A love letter to those who passed on and those still tasked with creating a better future for all

I would like to express appreciation to the contributors to the roundtable for their incisive and stimulating discussion of Zulu Love Letter. I particularly value their foregrounding of the problematics on the socio-political, economic, and stylistic complications that impinge on the challenges, contingencies, and intersections that relate to our strives to make sense of our pasts, presents, and futures. The reflections offered speak to the complex relations between the personal, social, institutional, and aesthetic dimensions that inform the film and cultural production. I will confine myself to some brief observations on these aspects in the hope that they will elucidate the thinking and questions that shaped the project and the public life of the film. The writing of the script presented the usual creative and social challenges typical in the making of art. When it came to production and distribution, the film entered a convoluted public space particularly with regards to its making and reception and that still confounds. When we formed Natives At Large in 1995, Ramadan Suleman and I were clear that we wanted to create work that is informed by the following political and creative visions: the work must primarily address an African audience and it must do so in ways that facilitate dialogic and critical deliberations on individual and collective experiences and dreams; celebrate African ontologies, epistemologies, and identities while avoiding provincialism (or South African exceptionalism) by remaining attuned and receptive to ideas, experiences and aesthetics from anywhere as long as they constituted part of the complicated and congenial storehouse on the human condition; explore the quotidian by centralizing the lives of ordinary people (the underclasses and those who are oppressed and exploited in private and public spaces) and to do so in ways that celebrated their knowledge, agency, resilience, hopes, and fears (all these are the everyday senses and ways of being that are often ignored, downgraded, or erased by the lenses favored by parochial and patriarchal nationalists, capitalists, and whiteness in society and culture); and, lastly, to pursue the preceding principles by making films that are grounded in the use of African cultural repertoires and artistic practices. In 1995, after numerous possible names for our production company, we settled on Natives At Large, a statement we found in Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa. Plaatje uses the phrase to indicate the marginal social status and exclusion of black people under colonialism (and apartheid, post-apartheid, and imperialism from our vantage point). We also read it as an enticing and subversive call to embrace a political and creative