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Death is a shared experience across religions, cultures, and families. However, how it is mediated and understood within communities can vary drastically.
My understanding of death and burial rites stems mostly from the passing of my maternal
grandmother when I was 14 years old. What stayed with me was the intimacy with
which the living had with the deceased from death to subsequent burial. My mother
sat in her mother’s bedroom for an entire week before her burial and stayed with her body the night before my grandmother’s meeting with the earth. When I relayed these happenings to my white classmates, their mouths were ajar with shock.
In the context of Imameleng Masitha’s video installation showing at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town titled, Lilahloane, this personal recollection is pertinent as this work serves to confirm the persistence of African cultures surrounding death despite colonial legacies, forced removals, displacement, and migration. Lilahloane (which translates to Abundance) refers to one of the multiple names bestowed upon the artist’s mother by a family member and is intended to impart a legacy to the young that will live beyond the namesake.
The space in which Masitha’s film is shown is preceded by a proverbial stairway to heaven before you arrive at the entrance of the New Media Gallery upstairs at the AVA. In this dark room you are met by this video installation work, which is sparse in sound yet full in imagery, and the room begins to operate as a site of meditation and visual rupture simultaneously. Only captivating you for three minutes, and leaving you wanting more, the work not only deals with ephemerality – death and migration - but is and of itself an ephemeral experience.
The body in relation to the earth is an important theme as the Cape Town-based
dancer, choreographer and theatre-maker Siphenathi Mayekiso is depicted inside a room interacting with a mound of soil. These visuals are juxtaposed with aerial views of a funeral procession before we return to Mayekiso. Drawing attention to the soil speaks to a larger narrative; its role in embedding and tethering oneself to home, cultural identity, and ancestry, says Masitha.
“Home is not necessarily a structure, but home can be where your placenta fell from your mother and was buried…so when I die people might not know that my placenta is in Lesotho and my body must be moved there,” she adds.
A longing for home in the midst of moving and migration is integral in engaging the earth as a site of homing for displaced people.
The use of sound and silence is a powerful feature of the film. At first you are met with a reverberating and repetitive deep voice singing the words, “Kgale ke tsamaya” which translates to “I have been walking for a long time”. This Sesotho hymn written by actor Yongisipho Mthimkhulu mirrors what is called in the Basotho
culture ‘mangae’ - initiation school hymns. Masitha describes their purpose as, “a new beginning or reciting of a past or present”. The sound is hypnotic to the ear, pulling you in just before a deafening silence kicks in mid-lyric. The fading remanence of the hymn in your mind becomes the new soundtrack to the piece, leaving you to fill in the gaps.
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