PAUL KHAHLISO

Introduction

In the complex tangle of past and present, one still contemplates notions of self that lie beyond internalised inferiority and racism, as well as the conditioning towards self-loathing experienced by many black people. These complex notions also raise questions about the political circumstances that move contemporary psychotherapists  and their approaches to various psychological trauma as experienced by communities within which they live and work.

With this experimental film, we trace the effects of land dispossession and political oppression on the minds of subjects and victims, an examination of the history of the various colonial epochs that directly affected black citizens of South Africa and attempt to rewrite African-Centred analysis of psycho-phenomenal experiences by various people of colour and how that became instrumentalised by the political authorities.

Through this video poem we will demonstrate how a fragmented person, destroyed and broken, can reshape an identity, even though colonial aftermaths always contribute broken identities as a norm?

Are reformations of new identities within the psychological detriment caused by the inferiority inflicted by colonialism, eventually prone to breeding  a new type of “identity craving” and crises that spawn divergent behaviours in certain communities?

In an essay titled The Interior Life Of Mtutu: Psychological Fact Or Fiction? Professor Kopano Ratele outlines that it is “…clear that the orders of inequality that black people were socialised into, and against, have infected their thoughts and bodies, restructured their inner worlds, and influenced their relations with one another.”

This video poem is a response and attempt to grapple with the ideas espoused above, a way of poetically representing the defiled interior of black folk in the face of social disinheritance.

The video poem investigates how the global north has developed methods of “othering”  through the academy and its faculties such as that of Psychological Studies, while asking how theories developed in “the global north” or western countries are being preached as universal truths to be used and misused on the “the minds of the global south” comprised of a vast majority of people of colour.

The video poem is a dream where the viewer meets a psychotherapist who explores a variety of topics that pertain to African experiences of how the west analysed and formed our variety of identity definitions.

Notes on the OUTLINE

The OUTLINE is mere draft of how the narrative will be crafted into a 10 minutes video poem, which will serve as both submission for herri, and as a possible teaser for a longer version. Currently, the video artist is crafting an opening sequence that is under a minute long, which uses archival material and the video artist’s own footage together with edited audio from Professor Kopano Ratele’s lectures found online.

The interview with Professor Ratele will be a conversation that will delve into a variety of aspects of African Psychology, and most of the content of the interviews will be archived for the longer documentary.

And below are proposed sequences to be filmed and edited to visually interpret much of the analytical conversation the Professor will have with the video artist.

Opening Sequences

Expositional wide shots of Stellenbosch from a nearby hill. These shots are followed by shots of various historical streets, churches, museums and other important buildings around the Stellenbosch University.

A variety of shots and sequences exposing the architecture of the university and exploring its pedestrian activities, students in various spaces and situations.

Sequences of immaculate corridors, and these are shot to create a maze that eventually leads to Professor Ratele’s location, a secluded office, with vast windows letting in the views of the university.

Inside the Critical Thinking Department Building or any location selected for the formal interview.

Montages

Time-lapse sequences of Professor seated among the pedestrian traffic of students at Stellenbosch University.

Walks through white architecture of various heritage sites in Stellenbosch to act as cutaways to be inserted into the interview.

Sequences of the professor during his walks and taking his amazing pictures to enhance the voyeuristic and analytic character of the protagonist of the video poem.

A walk through a  vacant (or occupied) library.

Reading sequences are essential and any exploration of archival or literary material will be filmed.

A walk through an archival facility, and sequences of the professor viewing archival footage related to the topic.

Various sequences of archival footage filmed for editing purposes.

A walk close to a body of water at dusk. And variety of sequences on the beaches of Cape Town.

Through a process of re-listening to architecture, the film will visit a number of important historical sites, to capture images and footage that will be use in montages that expose Cape Town’s disparate economic and glaring inequality. Using some archival images the experimental montages will be employed to trace the origins of these sites, also showing their dramatic transformations in the New Democratic dispensation celebrated by South Africans.

African Psychology’s Over-Arching Questions

The Thesis – Professor Kopano Ratele’s enquiry into The Pitfalls Of Western Psychology (Approaches to Analysing African Psychological Phenomena)

The origins of African Psychotherapy – Who were the notable scholars of the mind of African descent who are of importance to contemporary understanding of the African mind?

The Era of Eugenics In Western Psychology – The impact of racist scientific dogma in psychology as a study on people of colour.

Black Inferiority And Evolution – On the flaws of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in relation to psychological development of the species.

The origins of Psychological Studies as University faculty – Understanding “the mind/soul”  through the Western lens versus the ”native mind”.

John S. Mbiti’s Concepts of God in Africa.– Ecumenical perspectives and the anthropomorphic nature of African interactions with notions of the divine.

The Smithsonian Society and The Development of Racist Psychology – Interrogating whether intellectual capacity is influenced by the environmental origins of people.

The Shadow Club – The evolution of self-awareness in western children versus the development of self-awareness in African children. (The parable of seeing your shadow for the first time).

Franz Fanon And the Black Mind In A White World – Imperialism and the subjugation of African people. The scourge of a dual identity and neurological impacts of multiple personae expressed by people of colour. Towards treating the psychological agony of colonial rule.

Land Dispossession And The Psychology Of The Dispossessed – Analysing the impact and experiences of cycles of displacement and return of dispossessed peoples—and how their sites of rebuilding and land-based rehabilitation serve as markers for navigating psycho-social  repair through the land, for contemporary South Africa.

New Wave Religions – The psychological origins and the impact of the exploitation of ‘The Worship Instinct” in African societies.

Paul Brunton’s The Mind Of The Overself – An analysis of African cosmological perspectives in relation to concepts of the personal mind, the collective mind and the galactic mind.

Ben Okri’s The Famished Road – Witchcraft, divination and visions of the unknown and invisible realities and their psychological origins and manifestations.

Freudian Psychoanalysis and the African Folktale – An approach to studies by Prof. Njogu Waita and the analysis of African tales through western perspectives.

Lewis Nkosi’s The Black Psychiatrist – The psychological impact of psycho-social inter-personal boundaries

Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s Call Me Not A Man – An Analysis of black masculinity in contemporary society

Storytelling As Psychotherapy – Literature and the exposition of the collective mind

What is the future of psychotherapy in a flawed digital age of biased algorithms?

Conclusion

These questions are but rudimentary thoughts that are preambles to more questions that will be sparked by responses and the process of producing the video poem will engage with the artistic traditions of documentary cinema.

Each conversation and response will undeniably trigger other questions, and these will be seamlessly woven into a coherent yet poetically unique narrative that speaks to how “the African Mind” is being modelled as an anomaly throughout history.

The video poem will question mistruths about the African or “global south mind” being perpetuated into the future by various technological developments that tap the brain and a physiological organ and entry point into what is called “the mind”.

The video poem will also infuse musical compositions where the creators viewed Music as spirituality, as it is an art-form through which many African musicians expressed their longing for belonging. Through looking back to their lost “motherland” and attempting to find a psychic connection to their ancestors; the conversation will ask how has this expressive art reformed a new psychology in many artists who found liberation through music and other art practices?

Selected Poems

Bad Man
by Langston Hughes

I'm a bad, bad man
Cause everybody tells me so.
I'm a bad, bad man.
Everybody tells me so.
I takes ma meanness and ma licker
Everwhere I go.

I beats ma wife an'
I beats ma side gal too.
Beats ma wife an'
Beats ma side gal too.Don't
know why I do it but
It keeps me from feelin' blue.

I'm so bad I
Don't even want to be good.
So bad, bad, bad I
Don't even want to be good.
I'm goin' to de devil an'
I wouldn't go to heaven if I could.

We Wear the Mask
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we
pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth
with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise, In
counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them
only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but
oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long
the mile; But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence. Dunbar, We Wear the Mask from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, )

I Come From A Place
by Benjamin Zephaniah

I come from a musical place Where
they shoot me for my song And my
brother has been tortured By my
brother in my land.

I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.

I come from a beautiful place
Where girls cannot go to school
There you are told what to believe
And even young boys must grow beards.
I come from a great old forest
I think it is now a field
And the people I once knew
Are not there now.

We can all be refugees
Nobody is safe,
All it takes is a mad leader
Or no rain to bring forth food,
We can all be refugees
We can all be told to go,
We can be hated by someone
For being someone.

I come from a beautiful place Where
the valley floods each year And each
year the hurricane tells us That we
must keep moving on.

I come from an ancient place
All my family were born there
And I would like to go there
But I really want to live.

I come from a sunny, sandy place
Where tourists go to darken skin
And dealers like to sell guns there
I just can't tell you what's the price.

I am told I have no country now
I am told I am a lie
I am told that modern history books
May forget my name.

We can all be refugees Sometimes it
only takes a day, Sometimes it only
takes a handshake Or a paper that is
signed.
We all came from refugees Nobody
simply just appeared, Nobody's here
without a struggle, And why should
we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere

Procession 1 - Hanging Day
by Wole Soyinka

A hollow earth
Echoes footsteps of the grave procession.
Walls in sunspots
Lean to shadow of the shortening morn.

Behind an eyepatch lushly blue. The
wall of prayer has taken refuge In a
piece of blindness, closed.
Its grey recessive deeps.
Fretful limbs.

And glances that would sometimes
Conjure up a drawbridge
Raised but never lowered between
Their gathering and my sway.

Withdraw, as all the living world Belie
their absence in a feel of eyes Barred
and secret in the empty home.
Of shuttered windows, I know the heart.
Has journeyed far from present.
Tread. Drop. Dread Drop. Dead.
What may I tell you? What reveal?
I who before them peered unseen
Who stood one-legged on the untrodden
Verge - lest I should not return.

That I received them? That I wheeled above and flew beneath them. And
brought him on his way
And came to mine, even to the edge Of
the unspeakable encirclement? What
may I tell you of the five
Bell-ringers on the ropes to chimes.
Of silence?
What tell you of rigors of the law?
From watchtowers  on stunned walls.
Raised to stay a siege of darkness
What whisper to their football thunders.
Vanishing to shrouds of sunlight?
Let not man speak of justice, guilt
Far away, blood-stained  in their
Tens of thousands, hands that damned.
These wretches to the pit triumph
But here, alone the solitary deed.

Compiled By: Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe anirrationaldiary