He had already made a very powerful short film entitled Home Sweet Home (1999), which told the story of a young woman who had left South Africa during the last days of apartheid to study in the U.S., and who feels free to return when the new government is installed. However, she returns to find her neighborhood in chaos and her family involved in illegal activity. They have internalized the violence that the system had directed against them, and they have in turn become agents of violence and inter-ethnic abuse. She herself is raped and she eventually loses both her father and her brother to self-directed violence. Her world is in ruins, her aspirations shattered. It would be natural for her to flee, but she chooses to stay, to do what she can to help move her country through this difficult transition period.

Soldiers of the Rock follows a similar pattern. Vuyo is a young university student in Business Administration, who embodies in many ways the potential of the new post-apartheid generation. His father was a miner, one of the tough breed of men who did the incredibly difficult work of deep ore gold mining, those men to whom this film is dedicated, the eighty thousand miners who paid for their lives building the wealth of South Africa, wealth that went almost entirely to others. His father died in the mines when Vuyo was 12, and with his last breath willed that all his survivor insurance benefits go to his son’s education. These benefits have allowed Vuyo to attend boarding school and then university. Vuyo knows that there is a symbolic component to this final decision by his father, but he cannot really understand it. In voice-over narration, he reveals the question that haunts him: What did he see down there in the deep darkness, in the dim light of his headlamp, as it flickered out with his life? Vuyo wants to have a fuller understanding of the life that his father lived down there, of the sacrifices that his father made by going into the mines in the first place, and (presumably, though he does not articulate it) what it felt like to stare down his own mortality and yet be thinking of the generation to come. By the time the film has ended, Vuyo will get his wish.

He decides to take work himself as a deep-mine worker during a break in school. He finds himself in a world very different from any he has known, a foreign, deadly existence that literally underlies–and supports–the everyday world of those on the surface. He becomes part of a crew consisting of men who have for the most part known no other life. They earn good money, relatively speaking, and are proud of their ability to support their families, though they rarely get to see them. They take pride in this life, seeing themselves as "Soldiers of the Rock," the continuation of a traditional warrior culture that no longer has relevance on the surface. Their attempt to maintain this tradition becomes ever more desperate as the gold veins give out. Their success has always resided in their fearlessness, pride, sense of mutual support, brute power, and stubborn adherence to their trade. But they are gradually finding themselves outdated, useless, redundant–and incapable of articulating their hopes and their fears.

Their leader is Usuthu, who wears a necklace of cowry shells and the name "Tupac" tattooed on his chest. Volatile and very dangerous, he embodies the miners’ suspicion of outsiders and adherence to tradition for its own sake. The primary object of his hatred is Satu, a former criminal who was once part of a "cash and transit heist gang." Something happened which drove Satu to leave that life, to enter the mines to make restitution for his criminality, in search of expiation for the suffering he had caused. Indeed, the life beneath the ground is part army barracks, part prison camp (but instead of trying to escape by digging up, here the men entrap themselves further in this life by digging down). Usuthu sees Satu as a rival and as a foreigner–someone who entered this life voluntarily, who was not born into it, and that arouses his suspicions.

Vuyo also comes to know Duma, an older miner who claims to have a background in business but ultimately confesses that he cannot read or write; Banda, a white-bearded old man, the crew’s "witch doctor," wise in the ways of the mines, somehow able to sense and even commune with the spirits of the dead who continue to inhabit the mines where they gave up their lives; big, muscular Mhlabagazi, a very decent man looking for direction; and Themba, who likes to party and loves the community that they form. And finally there is Thandi, a doctor who works on the surface of the mine, and who must deal with the broken bodies of the miners who make it out alive.

Vuyo finds himself caught up in the struggle between Usuthu and Satu. Satu wants the men to consider using their unemployment compensation (when it inevitably comes) to band together and purchase their own mine, which they can then run in a safer manner. He seeks Vuyo’s crucial support in this plan; though Vuyo is a rookie miner, the men have respect for his education and trust him (presumably because his father had been a miner before him). Usuthu has no use for Satu’s "scheme"; he refuses to acknowledge that the end is in sight or that the current system is stacked against them. Indeed, when a terrible accident leads once again to death and maiming, he directs the men’s rage not against the Company, but against the fellow miners who work on "Level 1"–those who have the technical skills to use the machinery that is the future of mining. They beat the Level 1 miners (who are smaller, weaker "non-warriors") until Satu challenges Usuthu and forces him to stop.

The men do not have the self-confidence to believe that they can grasp the new possibilities that are being offered to them. They will do so only when their present life is completely destroyed. The battles between Satu and Usuthu set up a treacherous, murderous, even suicidal chain of events from which most of the men will not emerge, and those who do will emerge to a new life. Vuyo will finally come to find himself and find his way, but with full understanding now of the lost spirits and the broken bodies that it has taken to bring him to this point.

With its powerful symbolism and aggressive filmmaking style, Soldiers of the Rock is a remarkable achievement for such a young director (Maake was only 22 when the film was made). This is even more noteworthy given that most of those working on the film were also students. Some of the actors were fellow students who had worked with Nomran on Home Sweet Home. Lebo Mathosa, who plays Thandi, is a very well known South African pop star, and this is her first film.

Though none of it was actually filmed in a mine (the set was constructed in an abandoned bakery!), it effectively conveys the claustrophobic feel of that world, its nightmarish sense of disorientation and impending disaster. The close-up focus on the struggle of bodies at work, the editing that pits character against character, man against rock and endlessly dripping seams, the pounding, groaning music all work together to pull the viewer into the men’s emotions and their situation. Life in the mines becomes a metaphor for life in post-apartheid South Africa–and it is very, very intense.

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