This article first appeared in WITS REVIEW

Volume 10 (October 2009)

Literati are inclined to pronounce, after watching a movie based on a novel or non-fiction work they have read, “The book was better than the film.” Of course, comparisons between genres are odious – and, moreover, the facile assumption that printed texts are more complex than visual or aural ‘texts’ is an inadequate formulation in societies where images and sounds have primacy over the written word.

There is, nevertheless, an obvious but important sense in which written text comes prior to an actor’s performance, to a camera recording and even to post-production tricks: almost all feature films have their origins in a script, or screenplay.

This ‘literary’ aspect of film-making is easily forgotten, so it is gratifying when screenplays are published and circulate in the public sphere – as is the case with Bhekizizwe Peterson and Ramadan Suleman’s Zulu Love Letter, brought out by Wits University Press earlier this year.

Wits Press is one of a handful of publishers that have sought to make South African play scripts more widely available, an initiative that is valuable not only to scholars and students of drama or literature but also to theatre practitioners seeking to mount a new production of a previously-staged work. This is not the case with a screenplay, however – the film is highly unlikely to be made a second time by a new director with a new cast. So what value does ‘the book of the film’ have?

Firstly, the script of Zulu Love Letter has an inherent literary merit, irrespective of the success of the 2004 film (and it certainly was successful, garnering ten international awards). Peterson, who is Associate Professor of African Literature at Wits, is the ‘writing half’ of Natives at Large, the creative duo behind the film. His screenplay does more than simply present dialogue, descriptions of setting and directions for actors or cameras; it offers a layered narrative in evocative language.

Secondly, those with a particular interest in film studies will find it productive to see how Suleman – the ‘directing half’ of the pair – has turned text into moving image. The published screenplay contains 30-odd pages of colour stills from Zulu Love Letter, giving an idea of its rich visual appeal, but (needless to say) the director’s art is best appreciated by viewing the film itself.

Thirdly, the book contains some useful supplementary material: there are essays from academics and from the creators themselves, as well as reproductions of newspaper reviews contemporary with the film’s first appearance. Peterson’s and Suleman’s respective contributions are the most noteworthy here.

Suleman provides some insight into the logistics of film-making generally, and of making Zulu Love Letter in particular: the problems posed by budgets and financing; the challenges and rewards of casting (including deaf/hearing collaborations and the involvement of ‘non-professional’ actors, such as members of the Khulumani Support Group for victims and survivors of apartheid-era crimes); and practical matters such as the use of a 16-frame-per-second shooting technique to “slow down the image” and create a blur or “visual destabilisation” effect in the “interlude” scenes that are of central importance in the film.

These scenes are both dream sequences and flashbacks, but predominantly the latter – for the film is, crucially, concerned with our individual and collective memories of the past. As Peterson puts it in a concise synopsis of Zulu Love Letter, the chief protagonist (Thandeka Khumalo) is a journalist who faces, in the years following South Africa’s first democratic elections, the task of

mending her estranged relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Simangaliso, who grew up with her grandparents because of Thandeka’s career and political commitments. Tormented by a sense of guilt and grief that refuses to wane, Thandeka is battling to adjust to the changes around her. Her melancholy soul is compelled to confront her experiences of detention and torture when ghosts from the past reappear. Me’Tau, the mother of Dineo, a young activist whose assassination Thandeka witnessed and reported, wants Thandeka to help her find Dineo’s body so she can be given a fitting burial. For mourning to end and for healing to take place the psychic demons that haunt the present must be recognised and exorcised.

Yet, as both Peterson and Suleman note, this is a complicated and ongoing process – on both a personal and a national level. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, writes Suleman, was “the beginning of a healing process” but was “fraught with problems” and “limited” in what it could achieve. Peterson goes further, critiquing the ways in which the TRC operated under “the banners of whiteness” insofar as it facilitated a myth of “nation-building” that disavows the past: “we continue to deny and repress the many social problems and pathologies” associated with apartheid South Africa.

Thus, while the characters in Zulu Love Letter – against the backdrop of the inaugural TRC hearings – follow “a discernible movement from conflict to denouement”, the film asserts that “as far as the larger socio-political questions are concerned, the unfinished and messy business of apartheid does not lend itself to any tidy solutions”.

Part of the reason for this is that the legacy South Africans have inherited is a tangled knot of “racial, gender and class inequalities” that, Peterson adds, “remain intact”. Indeed, while these fault lines were aggravated by apartheid, aspects of the inequity are centuries old.

On the point of gender, for instance, one cannot help but notice that the helpful commentary from Anitra Nettleton of the Wits School of Arts on the long tradition of beadwork underlying the “Zulu love letter” of the title betrays some of the patriarchal assumptions behind the practice: “Beadwork among the Xhosa was most commonly made for a young man by his girlfriend and for a married man by his mistress.” The intervention of Zulu Love Letter, however, offers a different way of understanding the art form; Simangaliso’s creation is a multi-media work of love from a daughter to a mother, ultimately dedicated to a woman who died in the struggle against racial oppression.

Jacqueline Maingard’s essay usefully distinguishes Zulu Love Letter from other films in TRC “genre”: Forgiveness, In my Country and Red Dust (all released in 2004), giving a detailed commentary on the narrative structure of the film.

Unfortunately, both Maingard and Mbye Cham, who contributes a Foreword to the book, locate the film against the vague backdrop of “African aesthetics” or “African spirituality” (Maingard) and “African film” or “African filmmakers” (Cham). These are, it must be said, rather unhelpful categories that depend on a fallaciously ‘essentialised’ view of the continent from UK- and USA-based academics.

Nonetheless, Cham’s observation that, in South Africa at least, “the relative absence of black filmmakers making films on ‘black’ subjects has produced a situation in which white filmmakers, at present, are the ones making the majority of films about black people and experiences” is worth bearing in mind when one considers the significance of the work produced by Natives at Large.

Zulu Love Letter was released last year on a double-bill DVD along with the 1997 film Fools, which Peterson and Suleman adapted from Njabulo Ndebele’s short story/novella of the same title.

With Fools, we have precisely the phenomenon described at the beginning of this article. However, while the film follows Ndebele’s narrative and characterisation quite closely, there are a number of insertions and additions that make Peterson and Suleman’s version as much an exercise in literary criticism as in filmic adaptation. 

So which is ‘better’: book, film or original screenplay? You be the judge.