Once upon a time we made new rituals: Bringing the norms of home to new places.
4 July 2025
Wednesday.
In her dream —
as relayed to me by my big sister over a steaming bowl of samp and beans —
my mother remembers herself in a large hall of strangers.
Men, women and young people sandwiched in queues,
the way South Africans tend to do when lined up in any bank,
post office or voting line.
No faith in personal space, my people.
The sun is out.
Mama is standing at the tail of a queue whose head she can’t see,
when a familiar voice calls out her name from behind.
“Uphi uNonziphu? Where is Nonziphu?” — three times the voice forages.
Mama turns around to find her late aunt Nomagama coming towards her,
wearing a faded pink nightdress,
arm outstretched, in palpable haste.
“Ndinguyelo anti! Here I am aunty”! Mama declares.
The elder says nothing and pulls my mother by the hem of her skirt,
away from the queue she is standing in and delivers her to a parallel line.
This is the queue you belong in, not the one you were standing in
Great-aunt Nomagama says in the language of dreams
and calmly walks away.
Mama wakes up. She slept through her 4pm tea.
Standing around her bed are my sister Vuyo, her boyfriend S,
Sis’ Nontsebenzo, who works at my mother's Bed & Breakfast as a cook and cleaner and
the late Sis’ Lindelwa, who was in charge of guest relations and cooked and cleaned.
She immediately tells them about her dream.
They silently chew on its ominous mystery.
I imagine the comforting combination of
Sis Nontsebenzo's beef stew and steamed bread
filling the house with a fragrance of order
on gravid days like this.
It’s the 15th of December 2020.
There have been no guests for months, for obvious reasons.
My sick mother is sleeping in the biggest of the guest rooms.
A sprawling room with an en-suite bathroom that has become smaller and smaller
The older we’ve grown.
It’s hers and my father's old bedroom, now called the Phalo Room,
named after my younger sister Singalakha’s first born son Phalo.
My parents’ bedroom always smelled of potpourri, Elizabeth Arden Red Door
and the inside of my mother's many purses
for the 25 years we’ve lived on Lazarus Road in East London, South Africa.
My father’s only contributions to the room’s general aroma were his Brylcreem —
opened twice a week to soften the bald dark brown mass that was his head —
and his 21 pairs shoes that Singalakha and I
had the weekly chore of taking out and polishing every Saturday.
I can still smell the black Kiwi shoe polish.
Nestled between the bed and my mother’s caregivers is an oxygen tank,
an oximeter and vitamins that I shipped from Johannesburg yesterday.
She refuses to get tested. She refuses to go to the hospital, Vuyo writes
in our Just Us whatsapp group: me, Vuyo, Singalakha and my youngest sister Qhayiya.
Mama has already lost two of her friends this week to Covid,
their last breaths taken at St Dominic’s.
Friday.
My sisters and I, having learnt of the apocalyptic scenes
playing out in and around hospitals in our hometown,
arrange an ambulance to collect our mother from home and
to drive her to Johannesburg, some 10 hours and 957 km away.
A decision that felt like throwing the kitchen knives in the garden.
Utterly absurd.
En route, somewhere near Bloemfontein,
mama has two cardiac arrests.
My sister is in the ambulance with her but knows [we thank you, God]
the value of hope in a moment like this.
She omits this information to us her three younger sisters,
following the journey on WhatsApp Live Location.
Four little black swans rehearsing a song.
Death circling like anmurder of crows.
Saturday.
For the first time in our lives,
in my Yeoville apartment,
my sisters and I pray together without any adults leading the singing,
prayer or ufefe, The Benediction.
I make salads and clean.
I smell of olive oil, lemon and
Sunlight Liquid dish soap.
Mama remains in the ICU until New Years eve.
She has no idea that over Christmas,
we were at the Zoom funeral of her partner of 7 years,
whom she last saw the night of the dream.
We couldn't tell her in the handwritten letters we wrote back and forth
while she was in hospital.
An order from her doctors.
Between the flood of phone calls,
We are all thinking about the queues from her dream.
What if mama had stayed in the queue she was in?
Was that the queue of the dying?
Wednesday
Only silence is appropriate as she emerges from my aunt's car,
half her original weight, smelling of hospital,
fragile.
Sunday.
I packed my bags the night before:
two tomato red candles
to acknowledge the presence of negative energy.
one small sewing needle
to insert at the bottom of the red candle. the metal conductor absorbs the negative energy and will be the only thing left when the red candle has finished burning. this must be discarded by burying it in the earth away from our home
one black candle
to look into the eyes of fear and ask it for guidance.
two canary yellow candles
our female ancestors.
two cobault blue candles
our male ancestors.
six Lighthouse Special white candles
the symbol of spirituality.
one tin of McChrystals Snuff
a universal altar offering of tobacco that resembles fine medium roast ground coffee and
smells like distilled peppermint. each inhale ends in a cascade of sneezes.
one fist full of iMpepho
cleanser of air. bringer of ancestors. carrier of intentions.
whose smoke smells like a shower of wet soil, tree bark, fenugreek, leather, camphor,
and memories of rural Xhosa women at the end of a day of plastering the floors of the
huts with the dark olive-green adobe of cow dung and garden soil.
silver coins.
for the ancestors who came by sea and brought coins to this land.
mine are rusty from being immersed in water. the yellow stains my fingers and smells of Brasso copper cleaner.
one stick of Palo Santo.
a sweet and woody South American bath for the aura.
one nip of old buck, one nip of brandy, one cup of milky tea, one glass of coca cola
for the ancestors to sip on
apples and tennis biscuits
they may be gone but they still like treats
I take the 7.10 am flight to East London.
An hour and 15 minutes later, I am home and hungry.
The east wind of the Indian Ocean is sweet.
As the second daughter, it is my turn to stop my life to take care of my mother.
We start our days with coffee in bed.
It takes longer to set the tray the way my mother likes it than to make the coffee.
Her tray cloths have their own drawers.
I choose the floral English Rose tea set on this first day,
accompanied by a gold spoon.
I put two sachets of Canderel sweetener on the saucer, warm up the milk and serve her.
Repeating small tasks helps me metabolise my feelings.
Like swimming.
Tuesday.
My mother never knew her mother.
My grandmother died when my mother was a baby.
But I've been talking to my grandmother for years,
something my mother was educated against as the grandchild of Methodists.
We kneel together in front of the altar we have built together
and begin to speak aloud to Zuziwe, her mother, my grandmother.
We ask her to ask God and the others for healing and strength.
I leave her alone to speak in private
and I wait in the middle of the living room,
unsure what to do next.
I enter the kitchen to find Sis Nontsebenzo
cooking her beef stew again,
and I watch her intently before asking her how she makes it:
You start by boiling the meat in water first, always. Then you add your diced onions and your robot peppers: green, yellow and red. After letting the pot simmer, add some Worcestershire sauce and "leave it alone", she insists. You can add beef stock cubes if you like but you must finish it off with ''Top Class Spice Mix".
Aunty Manapo adds white pepper, tomatoes and chicken spice to hers.
*
since moving to New York, i’ve been trying to figure out how to transpose, if that’s possible,
my spiritual life in South Africato this new place. when i left SA, as is custom, i reported to my
ancestors that i am leaving home and going to another land. in fact my family members gave me a send off
at our main homestead outside Butterworth. there was a sheep slaughtered, i did a medicine bath in the
kraal at 5am with my sister and the way was lit for me. person after person, celebrating the end of my film project, which
they knew very little about, and wishing me success overseas, gave me an instruction: “ntinga ntaka ndini”, which is a form
of congratulations and a command to carry on that means “dare to fly you darstardly bird, dare to fly.”
i flew overseas and didn’t realise that i was leaving behind a life build so securely on a knowledge system and cultural
and spiritual practices that were so normal and commonplace and effortless, until i didn’t have the security of belonging to
a community of shared values and practices.
i took for granted how easy it is to sacrifice a chicken or sheep to offer it to your ancestors in South Africa. you can
do it in your back yard and the laws protect you. you may have a village home where that is just the norm. that even if
the police showed up, they would understand the protocol and join you in your celebration or ritual accordingly because
the police are us. it’s easy to burn candles at the river or the beach. or to burn mpepho in private or public. i’ve never had to think of the
logistics of this until now.
from having to declare the mpepho at customs (they were really nice about it. it has to be dried and you can say it’s for religious reasons)
to not having an easy time burning it inside because of smoke alarms everywhere, to being scared that someone is gonna go “Ma’am” the second
you light a candle at the river. what river? i spent the first few months looking for a river to greet and introduce myself to because this is important to do as umntu wherever you are. first i went to prospect park and found a nice lake there, but remembered that an elder had told me that it has to be flowing water that has life in it that you can regard spiritually as an entity. then i went to central park and did manage to light a candle at the water there, though the wind kept blowing it out and too many tourists were coming near me to take pictures of the beautiful scenery. then the day before my wedding, i tried to go to the ocean to pray but it was too cold and windy and it just felt like too much of an effort and maybe it’s not necessary.
finally, after my ancestors via my healer chastised me for not introducing myself to the ancestors and custodians of this land (the Lenape), i went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, which are absolutely stunning and my favourite place in New York. there, i found a flowing body of water. beautiful. but there was a gate in front of what i learned was the Bronx river and i couldn’t get in. plus there were cameras all over so i couldn’t jump over the fence. but i stood at the gate thinking and decided to leave and return the following week with candles, some mpepho and sage and i was just going to jump over the gate and apologise after. so the following week i returned with said candles in my backpack and i decided against the sage and mpepho because this is America and you can’t say “ahhh come on baba” to the authorities and hand them twenty bucks. i jumped over the gate and sat on a rock praying that no parks ranger person was going to come and tell me to leave. it was an overcast day in october and there were a few people walking around the park but i felt safe. i sat there, lit the candle, greeted the water and its keepers and told them who i was and that i would like to make this my home. the sound of the water was divine. i could hear birds and a gentle breeze kept blowing yellow leaves onto the ground. nothing happened. i sat there for an hour, jumped back over the gate and walked around the grounds. i then met a girl who was also walking on her own and she was looking for “The African Garden”, which is an African American historical garden with vegetation historically eaten by black Americans. it was underwhelming when we found it but i enjoyed the chat with that beautiful stranger, and felt proud that i, the new girl in town, had shown her the way to the garden. i go there as often as i can.
since then, i have been meditating on how to change some of our traditional rituals to suit new conditions.
do we always need to spill blood? can impepho be replaced with the local plant?
what if there is no ocean or flowing river? can you do a ritual in your kitchen or living room?
what do the locals do to connect with their ancestors?
can you make something up to speak to the same thing the rituals were speaking to?
so far, i created a candle ritual at my altar here at home,
and i’ve asked my guides for local guides to show me how do people
do things like cleansings, rooting and tie breaking.
MEET ME INSIDE:
Releasing the bird and scaling down to the ant’s eye view on things.
what i ate today
20 June 2025
we were woken up at dawn this morning by a bird i had never heard before in Harlem, or anywhere really.
it had an angry, ominous call in two tones.
through the curtains, the day was yawning and decidedly grey and begrudging
just like the song of the bird,
which printed its melancholy onto this last portion of night.
my husband Warren grabbed his ear plugs.
i got up to go to the bathroom for the umpteenth time since falling asleep at 11:16 and when i got back in bed, i wore my ear plugs and
struggled against the new top sheet we have been trying out
i have this ingrained perception that having a top sheet makes you a better person, more serious and better at performing adulthood, especially now that i’m Married.
i’ve always just slept with a fitted sheet and a duvet, but something about that at 40 feels juvenile. my mother and my aunt and hotel rooms have top sheets.
they are serious women.
to me, their towering beds with gaudy headboards and shimmering brocade bed spreads are symbols of their accomplishments in life, along with trays and tray cloths, porcelain tea sets that have milk jars, microwaves, multiple televisions and bedrooms that
have ceiling fans and extra cupboards for their formal clothes,
clothes that are always fighting for their lives on hangers that live too close together.
we took our ceiling fan down because gross. we don’t have a really in-use microwave, we found our current one at a yard sale for $14 in a small town in Virginia and only use it to make popcorn, which has been twice in the last year.
my mother literally climbs up onto her beds, i fall into mine because we sleep on a super thin japanese mattress and a low wooden base that Warren made.
my mother and aunts have two cars each,
one for weekdays and one for Sundays.
They are insured to the high hills and have insurance for each of their children and relatives. they have hat closets.
they are uniformed senior members of the Methodist Women’s Manyano (bangoomama bebhatyi)
they know how to sing worship songs without hymn books
at 53 and 70,
they know how to pray:
black mom prayers in the form of commands rather than suggestions to uThixo
i’m wondering what it means to develop so far away from my reference points
for what it means to be a mature person.
i have some of these things, like life insurance and a hymn book.
i know how to pray on my own but one day, i’m gonna become a black mom
and i don’t know how to do that Thixo’olungileyo!!!! Thixo’onamandla!!!! Messiy’olungileyo!!!!
out loud on-my-knees-praying-for-my-children-and-family-and-against-my-enemies Xhosa prayer.
“We aren’t top sheet people love”, Warren said with certainty when we woke up,
trying to figure out why we slept so badly. i didn’t quite know how much i needed to hear this. we’ve been sleeping with a top sheet for a week now
and each morning it ends up at the bottom of the bed looking like a piece of
gum that you want to throw away but you haven’t found a rubbish bin yet
so you keep chewing and the more you chew, the more irritated you become that you can’t find a bin already
so you find the nearest tissue or piece of paper and put it in your handbag or car or pocket because the desperation to eject this material from your person reaches feverish levels.
living in New York has felt a little bit like this, except i am the gum and the city has felt like a giant mastication machine.
life here has absolutely been more challenging than my life was in South Africa. the cost of everything. not being able to work for months cos of permits, the small and big cultural differences. the unhinged levels of small talk involved in the quest to make new friends as a grown up and the difficulty of aligning schedules
with existing friends. the decibel levels. the overwhelming menu of choices for everything. perpetual exposure to mental illness and drug abuse bursts in public.
these are are just a few but standard challenges that many people experience when they make this place home.
18 months in, I’m actually starting to enjoy my day to day life here, mainly because it’s not freezing. i got all my papers (greencard and work permit) and i’ve stopped comparing it to a life i chose to leave, not because i didn’t like it anymore,
but because i met someone and he was worth moving countries for.
but if i were to draw the anatomy of just what has made this transition so difficult, i would say it’s two overarching things:
a) suddenly having to change what the meaning of “work” means in my life.
when i was in Joburg, my priorities were global in their scale and concerned with important political issues that the world is facing like decolonisation, racism, sexism, historical trauma, healing generational wounds etc. as a writer, storyteller and cultural worker, my work was my life and i was dedicated in whatever endeavour i undertook, to understanding, articulating and eradicating these issues. i chose most of my friends based on our shared interests in these concerns and i wasn’t the only one. i was part of a huge community of multidisciplinary artists and practitioners in a very rich tradition of integrating political work into our everyday lives. i even made my NY friends with this metric and i thought we could build friendships based on our ideological interests, which i did for a while but that’s not the case today.
in the last 18 months, this metric has transformed to reflect my reason for moving to NY, which was honestly to build my relationship with this person, but i didn’t quite know or understand what that actually meant in reality. i assumed the old friendships and career prospects would flower naturally by my mere presence here and it hasn’t turned out that way yet. the friends i had when i got here are all extremely talented ambitious people in their fields, all working on huge career defining projects and they are simply too busy and emotionally unavailable to meet me where i am, having just finished a huge career defining project myself and needing to rest and be in a different mode of living than the decade long mentality i had had of struggling against a system or trying to build or express something profound in response to a grand historical entity through my work. i didn’t wanna talk about racism on my walks anymore or white supremacy at brunch, having done it for so long. it’s not that it’s not relevant, but who else am i and what do i need? of course this is still my work. i am privileged enough to have been exposed to so many cultural institutions which have embraced my work such as MoMA, Sundance, The American Film Institute, The Anthology Film Archives and institutions like CAL Arts, Indiana University, Brown University, The Black Film Centre Archives, Dartmouth University, The University of Kingston, WITS University, The Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, The Centre for the Less Good Idea. and others which have presented my work. this has a particular sheen to it from the outside. like i’m making big moves. to some degree yes, but most of my days are not spent like i used to in South Africa. i’m not as busy as i’ve always been. i don’t have a big new project in this city and sometimes i wonder if moving here was the right decision because I don’t have the hunger of a 28 year old to hustle and climb in the way that’s needed to make it here. it’s been humbling to realize that i need to move in a different way because i didn’t come to NY for my career, hoping to meet someone as a second priority. it was the other way around. it took me a while to understand this and to recalibrate my brain to not feel like i’m failing at “making it” because i’m doing a different kind of labour in the last year and a half. i’m also making new friends along this axis and they are as delicate and refreshing as morning dew.
i usually joke about this at dinner parties but i have never cleaned this much in my life. imagine having to do your paying job and then all the cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, dishes, laundry when you’ve had domestic help all your life. americans are a marvel to watch in this regard. i’ve never met more hard working people. when my everyday life began to reflect how much domestic work i was cultivating, i became stressed and confused about what i was doing here. i’ve never really taken this personal side of life seriously enough as something to “work” on. but that’s exactly what i’ve been doing. i’ve had to change the scale of my priorities from global to extremely local, meaning i’ve been learning to deal with personal, intrinsic, immediate surroundings issues like daily home care, understanding my body, dealing with the fear of true intimacy and other things buried deep underneath the more exhibited aspects of my identity like race, class and gender etc.
my husband worked outside of the home for most of our 2 year relationship and would leave at 8am and return at 7.30. even though he does a lot of home care that is different to mine. he does the trash, plant care, rearranges the furniture once a month, makes headboards and tables and trays from wood, does all the heavy lifting, driving and periodic deep cleaning. i do all the cooking and cleaning because we couldn’t work out a practical schedule for when to do the thorough weekly clean. we have different approaches. i clean as i go and like to wake up to a clean house. he lets things pile up and then does a big clean. as the person who is home based, i can’t deal with an upside down house so i end up doing the cleaning anyway. when i couldn’t work here for 8 months, i had to depend on him financially (and still do because i’m still learning how to make money with documentary filmmaking) which all of my instincts, family, internet guides, feminist financial planning gurus - are against! but the reality was the reality and while it grated the cheese out of my self confidence and potency as a second wave feminist, i learned a hell of a lot about vulnerability and letting myself trust, let go of control and be loved. it has brought me the closest to another human being as i could ever have imagined. and that too has been “work”
b: the compounding effects of so many big and small things being new at the same time
- moving countries and accidentally becoming an immigrant
- living with a man for the first time
- marriage
- learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road
- the confidence see-saw that happens with meeting new people who don’t end up sticking around
- not being around my language and vernacular culture (not being around ABANTU)
- not being around my long term friendships which were very easy and well worn
- the battle of the schedules
- walking to and from getting groceries and up 3 flights of stairs with said groceries
- money and how much that money nerve in your brain is always throbbing in new york
- navigating the street cleaning parking reality (which i lowkey love as a way of cutting one’s teeth in this city)
- not having help from random men of the society to lift and carry things like we do in SA
- having to do laundry outside the home
- cleaning without Handy Andy or Domestos yehova!!!! sorry America but there are no proper cleaning products here. the only product that is superior to South African cleaning products is the Brillo Steel Wool Soap Pad. that little soap pad is amazing and beats regular steel wool from home but on other products to clean surfaces, kitchens, bathrooms etc i have never been satisfied.
- not having a dishwasher
- Jenny, my former domestic helper in Joburg would come every second Wednesday for 11 years to
help me manage the upkeep of my home, which was also my office. she used to iron. i don’t know how to iron.
i feel a little unserious (like, okay miss Africa we get it) writing this list down
in the midst of serious global catastrophes in the middle east, parts of Africa
and the very serious and painful challenges for immigrants happening in this city, this country and the world,
but these are the stubborn set of things that i have actually been dealing with
which have reduced my computer time and forced me to focus on life at a much smaller, more provincial scale and to recognise that actually,
that is also political, not that i need to frame things that way to legitimate my existence, but it’s been instructive because this is what the outside work i did was actually fighting for - the ability to live one’s unremarkable life peacefully.
the reduction has also come with some painful friendship losses, an inertia about
what’s next and how to be in this new skin, but also more clarity about what is important in these uncertain times,
and what role i can play from where i am to engage and be in concert with
humanity.
i’ve been trying to create at a solid structure for the last 18 months
and aluta continua comrades.
today i woke up at 6.30 and snoozed until 7.10 last week i tried ursula leguin’s famous writing schedule, which involves waking up at 5.30.
sleeping in the afternoon like i used to do
seems a bit embarrassing in a high productivity place like NY but i’m trying not to let that get to me
MILISUTHANDO the film is getting ready to be released in
North America on 1 October on a very special streaming platform.
my team and i are working on a plan for where the film will become available in SA and the rest of the world. i’m writing some new things but have no idea where they will end up or what they will be yet,
Warren put a couch in my office for me to read more, which i really appreciate.
i’m reading a few books that sweep the inertia out of me. (on Xhosa folk tales and their history) i’m trying to rebuild my spiritual life in new continent
being a lot more gentle to my body
and i’m cooking all the time, which i love.
this is where i am this season,
which i want to call The Season of Tending
today i ate a home made bowl of ramen that i wish i could have taken a photo of cos it was so good.
i bought chicken feet from Mast Market on the Upper West Side where I got on Tuesdays (amazing matcha latte)
and cooked them for 5 hours with water, onions, garlic, sesame oil and black peppercorns.
then i added some taiwanese pork floss (umami forward dried pork dust) and
cooked it for another hour. Warren drained the broth, which was opaque and stored it in the
fridge for 3 days. then i bought gluten free ramen noodles, cooked them in a separate pot,
boiled 2 eggs for 8 minutes each, chopped up some spring onion and warmed up the broth with some kale.
when it was hot, i dished it in two big bowls, added the noodles, deshelled and cut the eggs in half, placed them on top of the ramen, sprinkled some sesame seeds on there, some sesame oil, some tamari and served.
happy youth day South Africa. happy Juneteeth America.