‘Laundry’ Reveals the True, Revolting Face of Apartheid in 1968 Johannesburg

For decades, apartheid appeared on screen mainly through the story of resistance to its abolition. Laundry takes a more intimate and unsettling route: it returns to Johannesburg in 1968 and follows a Black family trying to hold on while running a laundromat under white rule.

That focus gives the film its force. South Africa’s racial-segregation system lasted from 1948 to 1994, yet the daily reality of the Black population remained largely untold in local cinema. International productions such as The Last Grave at Dimbaza, Cry Freedom and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom approached the period primarily through the fight against apartheid.

Laundry instead looks at the system as lived experience. Its subject is not only the political battle to dismantle apartheid, but the humiliations and pressures that shaped ordinary Black life while the system still governed every part of society.

The film is the first feature by Zamo Mkhwanazi, a Black woman director. Its arrival fills what the article presents as a striking gap in the country’s film history: a local work that confronts apartheid while keeping its attention on the people forced to live through it.