About Time, Paper, Bone

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 field work by myself and collaborator Bongani Kona, Time, Paper, Bone is a 57-minute radio documentary that chronicles Nombulelo’s decades-long quest for closure, and South Africa’s long reckoning with the injustices of the past.