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Good black hair

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Milisuthando Bongela has used her film to heal herself. Picture: Supplied
Milisuthando Bongela has used her film to heal herself. Picture: Supplied

I find the stylish, bright-eyed and spicy-but-earnest Milisuthando Bongela at Tashas. Her hair is short and natural, her frock a loose, black Superella. We’ve met near her work at the Mail & Guardian, where she’s the arts editor, but we’re here to talk about her film The Good Black, which is about to go into production. For years the 32-year-old Bongela’s incisive, woke, humane and gorgeously written City Press columns were a highlight of my editing week. Knowing her curious mind and self-reflective spirit, I’m intrigued to know what her debut film is all about.

THE GOOD BLACK STARTED OFF AS A BLACK HAIR DOCUMENTARY?

Its first title was The Hair That Grew Up. Hair was my point of departure for unpacking my black identity in the post-apartheid condition ... to understand my body. Because this hair was a thing that I didn’t really like. I didn’t want to look at it. I didn’t want to touch it. It felt too hard and not right. I started out as a person in my life for the first eight years and then I learnt that I’m black, and for a long time I wanted to dissociate myself from that. And then, at some point in the last three years, I became Black, actively and proudly so, and now I’m trying to return to being a person. None of that would’ve happened without my sitting down, looking into a mirror, looking at my skin, and kind of really trying to understand the feelings of rejection that came. I couldn’t say I like myself without liking this hair. I started trying to understand the biology of it, like why does it grow the way it does. And I found out it’s not a mistake, it’s not a genetic error, it’s the way we were designed because of where we live, the climate, the conditions, and I thought that was amazing. It gave me a sense of peace.

BECAUSE YOU ALSO WORKED IN FASHION SO YOU MUST’VE HAD WHITEWASHED BEAUTY ON FLEEK.

Even just growing up, television, shampoo adverts, cartoons. I come from Transkei and my childhood stories didn’t have people in them, they had animals, spirits, monsters. In 1994, when we went into these new, formerly white schools, the reference point for a story was a person, usually a white girl with long hair. You wanted to have that hair. You’re watching TV, you’re seeing the magazine covers and you’re trying to aspire to it. So without that intervention of my looking at myself, I would probably still be aspiring to a look that could never be mine. And now I’m okay, I love the way I look. But I knew I wasn’t the only one who had these feelings and I knew a guy with a camera ...

YOU WERE ALSO ORGANISING THE FEMINIST STOKVEL AT THE TIME?

The film started first and then came the stokvel. It was a vehicle to explore these conversations more deeply. My intention was just to have a five minute video on my blog. Within the first hour of the first interview, I just knew this was much deeper than I thought.

DEEP HOW?

It’s layered, there are levels of pain, physical, psychological, political. I realised that whatever we do as black women, our hairstyles are a response to something. If you have a natural afro you’re responding to the hegemonic whiteness of our world. If you have a silky long weave, you’re responding to a system that tells you your natural hair’s not okay. My own endless unpacking about my hair led to the feminism conversation, which led to the ‘person’ conversation I’m trying to have with myself almost four years later.

HONESTLY I’VE NEVER HAD TO EVEN THINK ABOUT MY HAIR BECAUSE IT’S JUST NORMAL IN THE WHITE SUPERSTRUCTURE

But for us, you’re being told your hair is not normal, your skin is not normal, your bum is not normal, your nose is not normal, your lips are not normal. You respond by trying to be normal.

BUT THE FILM CHANGED?

I wanted to bring something new to the table, an angle that was unique to me. I had to ask, where did I learn to hate my hair? Where did I learn to hate myself
as a black person? And the site of that was the Model C school. So now the film zooms in on the immediate years after apartheid and asks, what happened in these newly shared, intimate spaces? What happened to racism after apartheid? It kinda tracks my journey to becoming ‘the good black’ who tries to fit in. It asks what happened to my generation of Model C-educated black people who went from one completely different world into this new world.

THE FIRST BLACK SYNDROME? THE FIRST GENERATION TO ACCESS WHITE SYSTEMS?

This is literally the story of the first blacks. Which is celebrated, right? But my focus is also on the psychosis of fear, the fear we have of upsetting white people in this country, how protective we are of their feelings and how we suppress our needs in order to protect whites. And that was mastered in those schools, where the indoctrination was insidious, structural and seamless. You have the 1976 generation who have the scars, and then there was this lull in our democracy, and then you had #FeesMustFall. We are the bridge between those two, but we were silent, we didn’t have the language to protest. Why is that? Because we were in the golden years of Mandela and Rainbowism, being taught to forget about apartheid. Don’t talk about it, it’s not that serious. In the documentary there’s going to be a lot of talk about the 1990s and what that transition meant. It’s not a sad, testimonies-of-pain kind of documentary. I want to make a full-bodied portrait of who we are. Anecdotes, humour, storytelling. We’re not gonna lecture you, we’re gonna invite you to listen to our story. About our hair, about learning to swim, about intimacies, friendships. One person I’m interviewing has a story about being the first black person in her primary school and during lice check, one of the teachers was comfortably parting all the white girls’ hair. When it came to her hair, she used a ruler to touch it. Imagine how a six year old feels? So it’s that story, stacked next to another story about that one time you thought you were relaxing your hair, but actually you put on hair remover by mistake.

HOW DOES THE DOCCIE REFLECT WHERE YOU ARE GOING?

I’m trying to go back to being umuntu. How to understand race, but how to go back to being a person. Not a black person, not a woman. I’m trying to work through this stuff so that I can get over it. To eke out a happy life. I love being African. I love being black. But I don’t wanna look at my body as a wound any more.

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