BARBARA ROUSSEAUX

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.