an HONEST FILM CO original series
Womhlaba | Of the Earth
Every community has a pitch. Most of them don't have a name. Drawn in the sand, worn into the red dust at the edge of Soweto, carved into farming valleys the rest of the country drives past without stopping. Womhlaba is a series that finds those pitches, and sits with the people who have been playing on them for as long as they can remember. The ball gets us there. The rest we find on our own.
The best football in South Africa happens where no one is watching.
Three Episodes. Three Communities.
Womhlaba is a three-part documentary series made in South Africa during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Each episode follows our host into a different community, using football as the entry point into something deeper. The game opens the door. What's behind it is the film. Community. Identity. What this country actually is, underneath everything it pretends to be.
Over five days per location, football gets us through the door. What's behind it is three worlds: the farming valleys of the rural Western Cape, the wild coast of the Transkei, and the streets of Soweto. We play, share food, find the musicians, sit with the elders, and connect with people whose relationship to their land runs deeper than any headline about this country ever suggests.
Each episode ends the same way. South Africa plays in the World Cup. The community gathers where they always gather. And for a few hours, everything that usually divides people stops mattering.
Each episode follows the same structure.
The game was always theirs.
THE HOST
The 2026 World Cup gives him a reason to go looking for the game he grew up playing. The one that exists whether anyone is watching or not.
Over five days per episode he moves through a community on foot. He plays, eats, listens, and follows whatever the day offers. He is not there to present the story. He is there to find it. The people he meets along the way, the coaches, the elders, the musicians, the kids who never leave the pitch, they are the show. He is just the one who showed up.
Womhlaba is built around a specific kind of person. Not a celebrity. Not a pundit. Someone who grew up loving this game the way most South Africans do, on a patch of ground with no name, with people who never made it anywhere but never stopped showing up.
Courtney Seth Williams is that person. He played football seriously enough to chase it overseas. It didn't work out. He came back to South Africa, built a career in media and communications inside the sporting world, and never stopped playing. He is still an exceptional athlete. That gap between almost and not quite is exactly where this show lives.
Courtney knows these communities because he came from one. He has spent his career telling stories inside sport. He asks the questions he actually wants answered, not the ones a script tells him to. He is already building his own brand and creates sporting content online, which means he brings his own audience and his own creative instincts to every frame.
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Soweto is where South African football was born. Not the professional game, the real one. The one played in dusty streets and on packed-earth pitches before anyone was watching. Sixteen years after 2010, we go back to the source.
We train with the local club on a Tuesday evening, the kind of session where the coach shouts and nobody leaves early. We find the kid everyone in the neighbourhood already knows about, the fifteen year old who is clearly different, and we play with him. We sit in the place where the football argument has never stopped, the café or the corner or the barbershop where someone always has something to say about Bafana. We braai together as the match approaches. And when South Africa plays, we watch it in Soweto, the way it was always meant to be watched.
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The Wild Coast is ancient, proud, and largely untouched by the kind of attention it deserves. Football here is played on hillsides above the ocean, on beaches at low tide, on pitches with no markings and no names. We follow the game to find the people behind it.
We go out on the rocks with local fishermen at first light. We play football on the beach at low tide, goals marked with driftwood, the ocean doing whatever it wants at the edges. We sit with a Xhosa elder who remembers when the pitch was first cut into the hillside and who has watched every game played on it since. That evening we cook fresh fish on an open fire on the coast. When Bafana plays, we find a homestead with a generator, a single screen, and thirty people who were always going to be there.
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In the farming valleys an hour from Cape Town, communities have been playing football on the same patches of ground for generations. The mountains are behind them. The rest of the country drives past without stopping. We stop.
We run the mountain pass at dawn with someone who has done it every morning for twenty years. We sit with the oldest coach in the valley, a man who has sent nobody to the professional leagues and has never once considered stopping. We cook and eat with a local family on match day, the kind of meal that takes all afternoon and feeds everyone who shows up. And when Bafana plays, we find where the community has always gathered to watch, and we join them
WHY ADIDAS?
Earlier this year Adidas returned to South African football after fifteen years away. The kit launch they built wasn't a standard product drop. It was a three-part cultural story told across street, church and coast. Read it here.
The thinking behind it was that a football kit is not a performance product. It is a cultural artefact. It carries meaning, reflects identity, and connects different worlds.
That is exactly what Womhlaba is.
We are travelling through the communities where that identity was built before anyone put a brand on it. The farming valleys, the wild coast, the streets of Soweto. The places where football has always been real. Where the game existed long before the kits arrived and will exist long after the campaign window closes.
Adidas has just made a three-year commitment to South African football rooted in exactly this territory. Womhlaba is the documentary series that lives inside it.
Adidas’ Return to South African Football
HOW ADIDAS SHOWS UP
We are not building scenes around your brand. We are making an honest documentary series and inviting Adidas to be genuinely present in it.
In practice that looks like this. Courtney arrives in each community with Bafana kit and Adidas gear to give away. Not as a stunt. As a gesture. A kid in a farming valley outside Cape Town pulling on a Bafana shirt for the first time is a real moment. We film it honestly. Nobody performs for the camera because nobody is being asked to.
Courtney wears Adidas throughout the series because he is a footballer and Adidas is the national team's brand. The communities we visit watch Bafana play in your kit on screen. The connection between what they're watching and what they're wearing is already there.
Beyond the financial partnership, what Adidas brings that no one else can is access. Connections to coaches, clubs, former players, and communities across South Africa that have been part of the Adidas story for decades. We are not asking Adidas to open doors for us as a favour. We are asking them to be part of a series that tells the story of the world those doors lead into. That access makes the show better. A better show reflects better on everyone in it.
That is what honest brand integration looks like. It lives in the series permanently, not just for the campaign window.
Womhlaba is not a football series.
It is a portrait of South Africa told through the communities that rarely get one. The people, the land, the food, the music, the elders who remember and the kids who don't know anything different. Football is simply how we get there. It is the one thing that opens a door in this country faster than anything else. What we find behind it is a South Africa that is complicated, beautiful, deeply rooted, and almost entirely absent from the stories this country tells about itself.
Womhlaba is being made in June 2026, during the FIFA World Cup. We are looking for a partner who wants to be present in these communities in a way that feels earned. Courtney, our host, has a direct relationship with Adidas SA and believes in this project personally. That is why we are having this conversation. We have ideas about how this could work. But we would rather hear yours first.
Womhlaba is produced by Honest Film Co. Learn more about who we are.
