Television came late to apartheid South Africa. By the early 1980s the state-owned broadcaster was ready to expand the network to include the black majority. There were sound economic and propagandist reasons for this. Msibi was among those recruited to be trained as technicians, journalists, and cameramen. The irony was that this enterprise coincided with the sustained popular uprising that finally led to the end of white minority rule. So the new generation of black television journalists went back into their own townships and ‘homelands’ to record, like no-one else could, the rising resentment and the reciprocal repressions that characterised large swathes of the country in the 1980s and early 1990s.