Inxeba (The Wound)

The poster for Inxeba (The Wound)

Last year, a realist film set in Africa--South Africa, to be specific--debuted, both to great fanfare and considerable controversy that has only exploded in subsequent months.  Titled Inxeba, isiXhosa for "The Wound," and directed by white South African John Trengove, the story turns on a triangle of troubled desire involving three young Xhosa men, one a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, at an initiation ritual in the mountains of South Africa. Inxeba has since received a raft of awards, including the African American Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Film, the Durban International Film Festival's awards for Best Actor and Best Director, the L.A. Outfest's winner in the Outstanding International Narrative Award, the London Film Festival's Sutherland Award for outstanding first feature, and the Mumbai Film Festival's Jury Grand Prize. It also has provoked virulent denunciation, including a demand by the Xhosa King that it be shut down; death threats against its cast; and, recently, in response to the growing uproar online and on the ground, an extreme X18 rating, essentially reclassifying it as pornography, which is most certainly is not, effectively banning it from most movie theaters in its home country. This has sparked its own backlash online.

Nakhane, as Xolani, leading
a group of initiates; Niza Jay
as Kwanda is third from left

Critics have fixed on the fact that an outsider depicted a culture he does not know or belong to, as well as on the belief that the film reveals secret initiation rites, though the film's Xhosa executive producer (Batana Vundla) and writers (Thando Mgqolozana and Malusi Bengu), and its actors note that in fact, the charges are false, and that Madiba Nelson Mandela's 1994 autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom reveals far more information about initiation rites than the film, which mainly uses the ceremonial space as a backdrop. In fact, the director and executive producer even brought in a cultural expert to ensure they were getting this correct. What the protests obscure, perhaps intentionally in some cases, is that Inxeba is a groundbreaking film, for relative progressive (at least on paper) South Africa and the continent, as assured in its direction and action as in its cinematography, and the story it tells, about queer desire, masculinities, community, and cultural tradition in contemporary society, underscores the struggles its protagonist and so many like him face, not only in South Africa and across the continent, but the globe.

Nakhane, as Xolani, with his defiant
mentee, Kwanda, played by Niza Jay

The protagonist of Inxeba is Xolani (Nakhane [Touré]), a single, soft-spoken, DL factory worker, who heads to the Eastern Cape mountainside to participate in the annual Xhosa manhood initiation rites of ukwaluka, with other men in his community. In the all-male space, the organizers' goal is to create a deep spiritual, cultural, and social bond between and among the participants, thereby cementing their senses of connection as they age into fatherhood and the community's elders. Xolani has gone through the rites himself, and acquits himself with quiet restraint, thus making him suitable as a guide and mentee for a young man from the next cycle. This time through, a wealthy resident of Johannesburg requests that Xolani to serve as his son's guide, urging him to be tough on the young man, Kwanda (Niza Jay), whom he feels is "too soft." Kwanda is in fact effeminate, openly queer, and defiantly outspoken. He appears to care more about his expensive sneakers and the lack of comfort in his lodgings in than acceding to expectations of the initiation experience, which includes not just the traumatic ritual circumcision and gatherings with fellow initiates, but avowals and toughening exercises to ensure a particular understanding of cis-hetero patriarchial black manhood.

Bongile Mantsai as Vija, comforting
Nakhane, as Xolani

The third figure in the triangle is Vija (Bongile Mantsai), an outgoing, insistently physical, lighthearted former initiate who, we quickly learn, is also Xolani's secret lover. Vija is married to a woman and on the verge of becoming a father, but he also still possesses affection and desire for Xolani, and after their effusive greeting, they are soon making love in the secrecy of an abandoned building or the high grass, and openly tussling before a campfire, their embraces and exchanges hardly as innocent as the elders and young initiates around them may believe. While Vija enjoys the sexual relationship and is drawn to Xolani, his goal is to return to his wife; Xolani, however, is in love, but tries to maintain a thin façade of sublimation and covering, to use Kenji Yoshino's term, his struggle playing out not only in his attempts to regulate his emotions around Vija, especially when the other men are around, but in his treatment of Kwanda, whom he alternately approaches with severity and understanding. Above all, he offers the multi-edged advice, which he is trying his best to live out,  though perhaps he knows Kwanda is not going to heed it: "When you go home, you don't speak of what happened here."

Nakhane as Xolani, embracing
Bongile Mantsai, as Vija

This is not Las Vegas, and Kwanda, however, sees through Xolani's mask and performance. Representing not just a new generation but the product of decades of fight for racial, political but also social and sexual liberation, in South Africa and across the globe, Kwanda presses Xolani at one point, almost as a taunt and interrogation of his mentor's participation in the ritual, "What brings you back here? Don't you miss your friends? Or your girlfriend?" Later he sizes up Xolani in devastating fashion, saying, "I see what you are. But you can't admit it." The rites are not what is going to make a "man" of Kwanda, nor are the forced chants, the taunts against his sexuality, or the threat of violence. Instead, for Kwanda what counts is being true to yourself, whether that clashes with the society and culture around you. He even begins to orbit Vija's group of initiates, and Vija himself, spurring Xolani to panic. I will avoid spoilers, but Kwanda's instincts about Xolani and Vija are correct, his inquisitiveness upsets Xolani, and the results are tragic, suggesting that no matter how progressive national and metropolitan laws and attitudes may be, longstanding cultural strictures, and the worldviews they produce, particularly among embattled and oppressed people, can produce catastrophe when they collide. The wound remains open, and is bleeding.

Niza Jay, as Kwanda, with
Bongile Mantsai as Vija

Nakhane almost effortlessly captures the emotional and physical tension bristling in Xolani, his eyes dams holding back his longing, his suffering, his tenuous and continuous attempts at self-calibration. His ability to project a gentleness and fragility within an outward hardness rings particularly true. Based on this role, if he wants it and if there are enough roles for him, he should have a long and brilliant career. (Nakhane also is an acclaimed singer, and a published novelist.) Niza Jay's Kwanda is another linchpin, embodying both an acute and delicate vulnerability that leaves him constantly open to verbal and physical assaults, and a vocal, fearless defiance that serves, at least temporarily, as a shield, not only from the other young men and elders, but from Xolani. It would not be hard to imagine these two men standing side by side without incident or even interaction in a store aisle or in a gay bar in Cape Town, but in the socially pressurized space of ukwaluka, the actors convey, through looks, gestures and words, the cataclysm that ultimately seems likely to occur. Praise also should go to Bongile Mantsai, who effortlessly brings Vija to life. The viewer never once doubts that he can make love to Xolani one minute, then banter about women and be thinking about his pregnant spouse in the next. His ability to mark out the film's visual and psychic space, modeling a particularly form of corporeal hypermasculinity, also is impressive.

Niza Jay, as Kwanda

The writers have produced a taut, often tender, psychologically and socially perceptive script that, as Trengove, who served as a co-writer, has pointed out, took inspiration from but was not an adaptation of Thando Mgqolozana's A Man Is Not a Man. Cinematographer Paul Ozgur not only manages to show the striking beauty of the Eastern Cape mountain region, but also demonstrates an ability to provide visual clarity to Trengove's sometimes deep and carefully composed scenes. Perhaps in anticipation of the criticism to come, the camera often captures elders in the background, visible but somewhat blurred, seeing but not really looking at or grasping what is unfolding under their gaze; or rather, it is not their gaze through which we see what is happening, but the queer ones, of Xolani, Vija and Kwanda. Perhaps this is what has set off the critics more than anything. It also points to the fact that we--South Africans, Africans, and the world--need more such films, how uncomfortable they might make some viewers, to parallel and complement the deservingly lauded Afrofuturist fantasies of Black Panther. What we also need are stories that show the Xolanis, Vijas, Kwandas, and their cis and trans female, male and non-binary compatriots living their lives in a variety of settings; Inxeba demonstrates that if there is funding and audience support, the talent is there to make these future stories a reality.