The Guardian gallery highlights *Mapalakata*, the debut publication by South African photographer Robin Bernstein, which explores the layered history of Mpumalanga on the border with Mozambique and Eswatini. Using portraits, landscapes and historical traces, the project examines how different waves of outsiders have moved through, occupied and reshaped the region long before and after European colonisation. Its significance lies in connecting present-day lives and industries to older stories of trade, extraction, displacement and memory in a place closely tied to South Africa’s gold history.

The title means ‘visitors’ in Bapedi and comes from oral histories about eastern traders who once travelled through southern Africa. Bernstein’s work focuses on a landscape now marked by timber plantations, paper mills and gold mines, but also scattered with remains of a precolonial society and later colonial and apartheid-era histories, including housing built under the 1950 Group Areas Act. The article includes images and commentary spanning 2019 to 2025, from Kaapsehoop’s wild horses, thought to be linked to an earlier failed gold rush, to portraits in Barberton and industrial sites such as the Berlin plantation and the Bulembu asbestos mine.