Specialist guests and callers spoke of the bleak outlook of the country’s youth: lack of opportunity, a disruptive political past and, of course, the prospect of getting HIV/Aids. At the same time this writer was driving to work, having previewed filmmaker Mark Kaplan’s arresting documentary Between Joyce and Remembrance.
A work of seven years in the making, it is primarily about slain activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, who lived in Port Elizabeth until his untimely death sometime in the mid-Eighties. The traumatic tale of how Mtimkulu was tortured and poisoned by state operatives is carried by Kaplan’s conviction that ‘we must strive to keep certain memories alive and that the camera is a way of preventing things from disappearing”.
In the same vein, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has become the document of the nation’s memory of apartheid. This is where Joyce, named in the title, comes into the picture. She appeared at the truth commission to tell the story of how her poisoned son’s hair fell out, how he became wheelchair ridden, and how he took it upon himself to sue the then minister of police.
Kaplan was held in solitary confinement at the same time as Mtimkulu. ‘What makes this story so significant,” he says, ‘is that it connects events that happened in the apartheid era with today’s generation, exemplified by [Siphiwo’s son] Sikhumbuzo who is today the same age as his father was when he disappeared.
‘The film is a salutary reminder that we are still living with and are affected by legacies of apartheid, including the effects on families and the manifestations of violence and anger.”
This is where the aspect of troubled youth comes in to the picture. It is the attitude of the late activist’s son that shows how deep are the unhealed wounds gaping in post-apartheid South Africa. It is here that one begins to consider Perlman’s breakfast-time discussion concerning the redemption of the lost generations.
Forced to live up to a heroic absent father — present only as a clump of hair the family treasures in the absence of a dead body — Sikhumbuzo rebels. At the truth commission hearing he breaks down. Finally, when his father’s torturer, the notorious Gideon Nieuwoudt, arrives at the family household to pretend to beg forgiveness, Sikhumbuzo cracks and attacks the man.
Equally tragic is the belated funeral of the slain activist: the ceremonious burial of a handful of hair. Kaplan’s documentary is constructed with honesty and is beautifully photographed. But it is history that makes it what it is. These extraordinary circumstances remind one how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
The work has been used as a teaching aid at the department of psychology at the University of Cape Town and at the department of law at the University of the Western Cape.
Between Joyce and Remembrance airs on SABC1 at 10pm on Monday October 20.