Since South Africa’s democratic transition from apartheid, nationalist aspirations for health equity and racial justice have continuously been met with ongoing legacies of anti-black violence and dramatic disparities in mental illness outcomes. Currently, South Africa’s rates of psychiatric disorders are among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa and disproportionately impact lower income Black communities. While the continual economic and societal aftermaths of the apartheid regime are known to exacerbate present-day burdens of mental illness, growing evidence suggests that the traumas of apartheid experienced by past generations could become biologically inherited and have lingering physiological effects that influence stress physiological mechanisms and mental health outcomes across the child’s lifecourse into the next generation. Drawing on data from a 30-year, multigenerational birth cohort study and two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this talk examines the biocultural transmission of embodied trauma from apartheid and its impacts on human biology and mental health in subsequent generations among families living in post-apartheid Soweto & Johannesburg, South Africa. I describe the applications of these findings to recent work on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa and future research aimed at ameliorating and undoing the embodied effects of historical trauma.