Creative industries are built twice: first through creative work, and then through the legal, policy, commercial and institutional systems that decide what happens to that work.
Unathi Malunga has spent close to three decades inside those systems. An admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa, Fulbright alumna and UCLA LLM graduate, her career has moved across entertainment and production law, intellectual property, broadcasting, content acquisition, business affairs, public institutions, governance, policy, advocacy, lobbying and sector leadership.
Her experience includes private legal practice and production legal work; General Manager: Business Acquisitions at the SABC; Content Acquisitions Manager in Business Affairs at Kwesé; Head of Operations at the National Film and Video Foundation; and Executive Officer and Lobbyist of the South African Screen Federation.
The work now falls into three distinct but connected practices: Entertainment & Production Law; Policy, Advocacy & Lobbying; and Creative-Industry Leadership & Institution Building.
The work operates at both practitioner and system level.
At practitioner level, it addresses the legal, commercial and professional conditions under which creative work is developed, financed, contracted, protected, licensed, distributed and taken to market.
At system level, it engages the wider architecture of the cultural and creative industries: the laws and regulations that govern them; the public institutions responsible for supporting them; the incentives, funding mechanisms and development programmes intended to stimulate growth; the industry organisations and collective structures through which practitioners organise; and the relationships between government, industry and development partners.
The objective is not policy or institutional reform for its own sake. It is to strengthen the conditions in which creative practitioners and enterprises can retain rights, capture value, attract investment, build sustainable businesses and reach domestic, regional and international markets.
Upliftment for African Holdings is the principal professional vehicle through which much of Unathi’s current advisory, project, professional-learning and knowledge work is undertaken. Other roles through boards, representative bodies, coalitions and public-sector structures retain their own institutional identities.
Across all of it, the focus is practical: rights that can be enforced, policy that works in real industries, institutions that can carry collective interests and creative people who understand the systems around their work.
South Africa • Africa • International
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