on greetings and ukubonwa, to see and to be seen
In 2020, a very important person in my life asked me what appeared to be a simple question. “Milisuthando, tell me, can a mirror tell you who you are?” I took my time to think about my answer as he watched me make sense of his inquiry in real time. “No. I don’t think so, Ntate”, I said. “Mhmm, he grunted after a long silence. “A mirror can only show you how you look, but it cannot tell you who you are. Only another person can tell you who you are”. “Say more please, ntate”, I chimed, to which he said:
We fathom ourselves through others.
You cannot fully discover who you are on your own.
You are an endless being and you encounter and
discover parts of yourself through your interactions with other people.
To your parents you are one version, to your siblings another,
to your partner another to the grocer yet another
but you are still one person.
In the same vein, whatever you say about another person, you are actually saying about yourself. If you see beauty in another person and you say so, it is because you see beauty in yourself first. If you see ugliness in another, the ugly aspects of who you are are taking precedence in that moment. This is what we really mean when we say “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”.
It is in the act of seeing other people that you begin to see yourself.
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As a Xhosa woman, when you have met someone you intend to marry, you first tell your mother by saying “ndiboniwe”, which means “I have been seen”.
Two weeks ago, I turned 40 and my American husband traveled to South Africa with his father to bring dowry to my family in the form of cattle as a way of formally marrying me, which we call ukuLobola.
We first got married on a Friday afternoon at the New York City Hall Courthouse in March 2024 and while that was very beautiful and meaningful, my family members could only attend on zoom. My husband’s parents and some of our friends were there but this “paper marriage” was not seen as sufficient by my family and by extension, my ancestors, for whom marriage is not about the lovebirds, but about two families coming together.
Lobola is not a form of “bride price” but a formal expression of honour and gratitude to the bride’s family for raising her based on the foundational understanding that when she joins the man’s family, that family is gaining the most priceless component of its survival. It is gaining a home builder and the bedrock of its progeny, clan and ultimately the society. Traditionally, the cattle go to her family as a token of gratitude and relationship building between the two families. But some of the cattle are given to the bride’s youngest uncle to take care of and grow so that one day, should the marriage produce children, those cows become the children’s inheritance when the children are ready to start their own families when they come of age. However, should the marriage not work out for any reason and the bride needs to go back home, those cows can also become her economic security, or insurance if you will so that she is not a financial burden on anybody. This is just one element of what I’ve come to learn is a very complex and highly sophisticated system of structuring and organising the family, from an indigenous African perspective.
Now that he has formally given the dowry and performed other traditional marriage rites to unite our families and ancestors, we are now seen as a married couple and my move to New York this second time around, is official and understood by my extended family.
It’s been two years since I have “been seen” by this man, and by extension, two years of learning to see myself in ways that were impossible without the reparative intimacy and vulnerability that being in a loving relationship forces you to be in. How with each passing day, authentic love allows you to reach into and see the reality of your own imperfect image, your many selves, the imperfection of the other, the world and life itself. And then, to not only accept those imperfections, but to love them.
I try to take this way of seeing into my everyday life and especially into my work, where I think about and talk about love as a living practice that helps us to posture our humanity appropriately. I’m beginning to understand that being in a loving relationship and a well nourished, stable and supportive home environment allows me to better serve in whatever I do outside the home, whether it’s in my work or other relationships. It’s the base from which I get to prepare and nourish my humanity for myself and others. And it goes back to really understanding the value of home, homemaking, homebuilding and crafting that space as the space that prepares us to encounter the rest of the world. Creating a home, cleaning it, making meals, making it look beautiful and crafting its energy is an honour I never used to understand and appreciate because I always used to view the home as a less significant and an inferior site of self making than the external world. I know that this skates dangerously close to some old fashioned ideas about gender roles but the thing I’m talking about cannot be hijacked by or co-opted. It is a fundamental truth about being alive. We all need caretaking, support, food, warmth and relationships with others in order to make sense of our place on earth.
I’m still making some friends in NY, trying to start again after a fully developed and very beautiful life in South Africa. I used to blog back in the day and really enjoyed it. I’m thinking and imagining out loud here and I want this space to be my little public space of feeling my way through this major identity shift. I kind of want this space to feel as naive and innocent as blogs once felt, where numbers and page views didn’t matter, and where there were no brands hovering around people’s genuine stories to try to monetize them.
It all just felt like visiting someone’s room, where we could still see each other and allow ourselves to be seen.
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Come see me this weekend in New York. My film MILISUTHANDO is playing at The Anthology Film Archives, from 16 - 22 May every evening at 7.30 pm, and on Sunday 18 May at 12:30 at The Maysles Documentary Centre in Harlem as part of the New York African Film Festival.