“A lot of this footage had never been seen in South Africa”: Milisuthando Bongela on her documentary-memoir Milisuthando

Milisuthando Bongela was born and remembers a happy childhood in a Transkei, the first of white-run South Africa’s Black-assigned ‘homelands’ that was never recognised by most of the world. After apartheid and Transkei’s dissolution, she was one of the first Black children integrated into a mixed school in East London, South Africa, where she learned her inferiority in white eyes against the backdrop of Nelson Mandela’s grandfatherly coaxing of the would-be ‘rainbow nation’.  

There’s no straight way of describing the paradoxes and perversions bequeathed by South Africa’s history of race discrimination – though as Bongela relates in the interview below, she did try. With her self-titled documentary Milisuthando, she has found a poetic, experimental, expressive and inquisitive form that mixes Bongela’s evocative voiceover with personal and family footage, reanimated archive film, interviews with old classmates, self-reflexive encounters with white friends (and the film’s producer) and more. Like the impepho plant-burning rituals Bongela uses to cleanse the air and commune with her ancestors, the film diffuses her own experiences through the bigger South African story she tells.  

She spoke from New York, where she now works as an artist.  

How did you find the film’s shape, with all the different angles and elements and approaches you weave in? Was it always clear you needed multiple entry points to the subject, or did it come together iteratively?  

Iteratively, definitely. When I started out in 2014, it was supposed to be a video for my blog about Black identity and hair and Black women’s relationship to hair, and I had no idea how to make a film. I literally Googled ‘how to make a documentary’, and was trying to adhere to a traditional three-act structure, with a ‘voice of God’ narration. We tried all the approaches. But I was never happy.  

For two years it was about hair, and the next two years it was about the first generation of Black kids that integrated into white schools in South Africa after 300 years of not having kind of equal education; about who we were and what happened. We’ve never really recorded that experience at an intimate, psychological level: that close-range, ‘friendly’ racism, things as kids we didn’t know were racism.  

Then the film became more about the desire to get into the space of that tension that is still thick in the air in South Africa today – this quiet miasma between Black people and white people; the vestiges of apartheid, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, after the laws have changed. Somebody doesn’t even have to talk to you, but if they smile at you, you can just tell this thing exists.  

So we wanted to name it, and then to look at apartheid from inside of itself, rather than from inside of my own pain as a victim of it. What was apartheid; how was this thing conceived? What was the philosophy, and why did so many people buy into it for so long? So it then became about propaganda and all the modalities of the media, and also the homeland system; how people coalesced to create this reality.  

We were lucky in that we had time to explore. We would get grants and do more research and review more footage and more edits. The thing that made all the difference is that all of the bad ideas, we tried them, we did them. We knew we didn’t exactly know what we wanted, but that we would know it when we felt it, because it was a highly intuitive process. And through each of these iterations, we were never satisfied with subpar, didactic ways of saying: this was the history; this is what happened. 

The thing I set out to do was find myself in history as a Black person. How does history, through this medium of the camera, represent me? Is it a true representation of who I am as an African? We came to realise that it’s not. And if I can’t rely on history; if I want to use this archive I’m seeing, but it does not represent me fairly as a Black person or tell me who I am, we have to find a way to subvert it. And that led to a more associative editing style, almost telling new stories with the archive that we found.  

Now, after we’ve spent so much time making it, I want to call it a genre of Bantu cinema, which is fundamentally connected to African modalities of storytelling. It’s much more circular, concentric. The line between reality and fiction is thin. The occult, the esoteric is all mixed in. There’s myth-making, there’s storytelling, music, poetry, all of it lives in one, and to make cinema borrowing from the ways in which tales were told to us as children, and using those modalities as a way of legitimising the way I know things.  

You begin the film with a totemic scene of a mystery woman who stood naked in front of Nelson Mandela’s statue in Johannesburg in 2014 – and wonder why she casts such a spell on you. For me she represents the phantom nature of so much of the history you’re exploring: Black lives under apartheid; Black lives on film, especially Black women; homelands created then dissolved; national myths forged then forgotten, but still potent… 

For me, she embodies so much. I remember feeling so angry because everyone was admonishing her body, saying these horrible things and that she must be a mad woman, and I felt she looked like me.  

Also she represented this idea that now we’re the grown-ups. Mandela had died six months before and there was this sense that we had no elders: now we’ve inherited this place and have to invent South Africa because it’s still just an idea. We’ve got this constitution and storytelling, but we still have to make them real. We need to step out of the dream of having this amazing leader and being the world’s beloved African nation. That Mandela existed was fantastic, we enjoyed being all his grandchildren… but at the same time those first 10, 20 years after apartheid didn’t change the reality of the situation, the poverty and inequality. The racism found a way to mutate.  

So that woman was the first signal that everything is not okay. And traditionally speaking, in southern Africa, even west Africa, when a woman takes off her clothes and walks around the streets naked, that’s when you know there’s a crisis in the society that needs to be looked at. That’s the signal that everything’s gone bad.  

Even her nudity is the most vulnerable, but also the most courageous act. It’s like, well, there’s nothing I’ve got to hide.  

You made yourself a very permeable kind of subject – an emblem of the story, a node in history, a recipient of ancestral legacies. Was it a struggle to cast or fit yourself into the greater history? 

Yes and no. I struggled to find a voice, with the insecurity of someone who hadn’t made even a short film or been to film school: who am I to be so bold as to put myself in the film in this particular way? I struggled with wanting to be taken seriously and not go beyond what other really great filmmakers have done – to toe the line, like I’m new. But that would lead to dishonest writing, dishonest cuts. I could tell when something sounded hollow, when it was not true. 

The reason the film is called Milisuthando is not because I’m like: ‘Hey everybody, it’s about me.’ It’s because my name means ‘Be the love where there is none’. As a Bantu in South Africa, your name is your purpose. It follows you, it holds you in the world. So you don’t wake up when you’re 15 or 30 years old and go: who am I? What am I supposed to be? If your family said you shall go and be the love where there is none, what are you going to do?  

It’s not like I didn’t rage and we made angry or revengeful cuts, but we knew after making them, this is not what we want to do. So let’s track back and figure out what is the path towards love, and what is love when it comes to history and politics? That was the guiding principle to dealing with this history, these relationships, everything. 

The archive film you’ve found is fascinating, but how you’ve worked it so expressively and ambiguously makes it even richer, especially in the film’s second chapter, Bewitchment, which plays with the dream of apartheid as a supremacist idyll. How hard was it to spend so much time in that material?  

That was the most painful work, actually: the most challenging, the longest, and the most physically taxing on me and my editors – literally, from getting rashes and headaches to having to have a cleansing of the space.  

We started out with images of people we were interested in, historical figures, and looked at them as human beings – as elders, as ancestors, whether we like them or not. We worked with the principle of ubuntu [a quality of compassion and humanity], which says people may have a role, but they’re also human beings. What does it mean to put the Afrikaans leaders next to the Khoisan leaders, next to the Indian indentured labourers, the Xhosa people, the Zulu and all the various indigenous nations? Energetically, spiritually, what does it mean to put all of these figures in in one room?  

And literally, the plants died and there’d be flies all over the place. The energy would change. We start arguing with each other. That’s when I learned we’re not just dealing with figures in a textbook. These were people. 

A lot of this footage had never been seen in South Africa because it belonged to the apartheid-era Ministry of Information, and had been sitting in canisters for years until it was digitised. The people who handed it to us said: ‘This is a poison chalice. Be careful how you use it.’  

And when we started to use it, I discovered that it’s not going to be the Hendrik Verwoerd that I know, the monster who invented apartheid. Now there’s footage of him on a Sunday with his family, kissing his grandchildren, and I didn’t want to see it. But over time, I came to understand that there’s something else in the footage that wants to be discovered. So we opened up to that and said, let’s not try to be the judges of history. Even if we don’t like it, let’s try to understand it.  

it was very complex, extremely difficult, and I had to see healers when I was looking at that footage. The question was: how do I not pass on my bad reaction to the audience? How do I catch all of that stuff and process it so that the audience is not having the same experience I’m having? They’re still having a sharp experience of engaging with that stuff, but it’s not a destructive stab.  

There’s a line James Baldwin says in this one interview with Nikki Giovanni: if my book hurt you, it had to hurt me first. We had to be responsible so we’re not re-traumatising people, but creating conditions for them to understand this history. The rule in the edit suite was: we wanted to be able to tell people difficult things while they feel like they’re sitting in a warm bed. 

You’ve talked about finding your own voice and style. Were there any films or filmmakers who helped your journey? It seems like Agnès Varda’s playful spirit and use of her own person and encounters might have been an influence.  

In terms of filmmakers I drew from: definitely Agnès Varda. RaMell Ross [director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening, 2018]. Patricio Gúzman and his film Nostalgia for the Light [2010]. There were a few films we sat with. Honeyland (2019), made in Macedonia.  

We watched a lot of Tarkovsky films and studied The Mirror [1975] and Ivan’s Childhood [1962], and his book, Sculpting in Time; my editor, Hankyeol Lee, and I were always reading that together. Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye was another guiding text.  

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (1992) was a film we always returned to. He has such a spirit of ‘I’m just going to do whatever I like’. That gave us confidence: he’s done it, so we don’t have to be so scared about sticking to certain things. 

► Milisuthando is in UK cinemas now. See Tape Collective for details.