Ubuntu Heritage · Mantswe a maloba
Reclaiming African Voices — a cinematic, multilingual, offline-first heritage storytelling app.
Maloba is Setswana for "yesterday"; the tagline Mantswe a maloba means "Voices of Yesterday."
Ubuntu Heritage brings South Africa's foundational indigenous literature and heritage to life as an
interactive, cinematic graphic novel — and invites communities to add their own voices to the archive.
Built for the Advancing African Digital Humanities Ideation Hub (AADHIH) "Reclaiming African Voices"
hackathon (UNISA · BaobabX Academy).
What we're building
A single Expo app (web + Android + iOS) that does four things, humanities first:
- Reads the canon. Four foundational texts, rendered as cinematic, dual-mode (Child/Adult),
multilingual scenes — never dry summaries.
- Maps the heritage around them. A grounded, cited Cultural Atlas — heroes, customs, peoples,
provinces, presidents, national days — plus a walkable Journey through the history (1652 → today).
- Gives the archive back. A POPIA-compliant Community Archive where elders' stories are recorded,
owned, and erasable by the people who make them.
- Proves provenance. An on-chain Heritage Ledger notarises the app's own adaptations of four
foundational works — three public domain, one (Mutwa, d. 2020) in copyright and summarised in our
own words — as hashes + citations only, never anyone's personal data. Each work states its rights
on screen.
How we approached it
- Humanities before technology. The rubric weights Humanities Depth (30%) + Community Impact (25%)
above everything; every feature traces back to a text, a custom, or a community need.
- Truth only — no invented heritage. Every historical claim traces to a real source (see
docs/04-humanities-sources.md and per-scene
sourceNotes). Where a
fact isn't sourced, it's marked, not fabricated. AI-generated images and machine translations are
always labelled as such.
- Free-tier, offline-first, low-data. Designed to cost nothing to keep alive and to work on a cheap
Android phone with poor connectivity.
- Honest about state. Some headline integrations are built and wired but activate only when an API
key is added; the app degrades gracefully and says so. The full breakdown is in
docs/10-status-and-roadmap.md.
The four pillars (the heart of the app)
| Source | Author | What the module does |
|---|
| Mhudi | Sol Plaatje (1930) | Survival, egalitarian partnership, and the subversion of the colonial pastoral myth; Mhudi's proto-feminist agency. |
| Ityala Lamawele | S.E.K. Mqhayi (1914) | The inkundla (traditional Xhosa court) — indigenous jurisprudence and restorative justice (ubulungisa). |
| Indaba, My Children | Credo Mutwa (1964) | Cosmology and creation myth (Ninavanhu-Ma, the Tree of Life); an act of oral-tradition preservation. |
| Inkondlo kaZulu | B.W. Vilakazi (1935) | The journey from oral izimbongi to written verse — a meta-story about how a language survives. |
Around them: the Cultural Atlas (Unsung Heroes · Marriage Rites · Peopling of SA · Totems & Clans ·
the Nine Provinces · the Presidents · National Days), the interactive Journey timeline, the
Community Archive, the Heritage Ledger, and an "Ask Ubuntu" guide that answers strictly from
the site's own grounded content.
Languages
The entire interface switches across eleven of South Africa's twelve official languages — South
African Sign Language, the twelfth since 2023, is the one not yet served. Literary content is
human-reviewed in English + Setswana; the other nine languages are shown as machine-draft,
clearly labelled "unreviewed," pending native-speaker review — never passed off as authoritative.
The stack (100% free tier — zero monthly cost)
- App: Expo / React Native — one codebase → web + Android + iOS
- Cinematic visuals: Pollinations.ai (free, key-less) + Google Gemini
(pre-generated, cached local images)
- Narrative + language AI: Google Gemini (image/tone) · Anthropic Claude (chatbot + translation
drafting) · Lelapa AI / Vulavula (indigenous STT + translation) · Botlhale AI (indigenous TTS)
- Voice: ElevenLabs (static cinematic sounds only, build-time)
- Backend: Supabase (Postgres + storage + anonymous auth, RLS) · persistence is localStorage/IndexedDB on web (WatermelonDB was planned, not adopted)
- Provenance: Solana (devnet) + IPFS content IDs for the Heritage Ledger
See docs/02-tech-stack.md for the rationale and free-tier limits, and
docs/10-status-and-roadmap.md for exactly what runs today vs. what
activates with a key.
Quick start
cd app
cp .env.example .env # optional keys; Pollinations + the core app need none
npm install
npm run web # open in the browser (primary demo target)
# or: npm run start # scan the QR code with Expo Go on your phone
npm run typecheck && npm test # pure-logic unit tests — the count is whatever `npm test` prints
npm run check:docs # docs lint: stale product name, wrong language count
The app is fully usable with no keys. Adding keys upgrades specific features (see the roadmap doc).
Checking a change on a real phone
Nothing in the test suite renders (issue #53), so a layout or interaction change is only really
checked by looking at it — and the deployed site is the wrong place to look, because a merge is not a
deploy. Serve the working tree instead:
npm run web:fresh # same Wi-Fi: open http://<your-pc-ip>:8081 on the phone
npm run web:tunnel # from anywhere: a public https URL, via @expo/ngrok
--tunnel prints "Tunnel ready" and then shows you localhost:8081 — it does not print the
public URL. Read it from ngrok's local API while the server runs:
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:4040/api/tunnels # -> public_url: https://<id>.exp.direct
Both hot-reload, so a fix is a refresh away. The tunnel URL is reachable by anyone who has it while
it runs — stop the server when you are done.
Documentation
Start here: CLAUDE.md (project context) → AGENTS.md (working rules) →
STATUS.md (live log) → docs/10-status-and-roadmap.md
(implemented vs. planned). Deep dives live in docs/; the concept-submission narrative and task
backlog in specs/.
Ethics & ownership
Built on the integrity rule truth only — no invented heritage (AGENTS.md), full
POPIA compliance (docs/05-popia-compliance.md), honest labelling of
all AI-generated content, and respect for community ownership of recorded voices (private/public +
real erasure).
Credits
Created by Tumo Olorato Mogame. In partnership with UNISA · BaobabX Academy. Ambient music/soundscapes
credited in-app to African Tribe Echoes.
