During the 1970s, the Apartheid government’s Department of Information surreptitiously produced propaganda that masqueraded as popular entertainment. The B-Scheme films of the 1970s are familiar to historians of South African cinema, but less well known are two pro-apartheid comic book series—Mighty Man and Tiger Ingwe. Mighty Man featured a crime-busting superhero and was designed to appeal to urban audiences, while Tiger Ingwe targeted black readers in the rural areas, or “homelands.”

Africa is a Country spoke to historian William Worger who is spearheading a project at UCLA Library to compile a complete set of digitized Afri-comics to make them freely available online. We chatted about their production, about the challenge of understanding how they were read when they came out, and how we might read them today.