The escarpment rising between South Africa’s Mpumalanga province and the borders of Mozambique and Eswatini is a region of abrupt transitions: lush cliffs meet the hot red earth of the lowlands. Robin Bernstein’s first photobook, Mapalakata, engages with this landscape through a visual reassessment of a key historical, geological and geographical area in Southern Africa. The title, meaning ‘visitors’, is drawn from oral histories and was used to describe traders from the East who moved through Southern Africa before European colonisation.

The work is situated where plantations of foreign trees blanket the landscape, mills pulp pine into paper, and gold mines have operated for a century. The terrain holds relics of another time — remnants of a forgotten pre-colonial society and wild descendants of horses abandoned during wars and a failed gold rush. Bernstein photographs these traces alongside the people who presently inhabit the spaces, considering how the history of the region is continually rewritten as different groups attempt to erase the narratives of their predecessors.

Published by GOST Books as a clothbound hardback, the book includes written contributions from South African writers Lidudumalingani and Desmond Latham. A quotation from Latham in the publisher’s description frames the region as a place where the logic of trade and extraction has persisted from cloth and beads to gold and timber. Through a photographic investigation of remnants of the past and present inhabitants, Mapalakata engages with the nuances of present social conditions in South Africa and how place roots itself in the consciousness of those who inhabit it.