In Search of Mabel Cetu: A woman refusing erasure
One of the ways of addressing the problem of the erasure of Black women from history is through the documentation of these lives, using a diverse set of modalities. As mentioned earlier, in South Africa there is a growing trend of textual documentation, which needs to be complemented by audio-visual documentation.
This documentary is my contribution to the growing canon of these untold stories. The documentary is envisaged as a feature length, running no less than 48 minutes. I imagine it will appeal to various audiences, including high school and university students, art practitioners, especially audiovisual artists, feminist academics as well as the public interested in historical accounts.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
History has done Black women an injustice. When history is reviewed it appears we never lived, never thought, and never accomplished anything. To right the wrongs of history it takes concerted effort and a proclivity to ‘find’ Black women who are celebration worthy.
In the 1970’s when Alice Walker set out to find Zora Neale-Hurston, this was the work she was opening space for. Mabel Cetu is to South African photography what Zora Neale-Hurston was to African American literature. She is a woman of huge achievements, yet her name and legacy are not as recognized and celebrated as they should.
Interviewed at a film festival, a South African filmmaker proclaimed, ‘to think it would have been illegal, some 30 years ago, for me to point a camera at anyone.’ This statement, which is not only untrue, points to the erasure of Black women. This erasure is not only painful to the person being erased, but also to the one doing the erasing, however unwittingly.
It is painful because the person erasing feels themselves to be the first to arrive at the scene, an act which places undue pressure on them to excel. It is painful also because it robs them of counterpoints and historical references they need to guide their own journey. This inability to read history as a continuum leaves Black women, especially, feeling a sense of un-rootedness, as if we have no forebears, or gardens bequeathed to us by our foremothers to tend to, or footprints to track.
Impact
The impact of this project is three-fold:
Giving voice to untold stories and lost histories: the importance of storytelling, is that it builds tolerance because it gives us an opportunity to see the world from different perspectives. It is a shining beacon of hope in an increasingly intolerant world. Storytelling also has the power to instill a sense of wonder in a people and to the extent that we can see ourselves in the stories being told, garner a sense of motivation and inspiration, that engenders a sense of propulsive-ness in our lives.
History making: the making and studying of history is a great contributor in a people’s understanding of how past events made things the way they are today. Drawing from past events not only gifts us with lessons about what we did right, about what we did wrong, but also points us to what about ourselves we should celebrate and what we should avoid in the future. This documentary seeks to contribute to the corpus and canon on invisibilised lives of Black women, from whom we can learn so much; both positive and negative.
Encouragement and empowerment: in the making of this documentary, I aim to include, as much as I can, the contribution of young people, working as research assistants and creative crew, as a way of immersing them in a different kind of storytelling. So that as they develop their own craft, they too can develop a penchant for telling similar stories.
