Da struggle kontinues: Zulu love letter and the audiovisual language of a African counter cinema

Zulu Love Letter (2005) was ahead of its time in terms of its disenchantment with the then vaunted idea of the “rainbow nation” (when South Africa was under the spell of Madiba Magic) and in its innovative cinematic aesthetic. Unlike films such as Forgiveness (2004), Red Dust (2004) and In My Country (2004) that dealt with matters related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Zulu Love Letter questioned the grand narrative of the new South Africa and drew attention to the tensions between official projections of reconciliation and the continuing unfinished business of apartheid in the lives of the black women characters that are at the center of its narrative. Written by Bhekizizwe Peterson and directed by Ramadan Suleman, the film presents a black radical perspective on the problematics of forgetting and the lingering psychological trauma that apartheid inflicted on its victims. More importantly for me, the film has a distinctive aesthetic quality that is both sublime and political. In this essay, I will examine the audiovisual language of Zulu Love Letter with a particular focus on how the cinematography, editing and sound design work together to constitute, drawing on Peter Wollen,a subversive counter-cinema through a style that, in line with its thematic intentions, grapples with the visual, sonic and affective challenges related to the depiction and appreciation of trauma, memory and healing. Zulu Love Letter’s protagonist Thandeka Khumalo (Pamela Nomvete) is a journalist and woman who is at odds with post-1994 South Africa as she struggles to come to terms with her traumatic encounters during apartheid. The film not only centralizes black women but also chose a flawed and imperfected protagonist: she grapples with the performance of the patriarchal senses of femininity and motherhood demanded of her. Her strained relationship with her daughter Simangaliso and elderly parents gesture to the inter-generational and cultural strains within the black family/community and how these exceed the framing of reconciliation along racial lines. That notwithstanding, Thandeka is strong, resolute and unafraid to challenge the status quo. This layered depiction of black womanhood is uncommon in mainstream cinema (including South African cinema) which, more often than not, hegemonizes the experiences of male protagonists. Kenqu writes that Zulu Love Letter is a counter-cinema feminist text precisely because of the extraordinary ways it explores black womanhood. The counter-cinema elements can be read not only in the film’s its narrative content but also in its audiovisual form. Broadly speaking, counter-cinema aims to depart from