INTERVIEW: Walking the Path with Mandla Dube: Kalushi/Makeba/Yasuke

By Floyd Webb

We started this latest conversation with laughter. He was fresh back from Italy—“hectic, not a vacation,” he said—and I teased him about the watermelon crop he once showed me when he was experimenting in the countryside. That’s the thing about Mandla: his life is always rooted somewhere in the land, history, and struggle, even when he’s jetting between Johannesburg, Bologna, and Tokyo.

When I reconnect with Mandla Dube, it feels less like an interview and more like catching up with a longtime brother-in-arms. We’ve known each other for decades, swapped calls across continents, argued over cinema, and dreamed about projects that might take years to manifest. That’s the rhythm with Mandla—he’s always been playing the long game.

It had been three, maybe four years since we last sat down formally. Long enough that both of us had lost friends and collaborators, long enough for projects we once only talked about to now be in post-production—or, in the case of Yasuke, standing at the edge of history.

His Compass: History and Heritage

I asked Mandla the big question first: what values have guided his filmmaking through all these shifts? His answer was immediate: history, African history.

“I’m a student of African history,” he said. “My films are about African excellence, achievement, and our challenges—and how we overcome them.”

“We walk on the shoulders of giants—but we’ve barely hit the tip of the iceberg of what cinema can do for African stories.”

He traces that back to his time at Clark Atlanta University, where he was exposed to diasporic heritage that sharpened his vision. For him, the past is not a weight but a compass. “I’ve dedicated my life to learning about the African presence globally. That’s my anchor.”

Kalushi, Silverton Siege, and the Netflix Run

I’ve watched Mandla move from cinematographer to director with the same hunger he had when we first crossed paths. He started behind the camera, learning lenses and light, before stepping out with Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu, his debut feature about the young anti-apartheid activist executed by the South African state in 1979. The film put his name on the map.

That was followed by Silverton Siege, a Netflix thriller dramatizing a 1980 stand-off in Pretoria that gave birth to the global slogan “Free Nelson Mandela.” Then came Heart of the Hunter, which broke ground as the first African film to open at #1 on Netflix globally.

Along the way, he shot the History Channel’s The Great War, developed a project on King Shaka for CBS/Showtime, and photographed Netflix’s dance series JIVA!. He’s now in development on a historical epic about the Battle of Isandlwana (January 22, 1879), where the Zulu army defeated the British. That trajectory says it all: Mandla doesn’t just make films, he plants flags in contested memory.

And yet, each success came with resistance. Back in the early ’90s, fresh from Atlanta, he found South Africa’s industry still “dominated by white males.” No one would hire him as a cinematographer. So he invented his own lane—founding a production company, hiring directors just so he could shoot their projects. It was a survival tactic that doubled as training.

Later, at the American Film Institute, he studied under master cinematographer Bill Dill. The program was transformative, but costly: his marriage collapsed under the strain. Pursuing cinema at that level demanded sacrifices far beyond the screen.

That’s the thing about Mandla: the triumphs shine, but the scars are there too.

Makeba: A Promise Fulfilled

In 1996, fresh from Cannes, Mandla met Miriam Makeba at the Johannesburg airport. She asked what he did. He said filmmaker. She said, “One day maybe you could tell my story.”

Nearly three decades later, he is doing just that. Working with producers Paul and Andrea of Millstream Films, in Bologna, he’s assembled a rough cut of his Makeba documentary and is pushing toward completion and distribution.

“It’s an important story,” he told me. “Not just the public icon, but the private person. The artist who took the festival stage as a loudhailer against apartheid—and never looked back.”

That same year he also stopped by my office in London—a small but unforgettable crossing of paths. It feels right, almost destined, that our circles and Makeba’s would keep overlapping.

Yasuke: The African Who Walked into Japan

But the project that gets the most curiosity—the one that brings my phone calls and Mandla’s emails into alignment—is Yasuke, the African who became a samurai in 16th-century Japan.

We’ve talked about this story for years. Back in 2015, when MGM announced their own Yasuke project, Mandla called me furious. I reminded him not to sweat it—Hollywood announces things just to block others. He kept going.

What sets his version apart is where it begins: Africa. “He couldn’t have just been a slave,” Mandla insists. “Even if he was enslaved, he came from somewhere. Where?”

That research took him to the Mutapa Empire, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers—trading with China, India, Egypt, and the Far East from 800 to 1600 AD. He traced coastal routes near Beira in Mozambique, chasing evidence of African warriors who traveled east.

Netflix initially supported development, but the scope was too large for its African slate. The rights reverted, and Mandla’s Los Angeles manager, Steven Adams, suggested a bold pivot: turn the project into a graphic novel. That move created the opening.

At HollyShorts in Los Angeles, his business partner Sydney met representatives from Toei Studios Japan. “They told us: many people pitch Yasuke, but no one starts with who he was and where he came from,” Mandla recalled. That was the key. Toei signed a development agreement, and Mandla is now preparing to meet Japanese writers steeped in samurai culture.

“When Yasuke arrives in Japan, he’s already a warrior—he stood as an equal.”

That reframing changes everything. The film follows Yasuke from Africa to India to Japan, situating him in a network of mercenary work, spice routes, and cultural exchange. In Toei’s archives, Mandla even found hints of entire towns with African populations in East Asia, such as the Siddis at Janjira Fort. The Janjira Fort was critical for the Sidis to withstand invasions from the Marathas, Mughals, and Portuguese.

The Global Signal

I asked him what this partnership with Toei signals. He didn’t hesitate. “That African stories matter—and that we don’t have to sprint to Hollywood anymore.”

He tied it to politics too. Just before we spoke, the U.S. president had announced new tariffs—100% on films not made in the United States. Mandla didn’t flinch.

“We’ve gotta thank people like President Trump because they put us into a corner where we have to become independent and sustain ourselves.”

For him, barriers are catalysts. The Toei deal isn’t just about Japanese studios—it’s about a shifting global media landscape where Africa builds its own alliances.

Creative Struggle: Language and Form

Triumph is never the whole story. When I asked about the hardest creative challenge, he surprised me: “The main challenge has been language, right?” He wasn’t talking about dialogue, but form.

“The main challenge has been language—not spoken, but visual.”

“I find myself having to learn new ways of communicating visually, other than what one has been used to in Western storytelling methods.”

That’s more than craft—it’s philosophy. For Mandla, decolonizing cinema isn’t only about the subject matter; it’s about the grammar of the image itself.

Story Archaeology

One of my favorite things about Mandla is how he finds himself in the research. “You become a story archaeologist,” he says. Digging through archives, rituals, and landscapes until the past begins to speak back.

He told me about filming a reburial of ancestral remains once excavated by Pretoria archaeologists, now ordered returned by President Thabo Mbeki. On the eve of the ceremony, a storm rolled in. A family of elephants circled the coffins. His crew panicked. Mandla stayed, rolling 16mm.

“They weren’t violent,” he told me. “It felt like they were welcoming the ancestors.”

At dawn, the storm cleared. Under a full moon, they climbed the mountain and reburied the dead in a ritual that demanded everyone strip naked before the ancestors.

“I was holding a camera rolling naked.”

It’s an unforgettable image of raw vulnerability and total commitment: filmmaker as witness, stripped bare with nothing between him and history.

Passing the Torch

We ended where we often do—with advice for the next generation.

“You don’t need Hollywood,” he said. “You need a voice. Start anywhere—write, shoot, cut, design sound. Put in the hours. Shoot every day if you can. Collaborators will find you. Never give up.”

“You don’t need Hollywood; you need a voice. Put in the hours. Collaborators will find you.”

He pointed to the most recent Oscar winner, made for a few million dollars rather than hundreds.

“It goes to tell us there are stories that can still be told without two or three hundred million dollar budgets—and those stories matter.”

His canon reflects that ethic: Rashomon, Days of Heaven, Yeelen, Do the Right Thing; books like Shot by Shot and The Visual Story. “How do I say five pages of prose in one image?” he asks. That’s the craft.

As I listened, I realized our decades of conversations have circled the same idea: for Mandla, cinema isn’t just a career—it’s a vow. From Makeba’s airport blessing to Yasuke’s African roots, he has carried the charge.

And I feel honored to keep walking alongside him as he does.