By Annabel Nyongwana
What is the role of storytelling in South Africa today? How do we reckon with the violence of the past, and what resonance does it have with young people’s experiences today? These are but three questions that Nomandla Vilakazi’s 2026 film, Bones: A Story of Homecoming, which screened at Stellenbosch University (SU) on 19 March, raises as a tribute to the late legendary poet Dr Diana Ferrus. SU’s Transformation Unit organised the screening in the spirit of Human Rights Day and the events that mark it in South Africa. Dr Ferrus received an honorary doctorate from SU in 2022, where she reflected on the role of the storyteller as a temporal interlocutor connecting the “past to the present [and] provid[ing] food for thought for the future”.
Part of the success of this film and Vilakazi’s narrative point of view is its ability to thread multiple stories and temporalities (past, present, and future) into its modest 48-minute runtime. The first story follows the repatriation of the remains of Saartjie Baartman – a Khoi woman whom colonial officials kidnapped, violently paraded and exploited in France – in 2002. The second story is of Dr Diana Ferrus, who, in the film, details the central role her infamous poem, “I’ve come to take you home”, played in the breakthrough in negotiations to bring Saartjie’s remains to newly democratic South Africa (SA). This particular anecdote is central as, in an era defined by hope and celebration in SA, Dr Ferrus wrote back histories of slavery in the Cape into the country’s apartheid injustice-dominated collective memory.
The third story, which appears in vignettes throughout the film, follows a tribute Vilakazi held, following the renaming of Jameson Hall to Sara Baartman Hall at the University of Cape Town (UCT). By connecting the stories of Baartman, Ferrus, and her own, Vilakazi exposes the continuities of the violence enacted on Saartjie Baartman and the current Gender Based Violence (GBV) epidemic in South Africa, which similarly dehumanises and sexualises black women’s bodies. Given this harrowing reality, there is a temptation for despondency and resignation; instead, Vilakazi stresses agency and “transmuting [her] rage into action” through her work. Tunnelling down into this further, when asked about what she believed the university’s role was in keeping both Baartman’s and Ferrus’s memories alive, she responded, “One thing that I have seen is that the institutions are the people, and it takes amazing people to go out of their way to make sure that our legends are honoured and their legacies are kept alive. It’s not going to be found in the policies.” Following this, she narrates a story about how a single employee rallied other university staff at UCT to ensure that the initial screening of her film could serve as a memorial, despite the university’s policy reserving such services on campus for university dignitaries.
This illustrates how there are still some ways to go in institutional substantive redress and acknowledgement of the past. This reflection echoes the film’s concern and purpose not only with healing past injustices, but also with ensuring that they remain in our memory. Dr Ferrus’s nephew, Muhammud Ferrus, reiterates the call for continued restorative work, emphasising that “the work must not stop”. While there remains a troubling continuity to the violence inflicted on Baartman in present-day South Africa, films such as Vilakazi’s remind students and professionals alike of the necessity to build upon the work of poets like Ferrus. Finally, in the film, Dr Ferrus states that, through her poem, she not only wanted Baartman to be “buried” but also to be “remembered”. In this way, Ferrus ensures that Baartman is not simply laid to rest but that both her strength and the violence perpetrated against her are remembered to ward against its reenactment.
