Creator
Milisuthando Bongela is the Mail & Guardians arts and culture editor. She is a multi award-winning writer, blogger and collaborator. She has experience in the arts having worked in fashion, music, art and film as well as a decade-long career in consulting, entrepreneurship, blogging and cultural activism. She is also directing a documentary about hair and black identity, a film she calls the report card on the rainbow nation project.
"Recovering ancient hidden knowledges, as long as we are responsible with them, is important considering how many ills there are in our society."
If we can relinquish the smallest of responsibilities under the guise of creating employment, what of the bigger responsibilities on a national level?
"Our very presence on Earth is to heal the broken parts of ourselves in collaboration with those who came before us."
"Iintloni are mere reminders of who we are underneath it all."
"I’m loathe to say we are the only ones in the world, but she is right about us being a people of song."
"What a funny sight it would be to see power dynamics neutralised by something as ordinary as friendship".
"Who is speaking to this overwhelming sense that you are stranded in this tender yet violent place and you don’t know why or what it’s for?"
"Should I be forgotten a hundred years from now, I want my relatives to know there are ways to remember that cannot be erased".
"We had roles in our small domestic community. Roles that rendered us responsible and independent from our parents for things to do and ways to be."
Is the articulation of anger helping to create more value around women’s safety, our lives and our needs in relation to the men in our society?
"I felt compassion for the fact that they are cops in Johannesburg and, to them, this is a normal way to treat another human".
"uKukhapha is the bedrock of isiNtu. This untranslatable notion of uMntu ngumntu ngabantu".
How has our digital communication affected our relationship to the concept of seeing each other’s humanity?
The alleged improper conduct of the Zeitz MOCAA curator has raised questions about the transparency of a museum that is subsidised with public money
As the decolonial project progresses, it’s important to learn to look outside of what written responses to colonisation can offer.
After an encounter on the plane Milisuthando Bongela concludes that: “When given the choice to be right or to be kind, always choose to be kind.”
Milisuthando Bongela attempts to put into words who it was that has died
"It’s not that I wanted to be white. But I wanted them to accept and like me and I was all too happy to jump through the hoops."
"In South Africa, fighting occupies the space between everything".
"In the absence of living on a piece of land with my extended family… I yearn for this kind of connection in my modern life".
