Yearning for rootedness in a femicidal landscape

Abstract

A lot has changed since I first watched Zulu Love Letter in 2005, and much has remained the same about the traumas of post-1994 South Africa, which preoccupy the film. This piece comments on two issues – the lingering violence of apartheid trauma and state neglect of the disabled – by examining the film alongside two sets subsequent incidents: the publication of lead actress Pamela Nomvete’s memoir Dancing to the Beat of the Drum: In Search of my Spiritual Home (2012) and various high-profile incidents which underlined fatal state neglect of disabled South Africans. These two sets of incidents resonate with the film’s commentary on state violence and its production of unbelonging. If, as Bhekizizwe Peterson writes, “Zulu Love Letter is about two mothers in search of their daughters,” both literally and symbolically lost to apartheid brutality, then one of these mothers – Thandeka in the film – was also in search of herself in the actor Pamela Nomvete’s real life – owing to apartheid displacement. When I first watched the film, I was stunned by Nomvete’s powerful interpretation of the character Thandeka as an invincible, deeply wounded and angry journalist, mother, and activist. Born in Ethiopia in March 1963, Nomvete grew up in exile, in Ethiopia, Lusaka, and London among other places, before returning to South Africa in 1994. She had been an up-and-coming theater actress in London, and soon landed the role of Nstiki Lukhele on the premier South African soap opera, Generations, which catapulted her to celebrity as a household name. The fame and money drew one Collins Marimbe into her life. They married in 2002, but by 2007, Nomvete was bankrupt, homeless, and seeking divorce from the abusive Marimbe. There are uncanny parallels between Thandeka’s trauma and Nomvete’s breakdown in real life. In Zulu Love Letter, Thandeka wrestles with alienation: her relationships with her child, her parents, her child’s father, and her colleagues are all under terrible strain from her anger and survivor’s guilt about the murder of Mike, her child’s deafness, and unprocessed trauma of witnessed horrors. Nomvete’s memoir Dancing to the Beat of the Drum reveals that while she dazzled onscreen as Thandeka, offscreen, her life was spiraling out of control. After delivering an award-winning performance as Thandeka, at the end of the workday, Nomvete was going home to an emotionally and financially abusive marriage. The opening scene of the film featuring Thandeka passed out in her car was to be prophetic: a few short years later, the actress was destitute, living in her car. If Thandeka’s role in the film is as a witness – both literally, having witnessed Dineo’s murder, and symbolically, as a journalist and a witness to Me’Tau and Bouda’D’s grief – then I suggest that her offscreen life and subsequent memoir bears witness to the institutional corrosiveness of patriarchy and South