Page 23 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

Holding the past to account
Siona O’Connell, Department of Historical and Heritage Studies
The documentary film-maker and writer, Siona O’Connell, is clear in her understanding of South Africa’s violent history: that it is far from over and that the past needs to be held to account.
Pivoting on apartheid traumas and restorative justice, Siona O’Connell’s work in 2018 focused
on the long reach of slavery in South Africa by looking at the traces that remain: first, through the question of land restitution and, second,
by looking at apartheid-era street photography and the forms of self- representation and freedom that are invoked.
Uitgesmyt is a 26-minute documentary directed and produced by O’Connell. The film premiered in Cape Town
and Pretoria in 2018 and also screened on local and international television stations, and at a number of universities in the USA and Europe. The documentary looks at Elandskloof in the Cederberg, the site of the first successful land restitution case in South Africa.
Although the film considers the complexities of land in South Africa, Uitgesmyt draws together the attendant threads of slavery, religion, ‘colouredness’, poverty and inequality. In so doing, it highlights the urgency of memory work related to race-based evictions. In the film, O’Connell makes the point that the issue of land and restorative justice cannot simply be settled in financial ways, or through a
return to land. She contends that it is necessary to address and attend to the ongoing legacies of the trauma of apartheid evictions; in post-apartheid South Africa, this trauma continues in projects of social gentrification, and an inability to ‘move on’ from a past that holds the present to ransom.
The film is largely in Afrikaans – a first for O’Connell – who comments that as soon as one of the interviewees used the term ‘Ons was uitgesmyt’ (We were thrown out), she knew she had the title of the documentary.
An ongoing project of O’Connell’s
is Movie Snaps, a documentary
that she directed and produced in 2015, and which is now theorised
in her published work. Movie Snaps captures street photography taken
in Cape Town between the mid- 1930s to the early 1980s, portraying ordinary people of all races living in extraordinary times. O’Connell’s work shows that the self-representations of racially oppressed people – evident in dress, posture and gesture,
among other markers – are key to understanding South Africa today, providing ways of imagining what freedom could look like and to what extent it is yet to be realised in contemporary South Africa.
Siona O’Connell’s Ma and Mama (Movie Snaps)
Siona O’Connell is Professor in History and Heritage Studies at UP. In 2018
she was appointed as Distinguished National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, USA.
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