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Milisuthando Bongela
South African arts journalist, podcaster and filmmaker (1985-) · South Africa · On the map · Podcasters
Milisuthando Bongela is a South African writer, filmmaker and artist who is known for her 2023 debut documentary Milisuthando which documents her life growing up in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s during apartheid and the post-apartheid era.
Milisuthando Bongela is read about 2 times a day, in 3 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 8 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 75 days, one point a day.
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Bongela was born and raised in a Bantustan known as The Republic of Transkei in the 1980s. The Bantustans were self-governing enclaves in South Africa set up by the apartheid regime in the 1950s for Black South African people to live in as their "homelands", separated from white society. The Bantustans were dissolved in the 1990s with the end of apartheid and Bongela and her family moved to a mixed area of South Africa, with Bongela encountering White South Africans for the first time. Bongela narrates the film, in which she describes the racism she experienced in her adolescence growing up with White classmates and friends in a post-apartheid setting. Bongela also describes growing up in the insulated, all-Black Bantustan in which she was not yet fully exposed to racism, nor fully aware of her life in apartheid. Bongela uses Bantu and Xhosa philosophies to frame her experiences. In other parts of the movie, she interviews her White friends, including a producer of the documentary, to understand their experiences in apartheid and interactions with Black South African people.