The Banality of Apartheid: A Conversation with Milisuthando Bongela

It was a dumb little thing—an argument I had with my friend because I wanted to relax my hair. Instagram was new, and I was feeling a lot of pressure about looking a particular way, because suddenly you have all these girlies showing up on the timeline looking so fly! I last straightened my hair in high school, and I stopped straightening it because my dermatologist was like, “You can’t put on the oils that maintain straight hair, it’s ruining your skin.” I kept my hair natural for ten years, and then one day, around 2015, I decided I wanted to relax it. My friend was like, “No! Why would you do that?” He started to mention apartheid and racism and colonialism and Winnie Mandela, and I was like, “What the fuck does any of this have to do with my hair? Please.” Then I went back home and Googled “Black hair, racism, identity,” and this entire world opened up to me.

I didn’t relax my hair, and I immediately bought a book called I Write What I Like, by Steve Biko. It’s a seminal text in South African Black intellectual thought, one of the first books you read by one of our greatest thinkers, who was killed in 1977 by the regime. I was very ashamed for not having realized my hair’s connection to this image that we’ve been given by white people, which is that we are not beautiful, we are not good enough, we are ugly. I interviewed eight of my friends for what was meant to be a five-minute video for my blog, but as I talked to them I thought, “Why is this not a bigger conversation amongst Black women?”

So then I did different interviews at salons with more people. The first couple years, the film was about hair, and I pitched it to Hot Docs at the Durban Film Festival. They said to me, “This is cool, but this has already been said about hair. How much deeper can you go?” I was very grateful for that feedback. Where did I first learn to hate my hair and disassociate from myself? It’s the Model C schools, the white schools that we went to immediately after apartheid. So much happened to us as children that we haven’t spoken about. It’s not microaggressions; it’s close-range racism that happened in spaces that were supposed to be safe—the schools, the classrooms, sleepovers, birthday parties. Every Black person I interviewed had some experience where they had this white friend that was really nice to them, but the closer they got, something would happen at the house of that white friend, because often times a white friend would say to us, “My mum says you can come to my house but I'm not allowed to come to yours.” These are things we didn’t tell the teachers about, we didn’t tell our parents about, we all just experienced in silence.

Now, thirty years later, we’re adults. How has that shaped the way we think about ourselves? That was the next phase: looking into the schools. But I only came to those schools when I was eight. Where was I before that? In the Transkei. The story of my family and other families in our neighborhood, you didn’t see it represented. I know the Transkei as home, but politically, what the hell was this place?

I started reading and interviewing family members and discovered this was a full-on apartheid guinea-pig project of the state getting together with Black leaders to create this inverted place where Black people had more rights than white people. This was a semblance of them giving us our own freedom, but really it was them taking the land more formally. They were creating these homelands for Black people, giving small pieces to us and taking the rest of the country for themselves to create a white homeland. When I recovered that knowledge for myself, I knew what the film would be.

People speak of the Transkei as home or a holiday destination or these rural villages, but politically, it hasn’t been integrated into South Africa’s post-apartheid narratives. And it’s not only the Transkei. There were three other huge homelands: there was Venda, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana. And there were many smaller ones where the regime had managed to really balkanize the land, slowly over time selling this idea of, “You can run your own affairs. You don’t have to be bothered by the bad white people. Here, you have your own parliament, your own passports, your own borders.” There’s this dichotomous experience: yes, I’m a Black victim of apartheid systems and racism in South Africa, but I’m also, to some degree, a benefactor of this other thing. I didn’t have whiteness as a reference point for the first seven years of my life. I didn’t even know white people existed. I was in this very beautiful world, and not everybody had that.

At seven we left the Transkei and that is when I encountered whiteness, so the film is me examining the things that happened to me to ask: do we really know what apartheid was? We have a very visceral understanding of it that is still materially evident in the country, but psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, I don’t think we’ve begun to touch it. If I were to get into the shoes of the people who created apartheid, how do I understand it from within its own mythmaking, within its own desires?

Understanding apartheid from within its own logic released me from a loop of confusion and frustration as a Black person, because we grew up as Black people wondering, “Why do they hate us so much?” What released me was to understand that there’s a perpetual anxiety within white society that these Afrikaners had because they needed to create a home at the bottom of Africa and force indigeneity. They have myths and legends and fairy tales and stories and all kinds of songs to legitimize the idea that this is their home. A land without a people, a people without a land. The same narratives in Australia and Israel exist here in South Africa. The whole Bantustan idea was more to serve their needs to create a home rather than Black people’s need to create a home. We never felt like it’s not our home. We never needed to prove it to anyone. Watching all of this archival footage is what revealed that to me.

If you YouTube search apartheid images, it’s all stuff that we’ve seen before. I wanted more. I wanted full color 16 mm, 35 mm, 9 mm footage of what happened, in its entirety, from as soon as films could be made in this country. How does cinema hold the desires of this regime, and how was the regime deployed through cinema? Afrikaners were making incredible propaganda films and showing them to different populations to legitimize and make real this idea of apartheid. They took the French New Wave, and they created an Afrikaans New Wave. They have Afrikaans westerns and Afrikaans Alpine films to create this idea of normalcy, history, and heritage from this patchworked identity. Then they did the same thing for Black people. You watch propaganda films about the Transkei and the Bophuthatswana, and they look so good. They are so well made. The entire imagery in the country was controlled by the state, so you don’t blame white people for believing in their own superiorities all the time, or Black people for internalizing inferiority complexes.

In the archive I was looking for a representation of me, and I wasn’t quite finding it. Whenever I found images of Black people, and Black women especially, we were always subordinate, which is how these white people saw us. There’s a huge gap between what these images are and who we are as people. I knew that within these gaps, we were going to have to invent. I was working at the time with a consulting editor named Arya Lalloo, and through a lot of trial and error we spoke about subverting the archive. Working with her and Hankyeol Lee, my editor, we arrived at the cinematic language that we were going to use to explore the subject through the archive, through these very quick cuts and a soundtrack that’s creating the atmosphere that we want, which is doubt. Doubt the validity of this image, because we doubt it, because it’s not true.

Making the film I realized that we cannot be having a conversation by ourselves, about ourselves. I needed to illustrate cinematically what I’m experiencing in these relationships. We’re friends, we talk about all kinds of things, but there’s this power dynamic and this invisible history that’s also here with us in very subtle ways. I can feel them restraining, not wanting to say the wrong thing, but there is something that they’re holding back behind those smiles. We also have it as Black people. We hold ourselves in a particular way and almost mollycoddle them. I know this tension exists all over the place, but when I started to look for it in films, this representation of interracial relationships and friendships especially, I found that it was either films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or films like Jungle Fever.

It’s nothing! There is a huge middle ground that’s missing where I don’t see any representations of the close-range racism that has been happening between Blacks and whites since we met. Before we worked on the film, [my producer Marion Isaacs and I] were friends, and we had always talked about these things in the abstract. As we started working and spending more time together, they started showing up more naturally, and she was the white person that was in front of me when I was remembering all the things that had been done by friends in primary school, in high school, in university, and throughout my life. She was there, and she triggered me, and suddenly I was like, “You people!” And she was like, “But wait!” I wanted to represent the complex response that our white peers have in these moments, where on one hand they are well-meaning, good-hearted people who want to do the right thing, but ultimately they have no precedence for how to handle this because in their culture they don’t talk about it. The hand-wringing, the anxieties in Marion’s voice—that’s real. It took a lot for her to come and tell her story because many people have that fear and they just pretend it’s not there. They all want to advertise how non-racist they are. They’re virtue signaling—the constant charity toward Black causes, dating Black people, adopting Black people—all these ways in which their goodness can be expressed without having to deal with the fact that racism is in them. They’re always wanting to help us as if racism is our problem.

The other section with Bettina represents a white person who is doing the work without me. She is asking, at a very deep level, questions about who she is in that country as a white person, and she’s grappling with that using indigenous African methods. She’s consulting with traditional healers to look into her ancestry so she can understand herself. “How do I engage the violence in me?” she keeps saying. The things she says in the film, I really needed to hear them, because what you find a lot is white denialism of apartheid. It’s almost as if the bullets fell from the sky, like they weren’t shot by people. A lot of our white friends want to act as if their parents were against apartheid, always pushing it away, whereas Bettina is saying things that Black South Africans have been yearning to hear from white people.