with an artist for years for free, because you believe in them and you're betting it turns into something later. That belief has paid off for me, but I'd structure that investment properly now instead of just pouring myself in and hoping,” he says.

Most of the expenses that go into creating an ongoing document of culture can't be quantified. In a pre-COVID, pre-social-media age, Moabi was spending on flights and accommodation to Senegal, where he documented Tumi and the Volume. "It was about a week or two, [and] cost me about R55,000. I remember because I swiped my credit card," he says.

"I once shot a concert for Samthing Soweto, one night at Soweto Theatre. I spent about R65,000 to film that, equipment and hiring crew. The cost goes up with post-production. Thandi Ntuli at the Market Theatre; we filmed with seven cameras. I've been to Mozambique plenty of times to film 340ml — I don't know how much that cost. I went to Zanzibar with Kwani Experience. All of the trips I've made around the continent, I was using my own money."

The cost isn't only monetary, and that can be made back. But the blows to the spirit that come with the sacrifice can send a person into a twenty-one-day inpatient psychiatric program and leave the heart devastated. Still, the artists and creators invested in preserving the soul of our creative output keep showing up to do the work.

"My message to new creatives is to not look at their world from an opportunistic viewpoint, where you get excited by being booked by a mainstream channel, television or radio, and then ignore the lesser-known content creators, especially in this day and age. When the artist gets big, they no longer exist in their own ecosystem. Which means that small content creators or filmmakers never get an opportunity to interview them," Moabi shares in conclusion.