The last time Nombulelo Booi saw her father – anti-apartheid activist, James Booi – it was 1963. He was dragged into an armoured police vehicle in the early hours of the morning, and never seen again. Nearly sixty years later, Nombulelo works with Madeleine Fullard, head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, to find the remains of James Booi.
Based on four years of fieldwork by myself and collaborator Bongani Kona, Time, Paper, Bone is a 57-minute radio documentary - made for BBC Radio 4’s Archive on 4 - that chronicles Nombulelo’s decades-long quest for closure, and South Africa’s long reckoning with the injustices of the past. (Listen here if you’re outside the UK).
Time, Paper, Bone was made possible with the support of the 2021 Whickers Radio & Audio Funding Award (RAFA), which enabled us to start reporting this story, as well as the Whickers/Sheffield DocFest Podcast Pitch Award, which we won in 2023.
We premiered a half-hour version of Time, Paper, Bone at the 2024 Sheffield DocFest, and prior to that a 9-minute version of the story, titled Nombulelo Booi, aired on BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts.
