Milisuthando: a personal interrogation into the lingering horrors of South African apartheid

Milisuthando opens with the sight of a naked woman standing before a giant statue of Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg in 2014 – she is credited as ‘Mystery Braveheart’. At the time, Milisuthando Bongela, the writer-director who gives her own name to the film, wrote an article for the website Africa Is a Country, ‘The Naked Woman on Mandela Square’, speculating on why the woman had chosen this statue, outside Sandton City, Africa’s largest shopping mall – a “physical embodiment of South Africa’s neo-liberal agenda”. For Bongela, the place exemplified the way Mandela had been “commoditised by the power that oppressed him”. The event ignited questions in the filmmaker’s mind, leading her to wonder about her family’s past, and how apartheid affects them still.

In this documentary, a mixture of intimate home video and historical archive, Bongela looks at her family’s attachment to a country that’s long gone, even though its formation was in service of white supremacy: she was raised in the Transkei, an ethnostate reserved for Xhosa people, recognised only by the South African government. Further archive footage from the UN General Assembly in New York, 1976, shows arguments which correctly identifies it as a ploy to keep a reserve of cheap labour, to drive the country’s Bantu population out of sight under the false pretence of “self-determination”. “The racism is in the detail,” as one interviewee notes. The presentation of the Transkei was dressed up in -insidiously positive language, supported by the politician Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima, who would become ruler of a single-party state, and who believed that the liberation movement led by the African National Congress was a dead end. That propagandistic take convinced a lot of people, Bongela’s grandmother included.

Bongela wonders out loud about the existential questions that motivated her to make this anthropological documentary-meets-autobiography. How does she reckon with a childhood where she didn’t understand the horrible things happening around her, and with the fact that it didn’t actually feel too bad to her? And how has apartheid continued? It feels ever-present on an intangible, microscopic level, and the film attempts to capture this feeling of the past and present colliding through a rather dizzying mix of poetry (spoken and visual), archive and interview. The archive presentation is a little more engaging than some of the diaristic moments; some of Bongela’s more verbose descriptions of her feelings are more opaque than images edited together and presented without comment.

Every element of the film is geared towards exploring the ways apartheid continues through social conditioning. Bongela’s white friends fret about power dynamics, how their own families benefited from segregation. Bongela also notes the struggles of reintegration – interviewees remember the abuse they encountered when they finally attended schools that had been reserved for white children. Footage of children at a Soweto primary school in the 1990s shows heartbreakingly even the youngest children being raised with an understanding that they are hated arbitrarily.

Bongela explains that thinking about her childhood is a tightrope. She remembers that her family was happy. Were they happy because of segregation? The short answer is no, it was despite it. But some members of her family clearly feel differently – one scene shows her grandmother frustrated that her grandson has fallen in love with a Vietnamese woman, reflecting a hopelessness about the possibility of coexistence and a fear of the death of Xhosa language and culture. She even laments Mandela’s role in encouraging “race mixing”.

That uncomfortable personal dimension makes this film feel like a fresh discussion of apartheid, even as it hits familiar points about how the system’s sinister mechanics were enabled, the relief of its dismantlement, the pains of reintegration. The questions that open the film don’t get concrete answers – it ends with the funeral of Bongela’s grandmother, through whom much of this perspective is explored, so maybe they never will. Despite its sprawl and the frustrations of its narration, Milisuthando’s search for these answers is a compellingly uncomfortable, emotionally fraught confrontation with apartheid’s intangible spectre.

► Milisuthando arrives in UK cinemas 18 October. See Tape Collective for details.