The apartheid regime conspired to advance black ethnic divisions to facilitate the homelands and diminish the threat of black people to South Africa. From 1994, the democratic dispensation has engaged in various nation-building attempts to solidify a united South Africa that is multicultural and multilingual in conjunction with a progressive Constitution. Popular township films by Ekasi: Our Stories and Lokshin Bioskop have ventured into this arena which was the forte of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, to engage in storylines that encourage nation-building. In this article, I argue that popular films have emerged to represent cosmopolitan tropes that galvanise Black Nationalism. Also, the films engage negative black tribal stereotypes that, if not attended to, could result in black disunity. It can also be argued that the latter has been a stimulant for African conflicts, occasionally causing genocides. This article explores the role popular films play in conveying a nation-building narrative that sustains Black Nationalism and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa.

Television films in South Africa such as the series Lokshin Bioskop and eKasi: Our Stories represent the township space as fabulous and rife with economic opportunity. This is in contrast to the representations that are often depicted by mainstream film, in which the township space is portrayed as manifest with crime, unemployment and decay as in the case of Hijack Stories, Wooden Camera and Tsotsi. This study demonstrates the way in which neoliberal and nation-building archetypes are central in the creation of a ghetto fabulous representation of blackness and the township space. The study employs a close textual analysis of Taxi Cheeseboy and Maid for Me. It is informed by the “ghetto fabulous genre of black film” by Mukherjee in its reading of these new forms of grassroots expression. Moreover, the study delves into the representation of a post-apartheid township amidst the economic and social woes faced by the majority of its dwellers who are still significantly underprivileged. The selected films represent the township exclusively from its quasi-suburban areas which promulgate a picture of a township that has not been neglected by gentrification in post-1994 South Africa.