Lithalelanga Vena

Reflects on the year

“This is when I told my life story in the most honest way, using my body and words.”

This is a year that started with grief and purging caused by what I choose to identify as the bygones. Loss had me making a promise to be kinder, softer and to love myself and others appropriately. Loss had me running to places that I thought were better and safer, but when I arrived it only became darker, until I realised there is no place like home.

Home. The place where I spent my 23rd birthday in February, in bed, stuck in a cycle of deactivating and reactivating my socials, deleting contacts, and shedding off all of the old skin. Somehow I knew kuzode kulungle.

I then moved to Durban, late February, to embark on a new and much anticipated journey in film school, a four year dream finally being realised. New skin, new place, and a new mindset. I knew this was a second chance for me, I had made it out of 2020 alive and all I had to do now was to tell a different story.

The first few months in this new place were all about taking it all in, observing the way the people moved, spoke and interacted with life while simultaneously remaining hidden in a shell. The lessons were my party and the tests were the morning after debrief sessions with friends. The second semester is what truly stood out for me, this is when I told my life story in the most honest way using my body and words. In the beginning I took Live Performance Studies for the sake of having fun but emerged a different person. I emerged from the shell.

I wrote and stared in a stage play that focuses on cultural evolution, KwaThandabantu. It is a direct representation of village life today, a story that has always been close to my heart. KwaThandabantu challenges patriarchy, agesim, interracial relations, and homosexuals or queer people finding their place in the black community in South Africa today.

Before writing the play I, along with the rest of my class mates, visited a Pan African Arts Centre and Heritage Site called Wushwini in Inanda, KwaZulu-Natal. During our visit, I saw a group of young school girls, on an excursion just like us, standing on a wall inside a kraal like area that operated as an open theatre.

At first, the sight had me questioning why the girls would even step foot in such a sacred place, but then I remembered I wasn’t home and this was not an actual kraal. I also realised that my concerns were changing from “why are those in there” to “why the hell can’t those girls be in there”.

I knew all this thinking had to change, and that is why I wrote KwaThandabantu, which follows the story of a young half Indian and half Zulu chief, who also happens to be a woman, as she chairs her first community meeting in her village. Her arrival is met with both opposition and warmth amongst the community representatives and some family members. This leaves the community at loggerheads with each other about what they really want for their own home.

Looking back at the collection of photographs that I have taken, I think I have always wanted to be a voice for the forgotten ones, embracing the forgotten culture and language while still acknowledging it’s flaws.

WRITTEN BY LITHALELANGA VENA COURTESY OF AESTHETIKSELEKTOR THE YEAR BOOK CLASS OF 2021 PHOTOGRAPHS BY LITHALELANGA I worked on seven different student films this year, as a performer, a producer, and a cinematographer, but this play stood out the most for me, followed by a short film titled ‘Death Do Us Part’ – a William Shakespear’s Sonnet 130 reference, in which I played the character of a loving and devoted Asanda. 2021, was unkind, then kind, and then unkind again. It started with grief and ended with grief again, taking away my sister and my uncle whom I loved dearly, but I came out a friend, a daughter, a student, and a performer.

Abongile Mayana, 30/10/2021

Simbongile Soko, 24/07/2021