Over many years, Michael Bollig and Doxa's paths have crossed in this region. Shared insights and generosity of spirit have greatly enriched Doxa's understanding of the social dynamics and underlying forces at play in the region. These collaborations have produced an interactive Multimedia project for the ACACIA exhibition in 2003 in Cologne. During the years of 2024 and 2025–26 Doxa has begun revisiting the stories and drawing the strands together, re-linking past events and re-viewing their outcomes, in what promises to be a fascinating sequel to the Doxa film 'OCHRE AND WATER' and a valuable addition to the VISUAL HISTORY ARCHIVE, in part due to the advances in drone technology, immersive 360° captures and vastly improved digital imaging.

Müller-Mahn, D. & M. Bollig (eds) 2026. African Futures in the Making. Oxford. James Currey.
Michaela Pelican, Karim Zafer, Michael Bollig (eds.) 2025. Decolonising the Future Academy in Africa and Beyond. Bielefeld. transcript.
2023 (with Franz Krause) Environmental Anthropology: Fields of Engagement and Contemporary Challenges. Zürich. UTB.
2020. Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia. Cambridge University Press.

Sakeus Kadhikwa, Michael Bollig, Stéphanie Eileen Domptail. Pan-ontological institutional bricolage? The urgent need for a dialogue between state and customary authorities in Namibian conservancies. Land Use Policy, Volume 161, 2026.
Köhler, E., Bollig, M. (2025). Elephant corridors in the Kavango-Zambezi transfrontier conservation area (KAZA TFCA): environmental infrastructures for a greener anthropocene in Namibia's Mudumu landscape. Rev Reg Res (2025).
Bollig, M. (2024). Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape: the political ecology of multispecies mobilities along the arteries of anthropogenic conservation. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 216–235.
van Dam, A., van Engelen, W., Müller-Mahn, D., Agha, S., Junglen, S., Borgemeister, C., & Bollig, M. (2023). Complexities of multispecies coexistence: Animal diseases and diverging modes of ordering at the wildlife–livestock interface in Southern Africa. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
Bollig, M. 2022. "Twenty-First Century Conservation in Africa: Contemporary Dilemmas, Future Challenges." African Futures, edited by Michael Bollig et al., Brill, 2022, pp. 111–24.
Bollig, M. & H.P. Vehrs. 2021. The Making of a Conservation Landscape: The Emergence of a Conservationist Environmental Infrastructure along the Kwando River in Namibia's Zambezi Region. Africa 91(2): 1–26.

Jacob, D., Birkmann, J., Bollig, M., Bonn, A., Nöthlings, U., Ott, K., Quaas, M., Reichstein, M., Scholz, I., Malburg-Graf, B., Sonntag, S. (2022): Research priorities for sustainability science. German Committee Future Earth.

Wouter's engineering firm was facilitating the international EIA study and had constructed a camp on the banks of the river to accommodate the scientists involved. To date the dam has not been constructed, but the camp has grown from its humble beginnings to play an important role in the employment, education and positive development of the local Himba people, and in supporting the establishment of a Conservancy.

During Doxa's documentation of the initial EIA and through subsequent years recording the trials, histories and stories of the Himba pastoral nomads, Wouter has remained a key ally and provided a base of operations. His work at the Document Warehouse in Windhoek and his enduring interest in the archival legacy of Namibia and its peoples has made him a treasured collaborator in the VISUAL HISTORY ARCHIVE project as it gets relaunched.

Through his efforts Doxa has been able to digitise celluloid film projects held by the Western Cape Library Services that were in danger of being lost as technology moved beyond the availability of the vintage hardware required to show them.

Frank Meyburgh is a veteran cinematographer and film editor — a foundational figure in the South African film and broadcast industry, widely recognised for his extensive collection of vintage film equipment and film archive dating back to the Anglo Boer War, as well as a Film Telecine Scanner and Tape Transfer facility. Frank is celebrated for providing critical support to both independent and young filmmakers.

Freddy is a librarian, film historian, archivist and festival programmer, as well as a contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT). He worked as Film/Video/DVD Selector for the Cape Provincial Library Service / Western Cape Provincial Library Service for more than 40 years. In this capacity he was responsible for building up a collection that grew to some 13,500 titles in different formats.

For many years he was involved in the film society movement and was General Secretary of the Federation of Film Societies of Southern Africa, as well as Vice Chairman of the Cape Town Film Society. He has served on film festival juries both locally and abroad, was a member of the Cape Town International Film Festival's Advisory Committee. In addition he was active in the Film & Allied Workers Organisation (FAWO) and has served on the government's Legal Deposit Committee.

In 2007 he was curator of an extensive panorama of South African films presented at the Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland. Afterwards he completed an audit of film/video material dealing with the South African liberation struggle for the South African History Archive (SAHA) and worked at the University of Cape Town as Film Researcher/Archivist. In 2014 he was the programmer for the Encounters Documentary Film Festival and has continued as Senior Reader up to 2026. He is also the festival's archivist.

The Western Cape Provincial Library Service operates a dedicated Film Library, offering a collection of DVDs and films for loan. It serves as a resource for community libraries in the province, offering diverse content and facilitating access to film materials for users.

There are basically three 16mm film collections currently housed at the Western Cape Provincial Library Service, plus what can be called an informal fourth "collection" made up of donated material.

Material purchased by the WCPLS between 1956 and 1996 — our own collection of 16mm prints consists of some 5,200 titles. The majority of them are documentaries in the broadest sense of the word, ranging from straight educational or informational films, to made-for-television programmes, classics of the cinema and more personal works by filmmakers from all over the world. This material is complemented by selected fictional films, amongst them early works by now famous directors, children's films, animation (for children and adults) and experimental material, as well as a few features.

Details of the titles available appear in six non-cumulative printed catalogues, as well as on the wc.slims.gov.za website. Of some titles, especially earlier purchases, there is more than one copy and some consist of more than one reel — an estimated 6,200 reels on the shelves. Prior to 1990, what was then the Cape Provincial Library Service also purchased material for the Northern and Eastern Cape. After the old Cape Province was broken up, this material reverted to the new provinces.

The WCPLS collection of 16mm prints includes more than 450 South African films. Some of these might be in the collection of the National Film, Video & Sound Archive in Pretoria, but others are definitely not. These films form part of our cultural heritage and are irreplaceable. Steps should be taken to preserve such material, preferably by transferring them to a digital format. Legally, any South African film older than 50 years is out of copyright and the owner of such a print can make copies without referring to the previous copyright owner.

The collection that belonged to the South African film society movement was handed over for safekeeping when the movement was dissolved. The Cape Town Film Society had been in existence for more than 50 years and built up a large collection of cinema classics for use by members of the Federation of Film Societies. The WCPLS accepted the collection on the understanding that its registered borrowers would be able to make use of it on the same basis as the library-owned material.

When BP Southern Africa closed their 16mm film-lending library in 1995, their films were donated to the Library Service. There are some 800 cans (not titles), about half of which are local productions and the other half British. Many cover aspects of the oil industry, with some titles dealing with sporting events sponsored by BP.

When the era of 16mm films was drawing to a close, various individuals came to the library with films they still had. In addition a few commercial distributors of educational films handed over films they could no longer sell. Most of them are either straight instructional documentaries or virtually unused prints from the catalogue of the Learning Corporation of America.

At the moment there are approximately 9,000 reels collected over a period of nearly 50 years. These films vary in condition from excellent to very poor, usually depending on the care taken when they were projected by borrowers. As a whole, the earlier black-and-white films have lasted better than the later colour films.

Today there is great awareness of our social and cultural heritage, both locally and abroad. There is an obligation on those organisations in possession of rare and possibly unique material to preserve and protect these films, even if they are not of immediate value or interest to the communities they serve. All over the world, archives, libraries and museums exchange material — for many years the WCPLS stored a large collection of 35mm Italian features that were in danger of being dumped, but eventually they were repatriated to a film archive in Italy.

This has culminated in an agreement with SWR to allow the use of its Southern African archive in the context of the proposed Visual History Archive. This consists of a vast pool of material capturing many historic and significant moments in our recent history.

ARD was founded in 1950 in West Germany to represent the common interests of the new, decentralised, post-war broadcasting services, with correspondents across the world and was very visible in Southern Africa during its independence struggles. In addition to South Africa, the reporting area also includes Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Malawi. They also cover Madagascar, the Comoros, and Mauritius.

An online museum was created to showcase these memorials, bringing them together with a rich range of audio, video and archival resources from the last 100 years in South African history.

Doxa Productions was commissioned to capture immersive panoramic photographs of these memorials. As part of this project, in 2006 Doxa created an interactive DVD on John Vorster Square — apartheid's most notorious police station — seen through the eyes of former detainees who return to their cells to share their memories and insights of this painful time. Viewers are able to explore the building and its surrounds, interspersed with audiovisual material. This project is in the process of being restored so it can be re-incorporated in the online museum.

Growing from these projects, the Visual History Archive's first version was launched, funded by Atlantic Philanthropies and the French Foreign Ministry.

Subject matter ranged from the Himba Pastoralists of Northern Namibia, the SAN Living Archive Management Project in association with the !Khwa ttu training programme, and the Liberation Struggle Living Archive Collection — for which Doxa received an award certifying inscription on the Memory of the World Register in 2007.

At the heart of the Centre is the understanding of collections and archives as important sites of knowledge — as products of traditions of art, ideas and values, and of the social and political circumstances of both their making and reception.

Doxa Productions passed the curatorship of their extensive legacy archive to the CCA to enable the digitisation of this analogue collection. This took a number of years, culminating in the video tape archive being digitised as a vital step in making this extensive and valuable collection accessible. This digital archive, along with the ARD German Television material, will become the backbone of the rebooted Visual History Archive.

Its aim was to provide information and guidance on the digital transformation taking place and how to plan and manage new generation formats. One outcome was the design of a system to read wax cylinder recordings of the Treason Trial and make them publicly available — a collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and INA.

His career includes senior roles at the Botswana National Museum, the International Defence and Aid Fund in London, and the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape, where he managed significant anti-apartheid archival collections. He later played a key role in post-apartheid heritage transformation within the national Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, contributing to major legacy projects such as the Robben Island Museum, Constitution Hill, and the Nelson Mandela Museum. Following leadership roles at Kagiso Exhibitions and Urban Brew Studios — where he founded the heritage-focused division Memory Inc. — he now leads METZPROJECTS, delivering museum, exhibition, and archival initiatives across South Africa and beyond.

Since the early 1990s, he has operated as a freelance DOP, director, editor, and scriptwriter, while running his own production company, MAXHEADROOM. He has also engaged with emerging media, presenting on digital filmmaking, producing online content, and leveraging social platforms, while maintaining additional interests in aquaculture development.

After working in music composition, production performance and sound design at Milestone Studios for eighteen years, he moved into academia, completing an MFA from the University of Cape Town (2018) and a PhD at the University of the Western Cape. He exhibited video art work at the 64th Venice Biennale and, during the Autumn of 2022, was accepted for the Radio Art Residency at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. He has taught sound and glitch-art based courses and, in 2025, moved to Johannesburg to complete a Postdoctoral Fellowship, Artist in lab in the Wits School of Architecture and Planning. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Wits School of Music.

During the State of Emergency in 1985 he worked as a sound-man with Craig in the rough and tumble of Hard News coverage in South Africa. At the same time he was producing posters and media for the ECC and UDF. He left the country as a Conscientious Objector in '86 becoming a political refugee in the Netherlands. While working with COSAWR and the various anti-apartheid groupings he was instrumental in establishing the SACCC, a non-partisan cultural group.

Returning from Holland in '96, he facilitated a theatrical tour by the Amsterdam Balloon Company, joined The Odd Enjinears in Cape Town, touring South Africa and Holland with 'Site Specific' theatre productions. He returned to work with Doxa on the movies Ephemeral Rivers and Ochre and Water, introduced the immersive panoramas to Doxa and shared many travels in Namibia on the various material gathering trips, recently playing a large part in the production of this website and the ongoing VHA initiative. In addition, he has designed and fabricated large-scale sculptures for the Africa Burn festival.

Simon's creative collaborative relationship with Handspring Puppet Company covers 15 years and includes 'War Horse' and 'Or You Can Kiss Me' (2010) for the National Theatre, London. For the Bristol Old Vic he assisted with the design and fabrication of the puppets for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (2013) and has been involved with UKWANDA and the Barrydale elephant puppets.

More recently he was a key part of the design and construction of 'Little Amal', a 12 foot puppet of a refugee child, produced by The Walk Productions in association with Handspring Puppet Company, as well as their latest environmental project 'The Herds', and built mechanisms for Kentridge's 'Faust'.