Matthew Krouse Down the tube
Of all the images of South African culture identifiable to the outside world, the Ndebele homestead must stand out as the one most exoticised. In pictures of homely bliss, postcards and books have portrayed neat little Ndebele communities as organised as the geometric patterns that women paint on their houses.
The picture of rural Ndebele life seems in harsh contrast to the other vision we have of their culture, transposed into an urban setting. For city dwellers, Ndebele culture comes to us laid out on pavements, for sale in little rows. If you’re lucky you can get a good price on beaded bridal wear from an Ndebele woman with brass rings stretching her neck, and a blanket over her shoulders. And once bought, it’ll look as good as any other art on the walls of a western home.
For anyone interested in Southern African culture beyond that found on the city streets, a seemingly reliable source on traditional Ndebele life shows on July 11 at 9pm on SABC3. Part of the Xpressions series of independently-made documentaries, it’s called The Long Tears – An Ndebele Story, and took five years to make.
For years director David Forbes and a small crew documented the life of an Ndebele family, the Ndimandes of Mbhoko in Mpumalanga. From the outset, mother Francina Ndimande and her daughter Angelina are world-renowned for their traditional art, and one gets a glimpse of an extraordinary journey they took to exhibit and demonstrate their painting technique in Berlin.
But it is not their international escapades that form the basis of Forbes’s work. Far from city life, the documentary focuses on daily toils in a slightly idealised picture of a woman who spends a significant part of her life painting her home, while her husband Mjanyelwa functions as an induna in the court of his King Mayisha.
Much of the documentary deals with the rites of passage thrust upon boys and girls who are driven into seclusion where secret ceremonies take place. Amply expressed is the manner in which youths are told (not asked) when they will go for initiation, without which they would not be accepted in their community.
Again, the Ndimande family are the subject. Son Gerald goes off to “The Mountain” for circumcision. And in another season the female initiation is experienced by granddaughter Mary-Anne. It’s a harsh system, depicted in a documentary that, quite rightly, doesn’t spend much time weighing up the pros and cons of the traditional way of life. Save for one scene set in a sparse tea house, where Ndebele youths discuss the impossibility of living a modern life in traditional dress.
The title – The Long Tears – refers to the trailing beaded headdress worn by mothers when they send their children off to initiation, symbolising their mixed feelings of having lost children, but also having transported their offspring into adulthood.
In many respects the work is a love story. Not only the love of people for their ways, but also the filmmaker’s love of his subject. Thankfully it’s not going as anthropology: rather, it is Forbes’s subjective view of the five-year experience he had. This is coloured by fine art and historical photographs that take a strong political view of indentured labour and the Ndebele defeat in a war fought against the Boers over a century ago.
While the Ndebele culture seems to have withstood time, all is not entirely rosy in these people’s lives. Appropriately, the loss of some of the most eye-catching aspects of their culture is symbolised in the crumbling mud walls of traditional houses that people have deserted in favour of a more contemporary way of life.