Profile
Yonela Makoba is a cultural worker based in South Africa. Her practice engages ritual as a site for the retrieval of memory and knowledge, re-membering, and transgression, where the personal, political, and sacred converge. Through embodied inquiry, ancestral memory, and Indigenous epistemologies, her work reflects on matriarchal inheritances, spiritual continuities, and the entanglement of bodies within social and political ecologies.
Makoba works across ritual, performance, photography, printmaking, and installation. In 2025, she received the Bag Factory Young/Unframed Residency, culminating in the sixth iteration of iTi Ritual Studies | Lomfazi Yindoda at Constitution Hill and the closing ceremony for the Defunct Context Pavilion. Makoba has exhibited widely across South Africa, with works held in the Iziko Museums and the University of Cape Town collections.
