Twenty thousand pages of South Africa’s forgotten popular culture have been saved.
South Africa (24 March 2026) – More than 20,000 pages of rare South African photo-story magazines from the 1960s have been digitised and made available to researchers worldwide.
The newly added material forms part of the South African Magazines collection on Africa Commons, and includes 250 issues of True Africa (1964–1969) and 110 issues of She (1964).
These were two widely read publications that captured everyday stories, social tensions, and popular entertainment during the apartheid era.
Photo-story magazines were their own thing. Stories unfolded through staged photographic sequences with dialogue and captions. Each issue ran between forty and seventy pages, and they were enormously popular across South Africa during the mid-twentieth century because they were visual and accessible.
Which is also why so few survived. Printed on cheap paper, they were read and passed around until they fell apart. The copies that made it this far have largely lived in African library collections, rarely accessible to anyone outside them.
Sabinet, Coherent Digital’s long-standing South African partner, digitised the new content, meaning what survived is now preserved and findable by scholars and students around the world.
The collection supports research across history, journalism, media studies, literature, political science, sociology, and gender studies. But it’s also just a vivid record of how South Africans told stories sixty years ago.
And then there’s She.
The popular media of the 1960s was dominated by male action heroes, She featured a female superhero protagonist. It was a striking departure for the time, and a rare example of women in powerful, heroic roles in South African storytelling. Worth knowing about! More than 100 digitised issues of the magazine were released during International Women’s Month. That’s a win!
Twenty thousand pages of who we were. Now the world can read them.
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