If you partied in South Africa in the early 2000s, it is almost certain that Thunda.com has photographic evidence of it somewhere. Anton Taylor has floated an idea that is genius…and also deeply concerning. Bring the photos back!
South Africa (16 September 2026) – If you went clubbing in South Africa in the early 2000s, Sunday often came with a hangover. But also, the very important task of logging onto Thunda.com to see what you and your friends had been up to the night before…
Sometimes because you genuinely couldn’t remember…
There were no Instagram Stories to check. Nobody had uploaded 63 photos to the WhatsApp group before you’d even made it home. Camera phones either didn’t exist yet or were producing photographs with roughly four pixels between them.
The Thunda photographer, however, was there.
South African writer, actor and media personality Anton Taylor recently took millennials right back to that era, with a suggestion to ‘release the files…’
“Back in my day, we couldn’t take pictures on phones, which meant that we could do anything we wanted,” Anton joked. “Okes, nothing was recorded. I know people who had sex on the couches of Tiger, Tiger, and you have no idea what happened in the Tiger, Tiger car park. What a golden guilt free time.”
For anyone too young to remember it, Thunda.com was a part of the furniture in South African nightlife in the early 2000s. The platform was based in Cape Town, but its photographers became familiar faces at clubs, bars, parties, concerts, festivals and events around the country.
Thunda described what it did as ‘permission-based social photography’. Basically, photographers would work their way through a venue asking groups whether they wanted a photo.
“They’d come up and ask if you wanted a photo, and obviously, we were wasted. We said yes. The next afternoon, you’d wake up, and excitedly, you’d go to Thunda to find yourself and your mates.” says Anton.
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Treehouse Family Centre: A Safe Space Where Children Can Reconnect With Parents They Don’t Live WithThat would be the ritual. Finding the gallery from wherever you had been the night before and hunting for yourself. Then your friends. Then the people you had seen out. It was social media before we really knew what social media was going to become.
Except there was one important difference – you weren’t documenting your own night. There wasn’t a camera permanently in everybody’s hand. Most of what happened just happened. Unless a Thunda photographer happened to be standing nearby, it stayed between you, your mates, and the strangers you met…
“Back then, there was only one record of our nightlife. Thunda.com.” as Anton says.
What a time. Thunda caught an entire era of South Africans going out. The clothes alone deserves an archive. The tiny handbags. The hair. The belts that were ‘just for decoration.’ The going-out tops. The men’s shirts. Whatever was happening with our eyebrows…
Anton was reminded of all of this after a friend of his suggested something rather brilliant. Find the old Thunda archive and give South Africans access to their own photos again.
The idea would be to use facial recognition or AI to search the old galleries for photos of yourself and your friends. He also suggested it should be completely opt-in. While some of us would actually pay money to see our 2004 selves living our best lives, others would probably prefer those files to remain buried…
The comments on Anton’s video sent us!
“Haibo no, we have children.”
“I don’t think we should open this pandora’s box.”
“Can I pay them to keep my pics to themselves?”
People have been making the same joke about the lost Thunda archives for years. Even on Reddit, former users have wondered what might happen if the site and all its galleries suddenly resurfaced.
“Bruh, if thunda.com ever decided to just pop back up with a full history of its contents, some lives are going to be ruined,” one user wrote.
Thunda eventually disappeared as the internet around it changed. Facebook photo albums arrived, smartphones got decent cameras and Instagram made waiting until the following afternoon to see photographs from a night out feel properly ancient.
Suddenly, everyone was their own Thunda photographer.
But that is probably also why those old galleries have become such a strangely precious piece of South African archival internet history.
They captured nights out at a time when we weren’t constantly capturing ourselves. The photos weren’t carefully selected from 28 nearly identical shots or edited before anybody saw them. Somebody walked up, you grabbed your friends, everybody leaned in, and that was that.
Which brings us back to Anton’s dangerous suggestion…
Somewhere out there may be thousands upon thousands of photographs of South African millennials in their natural early-2000s habitat, totally unaware that one day they would have jobs, bonds, teenagers and LinkedIn profiles.
Fellow South African millennials. If somebody emailed you tomorrow and said they had found your Thunda files… would you actually open them?
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