A film of reckoning

A tender yet piercing reflection, the documentary 'Milisuthando' explores memory, love and the psychic scars left by South Africa's unhealed past

- Palesa Segomotso Motsumi

To raise capital as a filmmaker in South Africa is tough. Even more so for black women in film.

What writer and cultural thinker Milisuthando Bongela has done in the past decade, navigating the film industry, is not only an anomaly but a rare occurrence.

It has been a sequence of deliberate actions, reaping fruit for generations to follow suit.

Milisuthando, her documentary film, is a nuanced offering, commenting on the colonial hangover, which Bongela describes as being “sausaged” into the construction of the so-called rainbow nation, which many black parents had to grapple with as they sent their kids to the formerly recognised “white schools” in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

“There is a step that was missed,” Bongela says, during our interview on Zoom, delving straight into how the film came about and what it sought to do — dissecting black people’s proximity to whiteness and the impact of it on our psyche.

The basic concept of the film is to interrogate the story of Mandela’s rainbow nation and begin an excursion down memory lane. This includes what was endured by pockets of society, who had no idea how to navigate it, considering the cultural indoctrination spewed by the oppressive, patriarchal, supremacist apartheid regime.

She sharpens the discussion by pointing to present-day South Africa, raising a thought-provoking question about the urgent need for leaders in the country to deal with — and heal from — the repercussions of apartheid and its effect on them, on a subconscious and spiritual level.

“Even our leaders — at which point did they have the opportunity to heal?” she asks.

In 1994, South Africa got its democracy, against the backdrop of a very violent system, stripping away so much of black people’s dignity, but beyond that, creating a rift between whole communities, cemented by the 1913 Land Act.