This documentary artfully explores familial love, race and belonging through the complex framework of South African history.
Milisuthando Bongela’s sprawling, self-titled documentary is divided into five distinct parts, each with a unique sense of direction. Formally, the film as a whole circumvents the need for a structure to contain its constituent parts. Poetry, archive material, collective memory, spirituality, personal histories and memoir are combined to make up a striking cine-essay foregrounded by Bongela’s lived experience as a black South African woman, and a desire to interrogate the dialectic tension between “nation” and “self”.
“The street I grew up in had no name, and is in a country that no longer exists”, Bongela explains in her poetic narration, switching between English and Xhosa. Her background as a writer truly shines, lending a lyrical tone to the film’s exploration of vulnerability and radical honesty. She was born in 1985 in the Transkei, a Bantustan established in 1976 by the South African apartheid regime as the first nominally independent “black homeland” for the Xhosa people. The state would remain internationally unrecognised and diplomatically isolated for its 18-year existence as a colonial testing ground for the illusion that racial segregation was the right path to equality.
For a young Bongela, growing up surrounded only by a black community in a place devoid of “whites only” benches and dogs that were trained only to bark at black people, that illusion felt real and would only rear its ugly head upon the dissolution of borders and her family’s relocation to the mixed city of East London. From that point on, Bongela must reckon with the apartheid regime in its direct aftermath, coming with the realisation that her generation’s lived experience throughout the existence of Transkei was at the core of the regime’s “sordid experiment”, with communities being forced to build a livelihood inside its bowels.
Combining a treasure trove of archive footage, home movies and personal photographs to tell the history of the Transkei, Milisuthando is also a clear love letter to the filmmaker’s own family. We hear from her grandmother as she reflects on lingering wounds, speaks effusively about the Transkei, and even blames Nelson Mandela for its dissolution. There’s a lot here about the ramifications of living outside the structural violence of apartheid, the complicated nature of a misplaced nostalgia, and the impossibility to reach towards a collective black history and memory that hasn’t been defined in relation to whiteness. Bongela really leans into these complexities with great nuance.
The film’s fourth chapter is made up almost entirely of a voiceover accompanied by a blank screen, where a heated exchange about white privilege between Bongela and her close white friend, Marion Isaacs, who is the film’s producer, takes place. It’s a bold choice that doesn’t entirely pay off, stunting the momentum built over the film’s first half. So much of the film is grounded by such a strong subjective position, and shifting the focus in this way to point towards the reverberations of white violence feels abrupt. Still, it does work in exemplifying the political undercurrents of relational power dynamics, and stressing that the personal is always political.
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Published 17 Oct 2024
Invites us to be immersed into a past, present and future South Africa.
The film’s second half shifts focus to white guilt, which doesn’t entirely work.
Such a strong cumulative impact – Bongela has poured her soul into this project.
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