Visible and Invisible Borders in Post-Apartheid South Africa An Intersemiotic Analysis of Meta-History

The aim of this paper is to analyse the intertextual relationship connecting Clint Eastwood’s film *Invicuts* (2009), Clifford Bestall’s documentary *The 16th Man* (2010) and John Carlin’s book *Playing the Enemy* (2008). In my analysis, I will examine the strategies adopted in the intersemiotic translation of John Carlin’s text into film and documentary, a very challenging process in that Carlin’s text itself could be seen, just like any non-fictional work, as a “translation” of an original hypotext (history as written down in the documents created by the people who actually took part in that process, which would later be “assembled”, “interpreted” and “systematised” by historians), which in its turn is a transcription of something much larger (history as lived experience).