Our Crew

Thabang Nkwanyana

co-founder

Thabang stays at Freedom Charter Square squatter camp in Kliptown. It is a mixed race community with diverse cultural spaces. Growing up there was a mixed experience, it was a community with rich history and culture yet underprivileged and surrounded by poverty, crime, drugs and unemployment.

It was through art that he found himself and his voice or inspiration of positivity amidst Kliptown’s neglected heritage. He is a passionate, self-taught visual creative: a photographer, graffiti artist, stenciller, filmmaker and museum/gallery art installer. He studied for one year at Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop. He was a co-founder of the Kliptown movement and gallery Post 77. Though now closed, it has left a lasting legacy with community members. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums in Johannesburg. He has collaborated with international artists and academics. Copyright label: © iceeimage.

In his role as a social entrepreneur with 1955, Thabang applies his creativity to community need and spearheads innovative initiatives.

Robert Shai

co-founder

Robert lives and tends his garden in Race Course squatter camp, Kliptown. He is a tour guide by profession and works tirelessly as a community advocate for Kliptown and her most vulnerable residents. As part of his NPO D4 Pro Tours he has concentrated on repairing, rebuilding and building shacks for the most precarious of his fellow residents. He is the person the grannies and children come to knowing they’ll find compassion and support.

As well, he coaches, raises funds and equips the Kliptown soccer team - his nickname Kappa attests to this passion! He believes that on the soccer pitch the youth can forget their everyday struggles and the poverty that they live in and simply enjoy the love of the game.

As a social entrepreneur with 1955, he applies his experience, knowledge, and relationships in the Kliptown community to identify critical needs.

Kristen Kornienko

co-founder

Kristen is primarily based in western Canada, spending 3-4 months every year in Johannesburg. She came to South Africa in 2007 as a Fulbright Scholar and was humbled and impassioned by the country and its people. She stayed to earn her PhD from Wit’s School of Architecture and Planning exploring the value of existing spatial layouts and social structures in the organised and self-built environments of Johannesburg’s shack communities. She advocates for how the cultural and socio-spatial values of place could inform the government’s provision of basic services and the grassroots consolidation of housing.

She is most at home with diverse people, places and ideas. As a practitioner of spatial justice, she works with a collaborative art-based approach exploring and documenting how freedom, identity, race, socio-spatial equity and social and cultural practice inform the places we live and build.

She is a community activist and social entrepreneur. She teaches design theory in Athabasca University’s RAIC Centre for Architecture and is a Visiting Research Fellow in Wits University’s Centre for Urban Built Environment Studies (CUBES) in Johannesburg.

As part of the 1955 crew, she contributes technical knowledge, writing, design skills and filmmaking.

Ronnie Lehlohonolo “Hloks” Mohlala

Hloks lives in Freedom Charter Square, Kliptown. He’s know as our “civil engineer” able to build and repair machines and structures. Currently he is working on recycling an old oven into our compression machine for moulds to upcycle plastic waste. He is Thabang’s wingman in all our drone work. He is certified in hand and power tools, PPEs and concrete forms.

Anderson “Bafana” Gumede

Bafana is a largely self-taught freelance visual artist, sculptor and performer based in White City Jabavu Soweto, South Africa and a member of 1955 Creative Collaboration, in Kliptown, Soweto. He has worked on such projects as the French Institute of South Africa’s Giant Match Puppets, where he was involved with making and performing with large scale puppets. He was a mural artist for the Alliance Francoise in 2021, to whom he donated a painting on canvas. In 2022, he taught in the RAIC Centre for Architecture’s Global Studio Towards a Cross Cultural Sketching School, sharing technical skills and African visual aesthetics with local youth. He has been working with the province of Gauteng since 2017 creating art works, mosaics and murals for local libraries in their Library Project. Bafana believes that he plays an important role in society by expressing his observations of social norms and values.

Ginger Mahlamvu

Ginger was born in Baragwanath Hospital on 26th of January 1980, his given name is Gerald Lungile Mahlamvu yet he chose Ginger because while his mother was pregnant she was an ardent reader and the particular book she liked was Ginger Bread Man. He heard that she vowed that whether her child would be male or female she would call it Ginger. She died three years after he was born.He grew up under the loving care of his grandmother who instilled the idea of family, good sense and thoughtfulness.

In the early 1990s Kliptown was infested with crime and gangsterism, it was no surprise that without a father figure he easily joined that gangsterism. In 2002, he was arrested and sentenced to 12 years in maximum security prison, the infamous prison Sun City. At that time, he could barely write or read and didn’t know where his life was going. He soon knew that prison was not a life for any human being. He started teaching himself how to read and write, the prison library became his only friend. There, a fellow inmate took him under his wing. He got his Matric, joined writing and drawing competitions, made plans to apply to UNISA, found his confidence.

Then in 2007 he was released. Outside he was faced with an obligation to give back to the community. He joined a group of artists from around Kliptown and Soweto and started a movement called Post 77. The same year he was introduced to analogue and digital photography at Becomo Art Centre in Kliptown. He’s been at the art centre ever since studying Printing, Painting, Silk Screen, Sculpture, Ceramics and teaching art to young children and the youth from around Kliptown and Soweto.