The Forgotten Voices of the Present started as a research project with the intension to document an alternative history of South Africa’s transition since 1994. This project aims to give voice to those South Africans who have been marginalized and/or excluded from the production of South Africa’s history to date, and thus, attempts not only to challenge the way in which histories of people and communities have been recorded, but generally the way in which histories have been made.

The main purpose of the project is to produce a collection of individual oral histories from residents in selected poor communities that can constitute a meaningful representation of South Africa's post 1994 political, social and economic history as lived and experienced by the oppressed and marginalized majority.

The scope of the project is intentionally limited to collecting oral histories from three selected, poor communities in post-1994 South Africa. It is attempts to capture a representational cross-section of voices from poor communities in post-1994 South Africa that cover rural, urban and peri-urban realities.

The three communites selected for this project are:

The community of Ramalutsi which is located adjacent to the small farming town of Viljoenskroon in the Northern Free State;

The community of Maandagshoek which is located approximately 30kms west of the small town of Burgersfort in the south of Limpopo province;

The community of Sebokeng which is located in the mid-Vaal area (south of Johannesburg) of Gauteng province.