I first visited South Africa in November 1977 right after Biko was killed in detention in September of that year, and I came across some references to Mighty Man then which I went back to recently in preparation for another return visit. I found some examples on the South African Comic Books website about five years ago. I put the title into eBay and that’s where a collection became available about four years ago—from an American comic collector who had a huge number of comics—those are the ones up at UCLA.

There are 17 of Mighty Man and 17 of Tiger Ingwe. The National Library in Cape Town is, coincidentally, displaying its complete collection of Mighty Man so I am working with them to hopefully digitize the full 34 titles to make the whole set available. This display at the library suggests that people are starting to recognize that the comics deserve scholarly attention.

I talked to a friend of mine involved in the Soweto Uprising, who would have been about 13 at the time, part of the target audience, and I asked him if he knew anything about them, and his response was “No, I was reading newspapers!” This is of course, in part, a response that indicates how uninteresting these comics would have been for a politically engaged young person. But I’m certain that they were read, so that’s something I want to follow up when I go to South Africa later this year and talk to a wider range of people who were children at the time, who might have come across these comics.

Yes, I want to go back and learn more about how these were created. Eschel Rhoodie, the Secretary of the Department of Information, describes how anthropologist Bettie van Zyl Alberts ran focus groups in South Africa before they were made, ostensibly to assess how these comics might best appeal to readers in rural and urban areas. The American DC-Comics artists (most notably the illustrator Joe Orlando) made the drawings for the comics. Oddly, under the injunctions of the South African government, they were tasked with drawing black South Africans to look different, somehow, from American comics’ depictions of black Americans. This of course begs the question: How do you make people look more African than African-American? Is there a memo somewhere that says if you change the image in a certain way you can make characters look more African than African-American?

Yes, one connection that hasn’t been made much yet is between these comics and Drum magazine. Even though no one says this, the Afri-Comics appear to be modeling themselves partly on Drum, which had a clear anti-Apartheid stance but also regularly juxtaposed its more overt political agendas with stories about sports and bodybuilding, advertisements for skin lightening creams, references to South African folklore and traditions, and features about American movie actors. Similarly Mighty Man mixes genres, but interestingly, they draw on this model with an expressly opposite pro-Apartheid aim.

They were primarily books and radio, but I’ve been trying to hunt down any examples of pro-Communist comics that might have been circulating within Apartheid South Africa. There’s a fantastic MPLA comic that came out in Angola in 1976 after the earlier overthrow of the Portuguese colonial regime, for instance. It’s a very graphic depiction of people struggling against colonialists—violent anti-colonial portraits. This would be something the Afri-Comics were meant to combat.

The Franklin Book Program was a front or semi-front organization which, from the 1950s through the early 1970s, put out a lot of pro-America, U.S. Information Agency/CIA funded materials. These papers are actually at Princeton Library and the inventory of the holdings there show a manifest interest in producing these kinds of propaganda for distribution worldwide.

Yes, and the comics are just one part of this, but they remind me, as a scholar who largely thinks of himself as working on anti-Apartheid history, that there are other people coming at these materials from other angles, say as Cold War historians, and these materials make me realize I might need to alter my framework since we are actually doing overlapping and connected work. They bring to mind too another vivid memory I have from 1977, of a white National Party politician telling me how naïve I was not to accept that the real enemy of democracy in South Africa was the Soviet Union working through ANC “dupes” to rule the world. We can’t forget how focused the National Party was in the 1970s and 1980s on fighting the supposed “Communist threat” throughout southern Africa.

Yes. Now once we have the complete set of these first two titles up online, we will suddenly have a new national archive, without a paywall, accessible to anyone, including all those people who actually can’t get to, or can’t be granted access to the holdings in the South African Library—namely the bulk of the population in South Africa.

That’s a key point—widespread access to the internet, even despite bandwidth problems, is available to almost everyone now in South Africa, and these comics provide all sorts of interesting ways into getting back into the history of Apartheid, to see how the government was manipulating people, creating images of it, etc. In my small way I’ve been trying really hard with this project to get around the gatekeepers. There’s a lot of lip service paid to decolonizing the university and the country but what really matters is how the people who were colonized themselves think of materials like these, and how they decided to handle and interpret them.