The last act of the narrative conveys the sedimented fragments of loss. Sorrowful. Saddening. Melancholic. Not in the Freudian (1917) register of melancholy as an indefinite, unassimilable or self-berating grief. Cheng (2001, p. 20) drives the point home: “in the long history of grief and the equally protracted history of physically and emotionally managing that grief on the part of the marginalised, racialised people… it has always existed for raced subjects both as a sign of rejection and as a psychic strategy in response to that rejection.” In any case, it is a sense of a critical consciousness of loss. Psychically and socially. The weight of exile is heavy, bearing down on those forced to leave behind everything they hold dear. For Dumile, the pain of separation is compounded by the knowledge that he may never see his family again. Forced to break ties to protect his loved ones from the oppressive regime, Dumile grappled with the guilt of abandoning them to an uncertain fate.

When he reflected on his twenty years in exile, Dumile’s thoughts inevitably turned to his wife, left behind with a growing child. The ache of their separation gnawed at him—a constant reminder of the sacrifices made in the name of freedom. There is no way of knowing what would have become of his relationship with his daughter after the unbanning of political liberation movements in the early 1990s. In theory, one would expect that without the ‘physical separation’ that grew into ‘emotional separation’ they would have had a chance to build a relationship if Dumile had lived long enough to return to South Africa. Theory is one thing and reality is another.

Dumile’s story serves as a poignant reminder of the human cost of political upheaval, the shattered lives left in its wake. Through his eyes, we bear witness to the profound grief of loss and the enduring hope that someday, against all odds, he may be reunited with those he holds most dear. Mphahlele (1976, p. 39) cites the poet Mazizi Kunene regarding exile, and his vision of home:

Our lives were ruined
Among the leaves
We decayed like pumpkins
in a mud field…

 

Bitter, neither young nor old,
Heaving and heaving like a volcano,
Multiplying with fire:
I was all things…

Zwelidumile is a visual archive. “We are presented with pieces of time to be assembled, fragments of life to be placed in order, one after the other, in an attempt to formulate a story that acquires its coherence through the ability to craft links between the beginning and the end” (Mbembe, 2002, p. 21). Plaatje (2007) writes in the epilogue of Native Life in South Africa that it is a narrative of a ‘melancholy situation’. He goes on to capture stories such as those of the Kgobadi family. The family had to hastily move from their land and home after the Land Act came into force in June of 1913. They found themselves wandering and going nowhere with their livestock with no home. They lost their cattle along the way. Their baby succumbed to the cold winter and was buried in a makeshift grave they secretly dug up in one of the farms they came across during their journey. There are several of these stories Plaatje (2007) chronicled in Native Life in South Africa. Peterson (2015) writes about Plaatje’s use of language and writing aesthetic in Native Life in South Africa. He argues that Plaatje’s unique blend of irony, melodrama, parable, metaphor, orature, proverbs and the petition genre make him a historian and writer of profound emotional narratives. A global narrative sociology, in my opinion, is one that aims to uncover and portray the subjective narratives of the marginalised.

At the 4th Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation or NEST conference in 2018, I presented a draft of the paper that later on we published (Canham et al., 2020) with colleagues at a panel discussion entitled “Triggering Objects: Narrating Grandparents through the Affective Object”. One of the main organisers of the conference was Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson, one of the writers and producers of Zwelidumile. He also chaired or moderated the panel and facilitated the conversation between us and with the audience. In the paper, we explored the affective narratives of objects pertaining to our grandfathers for their value to recuperate erased colonial and apartheid social and personal histories. The contribution my cousin and I authored was a body of published and unpublished newspaper writing by our grandfather from the 1930s to the 1970s. We discovered it a few years prior to the conference. Professor Peterson raised several points in his closing remarks to the audience at the end of the panel discussion. He then turned to the panellists as if he wanted to ensure that we have heard the point, or if we had any doubts about the value of these narratives, that on the contrary, they are very important for addressing the silences and gaps in existing archives of our histories.