Introducing the three GPS projects for 2026

Revitalizing Indigenous Soundcraft is a seven-week creative and ancestral activation rooted in Mthatha, designed to reawaken the musical, spiritual, and cultural technologies carried by rural youth. Guided through a carefully held process of breathwork, storytelling, somatic grounding, and traditional instrument building, participants craft uHadi, umrhubhe, marimba, umakhweyane, n’goni, and adungu harps—each approached as both musical tools and living archives of memory.

Across the weeks, youth engage in deep listening rituals, text-score practices, visual storytelling, guided sound journeys, and composition sessions that honour land, ancestry, and imagination. The project culminates in a powerful community showcase featuring hand-built instruments, original sound pieces, visual panels, and a closing ceremony led with elders.

Ukuhluma nurtures cultural continuity, emotional & mental well-being, and creative livelihoods—transforming indigenous soundcraft into a regenerative ecosystem of skill, healing, and possibility for the Eastern Cape and beyond.

Gwijo Nation traces the hidden history of Black rugby in South Africa, from the founding of Winter Rose Rugby Club in 1887 to today's vibrant Gwijo Squad. While the 2023 Rugby World Cup was celebrated as a moment of national unity, this documentary reveals the complex story beneath: how Black communities in the Eastern Cape used rugby to affirm dignity and resistance under apartheid, why many supported the All Blacks as symbols of anti-colonial pride, and how transformation debates still shape the game today.

Blending archival research, oral histories, and contemporary performance, the film repositions rugby as both a cultural text and a contested site of belonging. It challenges the superficial "rainbow nation" narrative, asking instead: on whose terms is national identity forged? Rooted in the Eastern Cape's cultural memory, Gwijo Nation reclaims Black rugby histories as essential to South Africa's ongoing struggle to narrate itself beyond symbols and quotas.
 

Mohla-Monene is a series of illustrated historical short fiction that brings together a network of artists and writers from urban and rural Maseru.The project will produce five comic book/zine-style publications that reimagine selected stories from Lesotho’s vibrant 20th-century history. The project will invite writers to submit their historical fiction short-stories to be considered for the series. The stories will highlight historical figures and moments that live in our collective memory, especially those that celebrate joy, creativity, affluence, and cultural expression. Mohla-Monene is a creative response to gaps in cultural education, an intervention against historical erasure, and an imaginative way of bringing Basotho history into today’s conversations. By blending archives, illustration, and storytelling, the project creates accessible cultural resources, nurtures new voices, and opens fresh ways of seeing the past and imagining the future.