I recently joined Hasanain Abdullah for a live conversation hosted through Ummah Tech. The subject was how technology can serve social change - specifically, how it can put a country's history into the hands of anyone who wants it, at no cost.
What South African History Online is, and why it exists
South African History Online, known as SAHO, was founded by the veteran documentary photographer Omar Badsha in the late 1990s and registered as a non-profit in 2000. It has since become the largest and most comprehensive online resource on South African and African history and culture, reaching millions of people every year and serving as a trusted reference for schools, universities, media and the general public. Its work has been recognised with the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences award for digital humanities, and Badsha himself received the National Order of Ikhamanga for his contribution to preserving the country's history.
The founding purpose is the important part. SAHO was built as a people's history project - to break the silence on the past and to challenge the biased account of African and South African heritage that dominated educational and cultural institutions for generations. The version of history most South Africans were handed in school was written from a narrow point of view. The contribution of struggle stalwarts to the liberation of the country, the depth of indigenous history, the ordinary life of communities that the state tried to erase - much of this sat outside the formal curriculum.
That gap is not abstract. South African learners study history as part of the CAPS curriculum, and students continue that study at a tertiary level. An open archive that anyone can reach for free is a direct answer to a system where good historical material has too often sat behind paywalls, out of print, or inside institutions that most people cannot access. SAHO hosts major collections, links its articles to archival material and academic sources, and makes the whole thing free to read. Access is the entire point. An archive that cannot be reached does not exist.
My part in it
I have been Technical Lead for SAHO since 2010, on a volunteer basis. My involvement goes back far enough that I co-curated the Bonani Africa 2010 photography catalogue alongside Omar Badsha and Jeeva Rajgopaul. The history itself is the work of the editorial team. My job is the infrastructure that carries it - and I do not treat that as a footnote to the mission. It is the mission expressed in another language.
SAHO runs on open-source frameworks, principally Drupal, self-hosted on infrastructure the project controls. Full-stack development work turns those open frameworks into an enterprise-grade platform capable of holding decades of accumulated material and serving it reliably at scale. The codebase is public, with a contribution guide, so that developers, designers and researchers can help improve it. Phoenix and I maintain the platforms through our company, Fenix Nordic Solutions, in support of the editorial team.
The choice of open, self-hosted software is deliberate, and I will return to why below. A people's history project cannot sit on proprietary, paywalled, surveilled infrastructure without contradicting itself. The medium has to match the message.
The history the curriculum left out: forced removals
Much of what SAHO documents is displacement, and the clearest example is one that shaped the city I photographed for a decade. District Six was a dense, working-class, multi-cultural neighbourhood on the edge of the Cape Town city centre - a community of freed slaves, artisans, labourers, merchants and immigrants that had lived together, across race and religion, since the nineteenth century.
On 11 February 1966 the apartheid government declared District Six a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act. Over the years that followed, more than sixty thousand people were forcibly removed and their homes flattened by bulldozers. They were resettled far out on the Cape Flats - in Mitchells Plain, Manenberg, Hanover Park, Langa, Gugulethu and elsewhere - according to how the state had racially classified them. The removals did not only take houses. They scattered extended families, broke the daily intimacy of a shared neighbourhood, and deepened the very racial separation the state was engineering. District Six, together with Sophiatown in Johannesburg, became a national and international symbol of the cruelty of forced removal.
This is the kind of history that formal schooling has under-taught, and it is exactly the kind of history an open archive exists to hold. Forced removal is not only a physical act. It is an erasure of place and memory. When you demolish a neighbourhood, you demolish the record of the life that was lived there. An archive is what refuses that erasure.
Behind the lens: photographing the afterlife of a policy
My photography in Cape Town is, by and large, social documentation. The subjects shift - from the transport networks and systems around the city and the people and conversations inside them, to the youth of Mitchell's Plain and the challenges young people face in the country's oldest town. I have used the camera as a way of engaging with people and gathering stories that stand as a record of what took place.
The transport work is where the history becomes visible in the present. The spatial geography of apartheid did not end in 1994. Townships built to hold the displaced still sit far from the centre - Khayelitsha is roughly thirty kilometres from the Cape Town CBD - and the people moved there still make long, costly, unreliable journeys to reach work. Studies of the city estimate that poor households can spend up to forty percent of their disposable income simply travelling to work, a burden that traps families in marginal locations and holds back any climb out of poverty. Cape Town carries the largest housing backlog of any South African metro and is widely regarded as the country's most segregated city. The collapse of commuter rail services on the Central Line made the daily journey harder still.
So when I photograph a commute from the CBD out to Mitchells Plain or Khayelitsha, I am not photographing a neutral fact of city life. I am photographing the afterlife of the Group Areas Act - the daily movement that forced removal made necessary, still running decades later. That is social science in motion, in the most literal sense.
Why open source, and why it matters beyond the code
The technical choices behind SAHO are the mission expressed as engineering. Open source, self-hosting, open standards, a public codebase - these are the same instinct as free and open access to history. I advocate for open-source software, including running operating systems such as Ubuntu, because ownership of the tools is inseparable from ownership of the work.
When historical knowledge lives on software that anyone can inspect, run and improve, and on infrastructure the project itself controls, the archive is not hostage to a vendor who could disappear, raise a price, or lock it behind a login tomorrow. When the sources are public, findable and cited, anyone can check the work. History behind a closed door asks you to trust it. History in the open asks you to verify it. I will take the second every time. This is digital sovereignty applied to memory, and it is the whole reason the platform is built the way it is.
AI as leverage, not decoration
Artificial intelligence has a place in this work, but a disciplined one. The archive is far too large to curate entirely by hand, so AI-assisted metadata enrichment lets us tag, structure and cross-link tens of thousands of entries at a scale manual effort could never reach. That serves discoverability directly - it helps a learner or a researcher find the exact thing they need. That is AI as leverage on a real problem.
And I refuse it where it would flatten the work into sameness. The current redesign of SAHO is positioned deliberately outside the default look that AI image tools push you toward - it is archive-first, built on libre typefaces, and rooted in the material itself rather than a generic machine-made sheen. Use the tools where they multiply human effort. Refuse them where they would erase the character of the thing. That distinction is the point.
The thread that ties it together
Open source, self-hosting, open standards, and free access to history are not separate commitments. They are one instinct. Whoever controls the record controls the memory of a nation, and open technology is how you keep that control in the commons rather than handing it to a landlord. The archive resists the erasure that displacement causes. The photography documents that displacement's afterlife in the streets. The software keeps all of it free, verifiable, and out of anyone's private enclosure.
My thanks to Hasanain for the conversation.
Watch the full session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_vI-hU64Bw
Visit South African History Online: https://sahistory.org.za/