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10
Contents
editorial
NYOKABI KARIŨKI
On Learning that one of the first Electronic Works was by an African, Halim El-Dabh
MARIMBA ANI
An Aesthetic of Control
JANNIKE BERGH in conversation with HAIDAR EID
Even Ghosts Weep in Gaza
WANELISA XABA
White psychology, Black indecipherability and iThongo
Theme African Psychology
DYLAN VALLEY & BISO MATHA RIALGO
An Epidemic of Loneliness - introduction to the African Psychology theme section of herri #10
KOPANO RATELE in dialogue with ARYAN KAGANOF
Psychology Contra Psychology: In Search of the Most Appropriate Definition of African Psychology
N CHABANI MANGANYI
On Becoming a Psychologist in Apartheid South Africa
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
African Psychology: serving as a reminder of human universals which have been lost or forgotten in mainstream Western psychology.
AUGUSTINE NWOYE
From Psychological Humanities to African Psychology: A Review of Sources and Traditions
SAM MATHE
Naming
ZETHU CAKATA
Ubugqirha: healing beyond the Western gaze
KOPANO RATELE
Dethingifying
PUMEZA MATSHIKIZA
A Psychological Explanation of Myself
SYLVIA VOLLENHOVEN
The Elephants in the Room
GWEN ANSELL
A New African String Theory: The Art of Being Yourself and Being with Others
ISMAHAN SOUKEYNA DIOP
Exploring Afro-centric approaches to mental healthcare
KOPANO RATELE
Four (African) Psychologies
LOU-MARIE KRUGER
Hunger
FIKILE-NTSIKELELO MOYA
"We are a wounded people."
CHARLA SMITH
Die “kywies” by die deur
KOPANO RATELE
Estrangement
MWELELA CELE
Sisi Khosi Xaba and the translation of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu
HUGO KA CANHAM
Leaving psychology to look for shades and complexity in despair
MALAIKA MAHLATSI
When Black academics leave historically White institutions
PAUL KHAHLISO
AGAINST COLONIAL PSYCHOLOGY
KOPANO RATELE
The interior life of Mtutu: Psychological fact or fiction?
MTUTUZELI MATSHOBA
Call Me Not a Man
WILFRED BARETT DAMON
James Joyce En Ek
ASHRAF KAGEE
Three friends in Gaza: We grieve, we mourn, we condemn, we deplore, we march, we demonstrate, we attend seminars and webinars, we wave flags, we wear keffiyas, we show off our t-shirts, but still the killing continues.
KOPANO RATELE AND SOPHIA SANAN
African Art, Black Subjectivity, and African Psychology: Refusing Racialised Structures of Aesthetic or Identity Theories
galleri
DATHINI MZAYIYA
Musidrawology as Methodology
STEVEN J. FOWLER
Dathini Mzayiya – the sound of the mark as it comes into being.
NONCEDO GXEKWA
Musidrawology as Portraits of the Artist Dathini Mzayiya & his Art
NONCEDO GXEKWA & NADINE CLOETE
Musidrawology as Methodology: a work of art by Dathini Mzayiya
NJABULO PHUNGULA
Like Knotted Strings
SPACE AFRIKA
oh baby
STRAND COMMUNITY ART PROJECT
Hands of the Future
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Blue Notes: Searching for Form and Freedom
DESMOND PAINTER
'with all the ambivalence of a car in the city...'
KOPANO RATELE
Ngoana Salemone/Mother
SOPHIA OLIVIA SANAN
Art as commodity, art as philosophy, art as world-making: notes from a conversation with Kopano Ratele on African Art, Black Subjectivity and African Psychology
ROBIN TOMENS
"Why don't you do something right and make a mistake?"
SIMON TAYLOR
On The Ontological Status of the Image
borborygmus
NAPO MASHEANE
Manifesto ea mokha oa makomonisi
MAKHOSAZANA XABA
Curious and Willing: Ngazibuza Ngaziphendula, Ngahumusha Kwahumusheka
RICHARD PITHOUSE
The Wretched of the Earth becomes Izimpabanga Zomhlaba
FRANTZ FANON/ MAKHOSAZANA XABA
The Wretched of the Earth - Conclusion
EUGENE SKEEF
Yighube!
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Amahubo
MBE MBHELE
Who cares about Mandisi Dyantyis Anyway?
KARABO KGOLENG
Women and Water
BONGANI TAU
Notes on Spirit Capital
ADDAMMS MUTUTA
Conflict Cultures and the New South Africa
ADAM KEITH
A Conversation with Debby Friday
DICK EL DEMASIADO
Some Notes on Cumbia and Dub
MULTIPLE AUTHORS
Thinking decolonially towards music’s institution: A post-conference reflection
frictions
AAKRITI KUNTAL
Still
FORTUNATE JWARA
In between wor(l)ds
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
A Love Letter
SHAFINAAZ HASSIM
Take your freedom and run
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
10 New Poems
KHULILE NXUMALO
Two Poems For
HENNING PIETERSE
Translating Van den vos Reynaerde (Of Reynaert the Fox) into Afrikaans
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Words to Treasure
MTUTUZELI MATSHOBA
To kill a man's pride
KELWYN SOLE
Political Fiction, Representation and the Canon: The Case of Mtutuzeli Matshoba
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Maboko a ga Alexander Pushkin 1799 - 1837
NAÒMI MORGAN
Why translate Godot into Afrikaans?
TENZIN TSUNDUE
Three Poems
claque
DILIP M. MENON
Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes
BARBARA ROUSSEAUX
Undoing Fascism: Notes on Milisuthando
WAMUWI MBAO
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Reclaiming the Territory of the Mind
SISCA JULIUS
Ausi Told Me: My Cape Herstoriography
SERGIO HENRY BEN
Read. Write. Relevance. A review of Herman Lategan's Hoerkind.
MARIO PISSARRA
the Imagined New is a Work in Progress
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The city is mine by Niq Mhlongo: A review
KARABO KGOLENG
The Comrade’s Wife by Barbara Boswell
DOMINIC DAULA
Pain, Loss, and Reconciliation in Music and Society
KNEO MOKGOPA
Normal Bandits: Mix Tape Memories by Anders Høg Hansen
ADDAMMS MUTUTA
‘Southern Cinema Aesthetics’: broadly imagined in multiple frames
RUTH MARGALIT
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew
LESEGO RAMPOLOKENG
Coming to Johnson
ekaya
KOPANO RATELE
From "Wilcocks" to "Krotoa": The Name Changing Ceremony
ARYAN KAGANOF
The herriverse: Introducing a new kind of Research Method, one that is Structural or even Meta- insofar as it exists in the Reader’s Navigation of the Curated Space and the Possible Contingent Connections as much as in the Objects being Curated; an Epistemic Construction therefore, that is obliquely but absolutely determined by Ontologically Unpredictable Exchanges.
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Introducing herri Search
off the record
UHURU PHALAFALA
Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement Book Launch, Book Lounge, Cape Town Wednesday 24 April 2024.
PALESA MOKWENA
Lefifi Tladi - "invisible caring" or, seeing and being seen through a spiritual lens
CHRISTOPHER BALLANTINE
Edmund "Ntemi” Piliso Jazzing Through Defeat And Triumph: An Interview
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
CHRIS McGREGOR (1936-1990): Searching for Form and Freedom
SHAUN JOHANNES
In Memoriam Clement Benny
VEIT ERLMANN
"Singing Brings Joy To The Distressed" The Social History Of Zulu Migrant Workers' Choral Competitions
SAM MATHE
Stimela Sase Zola
MARKO PHIRI
Majaivana's Odyssey
EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE
The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction
BASIAMI “CYNTHIA” WAGAFA
Hyper-Literary Fiction: The (meta)Poetics Of Digital Fragmentation – an interview with August Highland
feedback
DIANA FERRUS
Thursday 20 February, 2020
LWAZI LUSHABA
Saturday 4 April 2020
NJABULO NDEBELE
Sunday 5 December 2021
BEN WATSON
6 June 2023 20:50
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
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the selektah
LERATO “Lavas” MLAMBO
Real human person – a mix by Lavas
SIEMON ALLEN & CHRIS ALBERTYN
Celebrating the genius of Ntemi Edmund Piliso: A mix-tape of twenty five tunes recorded on 78rpm shellac in 25 years – 1953 to 1968
ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ
Stone Unturned 18: The Static Cargo of Stars
PhD
WARRICK SWINNEY
Stick Fighting against extinction: end beginnings and other dada nihilismus polemics
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HOTLYNX
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shopping
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the back page
ELMI MULLER
Fugitive reflections on pain, death, and surgery
DICK TUINDER
Rob Schröder (13 November 1950 - 6 July 2024)
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BARBARA ROUSSEAUX

Undoing Fascism: Notes on Milisuthando

In December 2013, after finding out about Nelson Mandela’s death, Milisuthando Bongela and her friends attended the vigil outside his house. They joined the gathering and while Milisuthando sang along the famous struggle song my mother was a kitchen girl, my father was a garden boy, she realised her experience of apartheid had been different to that of most black people. In an interview, Milisuthando commented: “I remember going ‘wait a minute my father and my mother were people who took briefcases to work, and wore high heels and perfume…’ That was the first opportunity where I took a moment to question ‘is my experience of South Africa the same as everybody else’s?’.”

Born and raised in the Republic of Transkei, Milisuthando grew up isolated from apartheid while being at the centre of the regime’s “wish”. The Transkei, like the other artificial ‘independent Bantustans’ in South Africa, was created, as Vishwas Satgar writes, as a way “to ghettoise the African majority as a cheap labour source”. In a sense, the Bantustans were also used by the National Party to show the world that racial segregation worked for black people too. Only confronted with racism later in life when she moved with her family to East London, Milisuthando’s first years of life were shielded from the violence black South Africans experienced during apartheid, something she explores and tries to make sense of in her documentary film Milisuthando (2023).

A still from Milisuthando.

Years after Mandela’s passing, when Milisuthando and her team were thinking through the film’s soundscape, they recognised there was something in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold opera that was key to understanding apartheid. The music rises and rises, but it never explodes. It modulates, unresolved, conjuring the possibility of expansion. Like fascism, Wagner’s piece relies on order and momentum, tension and spectacle, as it does on its grandiosity. Although he died in 1883, years before the 1930s, Wagner’s music was the soundtrack of Nazi Germany. “It is compelling because it is music doing its thing, which is bewitching. It’s as if the orgasm never happens, it keeps on edging… and that is the constant project of fascism”, says Milisuthando as we meet over coffee to discuss her work.

African Mirror, Transkei.

While doing research for her film, Milisuthando was entrusted with hard drives with all sorts of footage; African Mirror newsreels, propaganda short films, domestic films of black and white families, footage of the early 1990s with the inclusion of black kids to Model C schools, scenes of Mandela calling primary school kids his ‘grandchildren’ and many others. Elders in the film industry and other collaborators granted her access to previously unseen archival material. But also, the film features new footage she recorded: her grandmother, her friends, her family, herself. It is in this intertwining of times and spaces, peoples and stories, domestic and public spheres, that the film proposes a new reading of South Africa through the lens of all of these things, together.

The documentary is divided into five parts: birth, ukuthakathwa (bewitchment), ukuqatshulwa (protections), ukubhodla (purging) and “ibhokwe Ikhalile ekhaya” (“a goat calls me back home”). Starting in the director’s grandmother’s home in the Eastern Cape, the film guides us to see both the insistence of love through the absurd and the ways apartheid continues to operate in South Africa today.

During the film’s premiere and Q&A discussion in Johannesburg, Milisuthando’s sister, Vuyokazi Bongela, raised the concept of ukuthunwya in relation to how making this film was a kind of assignment from their ancestors. The Xhosa term translates to ‘being sent’ and is usually employed in the context of kids being sent for errands designed by their elders, who only reward them once the task is completed. Remembering that, Milisuthando comments: “The film was a colossal task that I had to finish. And I think that way of being raised, with those small errands made by adults to see if you could follow instructions, trained me to listen. The film was in itself an exercise to see how deeply I could listen.” During the process she was accompanied by healers who showed her how to “hold this [film] as a task”, she adds.

The film was engaged by the team as an ancestor who demanded some things, handed over others and showed how the story should be told. When editing together with Hankyeol Lee (the film’s editor and cinematographer) “the air changed”, so they always lit a candle or burnt imphepho as a way of acknowledging they were not alone.

A still from Milisuthando

They were dealing with people’s voices, people’s lives. “Celluloid is a spiritual material, it is almost like a talisman… it holds so much. It can manipulate the way you understand reality, that’s why it was kept away from black people here, who were limited to still photography”, reflects Milisuthando.

As Wamuwi Mbao writes in his review: in the film “there are no toy-toying men; no policemen wielding German shepherds, or images of Desmond Tutu or FW de Klerk. Instead, powerfully, we see and hear women: their voices (Milisuthando herself, particularly), their memories, their images”. I would add that also, a lot of what we see is a result of Milisuthando “staying” in other, uncomfortable images. Guided by the question of “what exists beyond the images we know of apartheid?”, she “stayed” in images of white leisure, gymnastics dances in stadiums, apartheid propaganda backstage, independence ceremonies of Bantustans and scenes of Chief Matanzima having dessert with National Party officials while they were served by other black men. And it is in this act of “staying” where she triumphs in her objective of learning something new about the logic of apartheid and ultimately, about her generation.

A still from the documentary with Milisuthando in her school uniform. Image: Rob Pollock and Francis Burger.

The team of archival researchers, which included Milisuthando, Hankyeol Lee, Arya Lalloo and Awongiwe Polo, went “archive dumpster diving”, looking for answers to difficult questions and stuck around long enough to receive them. The filmmaking process took almost ten years. “I just knew that I didn’t want to see what I saw before”, shares Milisuthando. But what she found was not always easy to see: “I was looking for myself as a black person in the archive but I couldn’t see myself reflected, because the people behind camara had an agenda against people like me”, says Bongela. 

Because she could not rely on the apartheid regime’s filmic material, Milisuthando and her team had to subvert it. The film’s rhythm when going through the archives is fast, it relies on associative editing and a participatory viewer, who – she trusted –  would read images critically. “The people who created that propaganda material in South Africa wouldn’t in a thousand years have imagined this material in the hands of black women”, she says.

Bongela and her team wanted to portray apartheid as it existed in the minds and lives of ordinary people. They made a commitment to themselves: they did not want to use their editorial power to cause more harm with this medium. This was a “very, very difficult task” says Milisuthando, as it was a complex emotional challenge to be faced with footage of those who systematically planned the oppression of most South Africans.

Engaging with this type of material meant being triggered, all the time.

Like when she came across previously unseen colour footage of Hendrik Verwoerd with his family, speaking calmly, wearing informal clothes, in a garden, kissing his loved ones. At the time, Milisuthando asked herself: “Who was this man?”. She doubted if it should be included in the film, but she was interested in “turning the gaze to the white people who had these ideas”, so she did.

An important aspect of her approach to filmmaking is that she “refused to participate” in the exhibition of black trauma. This refusal is evident throughout the film. For instance, the documentary shows a British journalist asking black parents at the entrance of Parktown Boys in the early 1990s about their feelings about being amongst the first black parents to send their kid to a Model C school. The journalist then approaches their child, who looks excited: “do you think you will get along with the rest?”, he asks, looking for the child’s anxious tears. But the kid does not cry, he does not give what this journalist wants. Milisuthando leaves us with that provocation.

In a different shot, at St Matthews school, also in the early 1990s, we see kids being interviewed by two journalists about the political context of the time. When Bongela remembers these interviews she comments: “the children get asked certain questions and they are laughing, but the second they get asked about Mandela something in their eyes changes. There is a word in Xhosa, iintloni, that stands for a way of being in the world, where existence is seen through a lens of respect, which sometimes can be seen as shyness. We wanted to capture that thing about black childhood”.

In the fourth part of the film, Milisuthando examines her relationship with whiteness through her  friendships with two white women: Marion Isaacs, the film’s producer and Bettina Malcomess, an artist and academic. For this part, Milisuthando decided to create a “visual silence” so the scenes would function as a “confessional” and viewers could also introspect “their own thoughts around intimacy and race” without projecting too much on Marion or Bettina. She chose to remove the image and show a black screen because she knows her generation is “tired of seeing white people crying and inadequately speaking about race”, so naturally “defences would go up”. 

Through these conversations, Milisuthando realised “how she still carries certain philosophies of apartheid in her mind” and “how fear of white people still lives in her, something we don’t talk about, even if we have extremely good reasons to be afraid”. But overall, “it was never about antagonising them, as they were courageous enough to lean into shame, in complete vulnerability, lean into their insecurity and imperfection at engaging their own racialisation, which white people never do”, reflects Milisuthando.

Ten years ago, Milisuthando published an article about the black woman who undressed gently in front of Mandela’s statue in Sandton shortly after his death. At the time, people filmed, laughed and didn’t understand. The video went viral on Twitter. Almost like an apparition, after standing by the statue for a while and getting chased away by a security guard, she dressed again and left. In her piece, Milisuthando wrote: “She could have gone to any of the many places that are named after Mandela but she chose this one, a physical embodiment of South Africa’s neo-liberal agenda (…) her nudity wakes us up, either in protest or solidarity to the fact that everything is not okay”. 

This image is returned to us years later as one of the opening scenes of the documentary. While Milisuthando tries to understand aspects of her own history, she digs into certain images and conversations; some are tender, others are tense, awkward even. Through her subjectivity, the documentary poses the hypothesis that achieving intimacy with each other can prove to be a powerful way of healing.

A still from Milisuthando

There have been different responses to this approach to race relations, in particular with regards to the productiveness of thinking them through intimacy. Some people empathise profoundly, others criticise it because of how fraught the ‘sentimentalist’ angle might be in addressing structural injustices in South Africa. The latter point is certainly valid when discussing the relevance of interracial personal relationships in the ongoing struggle for economic freedom and equality in the country. However, this critique is not necessarily applicable to Bongela’s film, in which one of the chosen angles is the permeation of the apartheid logic into domestic spaces across races.

With the hope of exposing the persistent legacy of apartheid in people’s minds in South Africa at large, but especially in private spheres, Milisuthando insists in showing the contradictions and shortcomings of ‘good intentions’. The director highlights tones, phrases, gestures and situations that reveal both subtle and overt racism in quotidian life— in cases of people who do not know each other and, especially, in people who are close to one another. For this, the conversations with her white friends prove to be an effective narrative device.

In his most recent lecture at Harvard, Viet Thanh Nguyen points out Asian Americans tend to be more unified in contexts of exclusion. He argues different immigrant communities have sought to become Americans through three mechanisms: self-defence, inclusion and solidarity. Nguyen proposes the figure of ‘the Oriental’ may be used to think of an extensive camaraderie between peoples who have been / are ‘othered’, replacing the more common ‘limited solidarity’ within communities that share ancestry or religion. In order for this to take place, he says there is a need of a symbolic death of Asian Americans so that what he calls an ‘expansive solidarity’ can be embraced, one that reaches beyond the specific context of the US. He argues this through the work of Edward Said, Mahmoud Dush, Nadine Gordimer, Jeffery Paul Chan, Amos Oz and others.

In his Instagram, Ngyen wrote: “We need an expansive solidarity, in this case one that sees how the Oriental that binds Asian Americans together is also the Oriental that connects us to Palestinians and anyone who has occupied the position of the monstrous Other, including Jews”. For him, real kinship can be “dangerous to dominant society”, and it is because of what it can disrupt that there is an urgency to adopt it.

The point made by Nguyen brings me back to Milisuthando and a question pertaining solidarity:

30 years after 1994, can white South Africans truly understand and support the struggle of Black South Africans?

In many ways, this film, as that naked woman by the Mandela statue, has the capacity of making viewers feel uncomfortable because of its refusal to accept the state of things. It is precisely in the context of everything not being okay, that the documentary asks something from us: that we (Black and white audiences) see ourselves. And it works in so far it leaves many thinking about what does it take to undo the legacy of fascism and achieve an expansive solidarity, in South Africa and elsewhere.

All stills courtesy of Milisuthando Bongela. Black and white portrait of Milisuthando Bongela © Hankyeol Lee.

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WAMUWI MBAO
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