Finding her spiritual journey
QONDWISA JAMES, 23, is a theatre-maker and artist who has travelled a long way from Kwanciti village outside Qumbu to cosmopolitan Cape Town with the story of a village mother and grandmother traumatised by the loss of two teen girls.
Silindile, 15, and a friend, also 15, whom Qondiswa will not name because “I wanted to protect the identity of the families”, went missing in 2012 from a bus stop in Qumbu. They were on their way home. Silindile – We are Waiting, is the title of Qondiswa’s final fourth-year documentary theatre piece towards a specialised theatre and performance degree from the University of Cape Town.
Only 30 or so students are chosen from hundreds who audition each year for the “T&P” course.
Her theatre piece played to strong audiences this week in the Arena Theatre on the Hiddingh-Michaelis campus in Cape Town city bowl. “The first time I heard their story, I felt haunted. The girls called me,” the Grahamstown DSG-educated, and well-travelled Eastern Cape artist said.
“My mother, Nomathamsanqa, told me about it in early 2016 and from then on I became obsessed. One of our family friends is related to Silindile. I spoke to this family friend back in Qumbu. I asked if she would introduce me to the family,” James said. “We went there. It was eerie. The presence of Silindile was there. She has still to be found.
“In the community, there is a lot of talk about girls going missing, of drugs, and sex trafficking. People are talking about how vulnerable the girls are, especially on drugs like ipilisi capsules. You don’t know what is in them.
“People selling the drugs are part of a prostitution network which extends from the rural areas to Mthatha and then all the way to Durban where they say the druglords and pimps are based,” she said.
“From there the line runs to Europe. This ipilisi drug concoction has derivatives of nyaope, and also ‘bath salts’, a derivative of crack cocaine. Nyaope has gone beyond wonga, which is a mixture of ARVs, rat poison and other opiates.
“This new drug is dirty! The things the youth are smoking in the town and villages are scary.”
As part of her research James spent her mid-year vacation this year with her family and spoke to a number of local people about the missing girls.
“I took cellphone recordings of interviews with the family and people in the community, and from there the play text arose,” James said. Some dialogue in her 60- minute performance piece is taken directly from the recordings.
“We call it docu-theatre. It is all in Xhosa, but the physical language of the piece makes it accessible to other language speakers.
“I chose to focus on the women who are left behind when young people from our rural areas go missing. I tried to manifest their physical presence, the haunting of these missing girls. I infused the piece with spirituality. It was about spiritual release and healing.
“There is some cool stuff happening on stage which was devised in collaboration with my performers, Noxolo Blandile, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe, who are professional performers. Nolufefe is from the Mothertongue Project in Langeberg, and Noxolo is graduating with a diploma in theatre acting from UCT.
“I do immersive work about ritual. All the senses have to be triggered, cups hang from the ceiling, the floorspace is covered in soil, mpepho [herb] is burning, and a candle is lit and blown out throughout the piece.
“I worked on the music with the Found-at-Sea band from the Eastern Cape. Xhosa jazz is played live by Qhawekazi Giyose, 25, and Gugulethu Duma, 24, using the umrhube and uhadi [traditional bows],” James said.
“They devised [created the music], with us, and gifted us with a song titled, Mantshingi-Mantshongo noDyakalashe, which is in the style of intsomi [traditional Xhosa storytelling]. Both musicians hail from the Eastern Cape but grew up in Site C in Khayalitsha.
“There is physical theatre and dance, and a lot of improvisation. There is core text, but every night I have given the actors free range to play with the language. It works everytime. We are all talking about people we know, our mothers and grandmothers, and we are all Xhosa. We know this language.
“The audience has been mixed. Very Cape Town. I invited Xhosaspeaking workers from UCT and they came. People who understood the language laughed more, at the comedy, you know grandmothers, you know the Eastern Cape!
“The audience felt moved. After the first performance two queens [women] one Xhosa one Zambian, just could not leave their seats. I had to go and sit with them and ferry them back to the world outside,” she said.
“I am political. I want this work to be a point for exhuming black stories, especially marginalised, rural black stories. It’s to again understand that we are black people trapped inside a system that forces us to enact violence on ourselves and each other. I want to release this trauma of black-onblack violence which continues to exist in these last dregs of colonialism,” James added.
“In the story, there is a sound motif, an audio track, using a white composer who is very good and he collaborates with black people to curate the music, which is very indigenous.
“It was important that the container [the frame of the piece] was a white man who used black voices, which speaks back to machinations of blackness and out if it emerges deep black pain.”
James, whose family surname was Mjemse before it was mangled by an apartheid bureaucrat in the 50s, has journeyed from her village, through private schools in Grahamstown and Maritzburg and on to University of Cape Town. She is doing her degree over six years, taking intermittent breaks to travel extensively through South America. She writes all the time.
“It all got going in Grade 7 in drama at DSG. My friend’s mother Sheena Stannard was an artist and also our drama teacher, and that exploded something in me. When I got expelled for smoking weed I did my own project, a play about it at my next school, and after that I knew I was an artist,” James said.
“In the first three months at varsity I knew this place would break me and remould me according to what the academy wanted, but I was already an artist, I just wanted to finesse my craft. So I left, travelled, and wrote a lot. I was on a spiritual journey and I was reclaiming my identity as an artist.
“When I came back, fallism was brewing. Something was going to happen. I was slapped with my blackness and understood why this place, UCT, was not made for black people to exist.
“But I continued and got through. I was so involved in 2015, I was physically and mentally and spiritually exhausted from activism. I had a calling. I went to the department and was told this place was not for me, they did not understand my spiritual rupture. I left again.
“I went back to my grandfather in the village for three months and understood that black liberation was bigger than me and that I must get my degree.” She returned last year. “Mark Fleishman, [former head of drama] my supervisor, has held me, and that got me through. The people in drama school actually do care. “I am going to take this piece back to these mothers whose story I told, maybe a tour of schools around the village and will call people to come, it is for them.”
“I have no money, zero but I will do it anyway. All I need is three bus tickets, or friend with a car, to travel with us for two weeks. My family will feed us. If you can assist, email qondiswa.james@hotmail.com — mikel@dispatch.co.za