Writer and filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela was born in the Transkei, a country that no longer exists and which was widely regarded as a sham state used to justify the institutionalized racism of apartheid South Africa. And when the new Nonracial South Africa was formally inaugurated on the 27th of April 1994, the Transkei  simply disappeared.

Milisuthando’s self-titled film Milisuthando explores this absurdist reality and uses it as a launching point for a powerful meditation on country, race, whiteness, propaganda, and many other things. This conversation with Milisuthando about the stories we tell and the stories we are told expanded my understanding of the world and myself. I hope it does the same for you.

‍

‍PM: Hello. Thank you so much for talking to me.

MB: You’re very welcome. Hi, Peter.

PM: Hello. I’m so glad to have you in this conversation, because I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a very long time about your film.

MB: Yes, about two years now or something.

PM: So, it’s very easy for us to start talking about the film, but we need to bear in mind that people who haven’t seen the film and hopefully, you know, will get a chance to watch it in the future. So we just need to provide a little bit of background about your film. It’s called Milisuthando. Can you tell us in a nutshell? I mean, it’s a very difficult thing to nutshell - we can’t not talk about apartheid and we need to explain what the Transkei is. So there’s a lot there. So, you grew up in The Transkei, a country that no longer exists. So what was The Transguide in the context of apartheid?

So, I grew up in a small town called Butterworth or Gcuwa in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa. But when I was born there in 1985, it used to be called the Republic of Transkei, this area that I was born in. And when we were at school, filling out forms there, they’d always ask nationality and we’d always write ’Transkeian’.

So I grew up in a world where this national identity and a lot of national pride and pride in isiXhosa - isiXhosa history, culture, language. A lot of television was in Xhosa. So the news, cartoons sometimes, TV shows that were dubbed – like from the US or other countries – they were always dubbed in this language. And as a result of that, I didn’t really know that I was black or I didn’t know that I was living in apartheid or even what apartheid was, because it was a very small country about the size of Switzerland – it had 3 million inhabitants.

And there was a lot of, you know, state propaganda, which didn’t appear as propaganda – propaganda doesn’t usually appear as propaganda – it just reaffirms what you already think and feel, and you kind of don’t know where your own memory or thoughts start. So I grew up in this country, and our leader was Matanzima. And my parents had pretty nice jobs. My dad was working for the Department of Education in Transguide as a school inspector. He was a musician. He was an author. My mother was a teacher. And everybody on my street was like black and middle class, and everybody had a car and took briefcases to work. And they looked nice. And we had parties, and our concerns were very much about our lives.

And the extended families and grandparents, aunts, uncles were always around in the ways in which we lived. And even in the architecture of the homes – it was never just like a nuclear family. So everything I knew was very informed by this culture. And in 1990, I was five years old, and I remember one day – it was a Sunday – and I was taking a nap.

And I remember being woken up from the nap by all this noise around. And my mom woke us up and we all went to the streets, and there were thousands of people in the streets. And it looked very scary because I’d never seen that many people. I was like five years old and I was on my mother’s back, holding onto her back. And everybody was shouting and screaming and happy. But I couldn’t understand it – I was just frightened. 

And we went back home after a while, back inside. And the grown ups didn’t behave like normal Sunday rituals – we didn’t have family prayers. There was champagne and they were drinking and everyone was kind of happy. And we were allowed to stay up later than usual.

And I realized much later that that was the day that Nelson Mandela came out of jail. And that is when my first consciousness of “something is not quite right, I don’t know, the full picture”. I had a sense of, “wait, there’s something else going on somewhere else”. And later we moved. Like a year or two later, we moved to a little town called East London, which was in South Africa, which is not far – it was only 100km away – but it was always a very different world; we always had to go through a border to get there.

And that is where I saw people who looked different, who spoke a different language, and their houses and the streets were always clean and big. And it’s where my parents’ demeanor would always, like, shrink, and they would suddenly speak English. Whenever they spoke English, they would be different. Whereas when we were home in the Transkei, they were very different.

And that is kind of, yeah, the place that I grew up in. And I only became conscious of the Transkei in 2013, when Nelson Mandela died, when I was 29. I was like “Wait a minute. This was another country actually, within South Africa. What happened to it? Why don’t we?...”

I grew up in a completely different system, but I thought that I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and very much identified with the black experience – because I grew up watching a lot of TV in the 90s, learning ’Simunye, We Are one’ and ’South Africa, We Love You’, and all those songs that informed that Rainbow Nation period and Mandela’s presidency. And we all kind of got sucked into that, and I truly believed that I came from Soweto and that I grew up in a township, and that I had been oppressed in the same way that other black people had been oppressed. 

And I never really questioned that until I was older. And it’s only when I started making this film that I really began to ask questions – “Wait a minute!”

Because at Mandela’s funeral in 2013 – I remember going with my friends outside of his house when we had the vigils every night. And we went, and people were singing a struggle song that I’d sung many times before, a kind of anti-apartheid anthem, a very popular one in South Africa called ’My mother was a kitchen girl’.

My mother was a kitchen girl. 

My father was a garden boy. 

That’s why I’m a communist. 

I’m a communist. 

And I remember singing that song. But for the first time I said, “Wait a minute. I now feel like I’m lying”, because my mother wasn’t a kitchen girl in the domestic worker sense. And my father wasn’t a garden boy, which is what gardeners used to be called in South Africa – black gardeners. And it started with me, the images of like, my dad in a briefcase having a typewriter, and my mom, you know, wearing high heels every day to work. This contradicted what the majority of black people’s story is in South Africa. That’s when I said, “Wait, I grew up in this other place!” And so what I came to discover, through a lot of research and interviewing my family members and trying to understand politically what the Transkei was, which was actually a guinea-pig state invented by the apartheid regime to fulfill this idea of racial separation. 

It was the first place that they built as a test case for this idea of full racial segregation, and apartheid was this notion where every race must be separate. Every culture, every ethnic group, has to have their own land, their own space where they have their own rulers, their own borders, their own system, their own language, and they run their own affairs.

But of course, white South Africa is South Africa. But where the Zulu belong is Zululand. Where the Xhosa belongs is Transkei and Ciskei, and where the Vendas belong is Venda, etc. And they saw the idea that all of us wanted to have our own land, and we always wanted our own nation. 

And it did work for about 18 years, when the homelands – they were called Bantustans, these fake countries that were not recognized by anyone in the world. The Transkei wasn’t initially politically recognized, except by South Africa and Israel. Those were the only two countries that recognized it, that came to the inauguration of the presidents and the leaders, and that funded it. The United Nations would not recognize it. No other African country recognized it. Black South Africans certainly thought it was a sham state.

And it was just a sham. But living inside of it, we didn’t have access to the news coming from the rest of the country. And as a child, this sham produced this complexity of “I’m living inside the imagination of the racist, white South African regime and their plan. But I am benefiting from not having everyday white supremacy rule my life. I’m benefiting from speaking my language at school and my language being recognized, and my culture, and not seeing black people in a state of subjugation by other races every day”. 

Of course there were white people in the Transkei. A lot of them left, but there were some who remained. And my sister reminded me that we lived next door to a white family in the Transkei. And I was like, “what are you talking about?” – I had no idea. But in my mind, they didn’t register as white because they didn’t dominate anybody, and they spoke isiXhosa. So in my child’s mind, they weren’t white in the sense that I came to understand what whiteness was later. And so the Transkei is the first example of what the dream and the wish and the desire of apartheid is, which is this racial segregation system, where it seems as if everyone’s just equal. But the truth is that, obviously, white South Africans, who were the minority group, and Afrikaners, who were even more of a minority within white South Africa – this was their dream. Apartheid was their vision, their desire to force the notion that they belong in Africa, to create an origin myth, to force indigeneity, like they are indigenous, even though it’s a contradiction, because, in many ways, they didn’t want anything to do with Africa. 

They wanted nothing.They wouldn’t want the language. They didn’t want to ever admit that within their own blood is the blood of Koisans and the blood of Zulus and the blood of Xhosas. And they call themselves Europeans, even though they had…

PM: But they wanted the land!

MB: They wanted the land! That was the most important thing – is that apartheid for me, my definition of it, is the creation of a white homeland at the bottom of Africa to convince white people that they belong there, that their ancestors belong there, that they are from there, and that they are African. But of course, “let’s take the best piece of land for ourselves, and let’s relegate the worst parts of the country with no minerals, nothing, the most barren land, the most useless land, to the black people and convince them that it’s their homeland.

But actually the real Bantustan was South Africa, because that was then the one that was meant to be for the white people. And this was their vision. And I think it’s important to return to definitions, because my definition – as a Transkeian of apartheid – is different from a white South African in the 70s, right, a typical white South African. Because today they say apartheid was bad. Now they say, “Oh no, I want nothing to do with it. I never supported it”. But back then they were fully in support of it. It felt like a safe system. It gave safety, security, power, order, a sense of place and belonging. And it really fulfilled this dream of home, which is…a lot of Europeans who leave Europe and go certain other places are forever battling with this foundational question of homelessness, of forcing this idea of “where can we belong, what can be ours?”.

And you find that when they leave Europe to go settle in South America, North America, Australia, parts of Africa and Asia, it’s never a sense of settling that is about making sure that all living conditions are equal and fine for everybody. It’s always you’re settling onto someone, meaning I’m dominating you. I’m violating you. I’ve had to rape to have to to be part of this land.

And so all the European countries that participated in this, in order to become these settler colony states and to house these descendants of theirs who were in other countries had to do something to settle on top of other people. And apartheid is just the third third iteration of it. First, it was colonisation by the British and the Dutch, then it was a slavery. First, it was slavery, actually, slavery for 180 years by the Dutch. Then it was British colonization for 200 years. And immediately following that 200 years, apartheid for 48 years. And so, South Africa is a confluence and mixed masala of these histories. And apartheid is just the last iteration of something that was finessed, something that started in the 1600s, that was then finessed right up until the 1980s, 1990s.

And we are products of that, although from different generations. And I guess the film and my desire to really explore this history came from the question, “Who am I, actually?”. I thought I was a black South African, but it got complicated by this discovery late in life that “Wait – the Transkei almost participated and embraced apartheid”, as a notion of “leave us alone as Xhosa, people leave us alone. Let us live here without being bothered by anybody”. And I’ve I’ve been I’ve benefited from that kind of that, like peace, I guess, and like a lack of direct racial violation that somebody in any other township in South Africa, every single township in South Africa, every black person – and by black I mean anybody who is colored Indian, etc – experienced under apartheid..

PM: Yeah yeah, yeah. I mean, I am so struck by the fact that people are really good at just living in the status quo, you know, living in their reality and being oblivious to everything. But the thing about supporting apartheid – until I went to university, I came across one white person who dissented. A history teacher when I was in standard eight (15 years old).

Nobody else. Everybody else –. And I want to say nice people, you know, good people – came up with very interesting rationalisations for how things were. And I don’t want to start quoting any of them because it will make both of our skins crawl, I’m sure. But it is just amazing. So if you lived in a little liberal enclave, maybe you lived in a different reality. But for me, it wasn’t nearly everyone who supported apartheid. It was everyone.

MB: Exactly. But these days, if you look, you won’t find evidence of that because everybody is like, “No, no, no, no, I didn’t support it”. We always sound crazy as black people because it’s almost like we’re talking to ghosts, right? Because nobody ever wants to admit, “Yes, I was racist. I grew up racially conditioned to believe I’m superior to everybody who was not white.

Yes, I believed in these things and I enjoyed it. And it’s part of my foundation. And that doesn’t mean I’m evil. It means I was a subject of a system. And I also participated in fortifying that system with my actions and with my lack of dissent”. Or you’ll find that people always want to wrap themselves around the activists who paid with their lives, who paid with their freedom, who paid the price, who were white, right? Those few who joined the anti-apartheid movement and fought against apartheid. But the majority, as you say, accepted it. 

And the thing is, what I’m looking at in this film and always in my writing, and in my work, is that it’s not just white South Africans who participated in and accepted apartheid.

PM: Yeah, it’s a difficult thing.

MB: Abdullah Ibrahim said in an interview once in a film, you know, “They created this thing and then they expected us to implement it”. And that’s the thing - we did implement it! The state created it –it was their vision, but it relied on the people’s implementation in order for it to work. And so it does mean something. And I was asking myself, what does it mean that for 48 years, black people in the majority did accept our inferiority and we did accept that, you know, we must be the ones that live in the shanty towns and the rural areas and the, you know, places that are not really meant for for human beings to thrive, and to accept that the white people do live in the nice houses and that this is their land, and we mustn’t go into the white people’s houses and we mustn’t go into their shops. Of course, there were those who fought against it, and they were silenced for many, many years. But the majority of people, you know, the domestic worker who works and raises white children for 40 years – her entire career – and the gardener who works there, and all of this interaction. What is it that they had to do to us to make us accept that we are pariahs on our own land, that we cannot speak our own language, that our culture and our religion must be something that we throw away and demonize, and we embrace something that belongs to somebody who you know does not like you.

PM: Yeah.

MB: And so what did they have to do to make everybody implement the system that oppressed all of us?

PM: So I think that “all of us” is key. And let’s dive into that a little bit, you know, a little bit more. But I think that we radically underestimate the power of propaganda and structure in terms of defining our reality. To the extent that my mother doesn’t know that she grew up in a propaganda police state. She doesn’t know. And even now I tell her that and she’s kind of like “But didn’t feel it that way. I didn’t notice that”. And that’s kind of the point, you know. You don’t notice it. The point of propaganda is you don’t notice it. It’s propaganda.

MB:  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think a guiding question for me and my team, when we were beginning to make this film in around 2015/16, was “something was done to all of us”.

PM: Yeah.

MB: What was done to all of us to make us all believe? And it was different things that had to be done. But I think, you know, when we look at history, the lowest hanging fruit is always to blame each other, to blame someone. It was white people who committed apartheid. Regarding patriarchy, it’s the men who are in control, who dominate women, etc. And as you so rightly say, we underestimate the power of the force of propaganda, which is always this invisible thing.

‍

PM: I’ve got this little propaganda machine, right here? (Peter pulls out his phone)

MB: Right. Yeah. Every day you put that into your pocket. Credo Mutwa called it a little tokoloshe.

PM: Yeah, yeah.

MB: He predicted many years ago, way before cell phones. He said in the future everybody will have a little tokoloshe that they walk around with and which lives in their pockets. I tokoloshe is an entity that takes your energy, that steals your power, that steals your agency as a human being. 

PM: Yeah. 

MB:And so propaganda – when it revealed itself, when we found all of these archives that belonged to the apartheid regime, which are in the film, they literally belong to the Ministry of Propaganda.

And the way we found them was also so…we were not really supposed to find them. It  was not really kosher the way we found them, but we found them and we were like, “Oh my God, we have to use these”. Because now this is the singing canary, right? This is the Pandora’s box opening itself to say, this is what we did to convince the different races of their position.

And that was accompanied by textbooks, by music, and all kinds of, like, structures of the society to uphold and to support this notion of separate development, as they liked to call it, which is why we had the cartoons in isiXhosa – which I’m like, “Oh, this is great! We have our TV shows in Xhosa”. 

So it feels good if you’re a benefactor of it. But we never look beyond as kids, to go, “Wait, this is coming from Pretoria”. Actually, this is not, you know, black power and black consciousness. It’s all part of the regime. Yeah, yeah.

PM: So you show in the film how the apartheid government literally went around kind of developing mythologies to imbue the Transkei with this kind of false history and false culture that overlaps real cultures. And you show this quite distinctly in the film. And then, of course, that was also the case with South Africa itself. And the Afrikaner Nationalist Party also had to…because Afrikaans is not a white language, It’s not a European language – it’s  an African slave language essentially – maybe I’m being overly simplistic there, but it is not a white language. So they had to invent it, they had to invent mythologies and dress styles and anthems. And, you know, I think that all countries do this. In our case, both of those countries, South Africa and the Transkei, are so young. And neither of those countries exists in the way that they were born. You know, I don’t think that 1948 South Africa still exists, I don’t know… 

MB: No…

PM: I mean, it’s got a long tail, but yeah. So countries have to be made. And, you know, even if you look at America where, as far as I know, you are now located, that constitution that they hold to be so sacred is also one of those documents. Yes. “Who are they going to be? What kind of people are we going to be? What anthems are we going to sing? What are we going to wear? 

MB: Yeah. And Israel, to many extents, is one of the latest countries to also…for it now…it’s coming undone. But at the same time, we’re seeing really what it’s made up of, and it’s a copy-paste of a lot of these types of invented states.

PM: Totally, and the other side of the Israel thing is that I often try  – and I’m not being sympathetic – but I’m just trying to explain what it’s like. People need to bear in mind what it’s like to live embedded inside the Israeli state.

MB: Yes, yes. 

PM: And if any human being is embedded in a propaganda police state, they tend to acquiesce.

MB: Exactly. And a lot of the times, you encounter it from a young age, and it braids itself into your memory, into your identity. And it’s very difficult to refuse what it’s giving you, because what good propaganda does is that it takes everything you value, and it perverts it ever so slightly that it’s almost like you don’t throw it away – you’re more concerned with all the ways that you can identify with it. And it takes your fears and it makes you feel like they’ve been represented, and there’s an order around them. They’ve been constructed in such a way that “I don’t have to fear because there’s something else taking care”. And so that’s what happens when good propaganda is in use and you really merge your identity, you believe in the state, you believe in the mythology. You know, the idea of Jan van Riebeeck, even: the image of him, he was printed on the money in South Africa and the origin story written into the songs, into the textbooks, into the identities of people. It’s very difficult to separate people from that and to have to inform them that this is a fake photograph – this man did not look like this. They had to invent this image. The volspiel thing, you know, people going every afternoon after school to participate in these national games, these cultural games. This is all copy pasted. They had to travel to Sweden, to Switzerland, to France, in the 1930s, when they picked up on these health-and-fitness regimes and classes that used to exist for young women and young men.

And so, it’s difficult to then let go of that, if that’s been your whole life. And it’s painful to let go and you don’t want to let go, because then you are left with no ground beneath you. Then you ask, “Actually, is my whole identity built on a lie?” And so, psychologically, it’s extremely difficult to ask people to disavow everything that they’ve known and loved and cared about. And until we understand that and we deal with human beings at that level – and even ourselves, we are not…I’m not beyond being indoctrinated. And this is the thing!

PM: Me too!

MB: We always think about it as if, you know, those people over there.

PM: Those people over there. Yeah!

MB: We’ve all imbibed some form of myth, and myth making is part of history telling and retelling. And so, the way we edited the film, the way we told the story, it’s not that I was sympathetic to white South Africans in apartheid – it’s just that I understood partly what they felt, because I also wondered “What I didn’t know about apartheid – does that make me a bad black person?” If I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t have memories of tear gas and memories of violence, there’s a chance that maybe another peer of mine living in Pretoria or living in Durban might not have known, even though it’s so obvious. There were so many obvious things.

PM: But it’s so obvious. The obviousness, in a way, is the point. It’s so obvious you can’t see it, you know. What you were just saying now, talking about how propaganda works and why it works, you were using a lot of words like “belief” and “image”. And it seems to me that it’s very linked to religion, and christianity and missionary programmes.

MB: Yeah. It’s the same. Yeah. They use the same symbols and the same rituals, to be quite frank. In holding and rearing a human life, you need rituals which are basically shared events in which a group of people witness the same thing. A group of people participate in the same thing, and a group of people forge belonging, you know, we’ve all come together to witness this thing and do this thing together. It means we are bonded. And bonding is really necessary to human relationship-forming. 

And you can have evil rituals, and you can also take rituals and turn them into things that are, that are good for people, that feel good, that lead to peace and harmony and balance in people’s lives. And so I feel like they’re partners: religion, the state, education systems, the media – under which propaganda falls under – and politics, these are all bosom buddies in  perversion.

PM: The fact that we vote for a single being!

MB: To lead us!

PM: Like God. It’s the same

MB: Exactly. 

PM: Yeah. So it’s time for new stories.

MB: Yes! And I think before we kind of…I think it’s always very interesting to return to those same stories, to really fish for the deeper meanings in them. And I think for me, I feel like in South Africa, we’re never going to move on from apartheid until we ask ourselves what was apartheid?

PM: Yeah, like, what was it really?

MB: Yes, because we all think we know what it is. And we don’t have the same definition of it, it’s not the same. And the thing is, South Africa was balkanised so successfully and there were so many South Africas within one land that is now South Africa. And so many different, complex, nuanced experiences that I think it’s very important to return to the scene of the crime historically. There’s an essay that JM Coetzee wrote in 1990 or 1991 called ’The Mind of Apartheid’, in which he says, “You know, before we bury the cadaver, before we bury the body of apartheid – as it was ending at that time – we do have to ask ourselves ’what are we burying?’”, so that we really understand this thing so that it can never come back to us. 

But I think we needed to get out and we stuck with the very simple definition. And now my generation, who were children back then when it ended, and who were essentially the benefactors of this new country, this  new culture, this new identity, we now are the grown-ups.

And I felt the need to go and return to the past to ask, wait, “What was this thing?” Because we’ve been bestowed the duty of making sure that it never happens again. How do we do that? You have to understand the thing that you are destroying before you destroy it.

PM: For me, what makes it hard to wrap our fingers, our minds, around this thing is the scale of it. It was all of our lives – it was the whole of reality, the whole economy, religion, everything that was published. It was reality.

MB: Yeah. 

PM: And you know, we moved so easily into the new South Africa. We had some teething difficulties. But I just think white people got the best deal, you know, especially the white upper middle class, with having to sacrifice – I was going to say very little – but nothing, nothing.

MB: Nothing.

PM: Yeah. I mean...

MB: Maybe standing in shared queues – I feel like they’ve just had to stand in shared queues now and maybe it takes a little longer to go to the post office and a little longer to go to the bank.