Very, very behind in my blogging. I’d love to say I’m a slow blogger a la Barbara Ganley, particularly given her extraordinary results to show for it (please, read and savor this post as soon as you can), but for me, alas, it’s either fast blogging or no blogging at all. Too many internal filters, I suppose, and I can’t give them time to get their tentacles (yes, my filters have tentacles–don’t yours?) wrapped too tightly.

So last week’s news, today. Last Wednesday and Thursday, UMW was honored to have a young South African author and filmmaker on our campus, Nokuthula Mazibuko. Wednesday she showed her recent documentary on the mid-70’s Soweto uprising, The Spirit of No Surrender. Thursday she read from her new novella, Spring Offensive. The latter is available as a free download from her website, http://www.thulacreative.co.za. Interestingly, Nokuthula has published this novella under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works. She invites others to tell their stories as well.

I found her visit, indeed her very presence, stirring in ways that are difficult for me to describe. There was an openness along with a tremendous sophistication, a sense of wonder along with a sense of the weight and importance of history. Her laughter sounded like bells. She sang for us as part of the reading. She told us stories of great loss and misery, but in a way that seemed to make anger or outrage, however necessary and appropriate, a lesser response. The greater response, and the theme she returned to again and again, was the basic human desire to be free.

In one of our conversations, Nokuthula told me she recognized her agenda (her word) of unity, trust, and community-building emphasized similarities instead of differences, and was thus controversial in some sectors of the conversation, here and in her native land. She is a very mature thinker and does not offer simple panaceas or naive idealism. But she does, very stubbornly and almost matter-of-factly (as Serena notes extremely well–thank you), insist on idealism, hope, and connectedness. She insists on our common humanity. To experience her firm and clear-eyed hope in the midst of such fraught and uncertain times as we live in was tremendously inspiring to me. In fact, it took my breath away. She made me feel welcome. But I’m in my home territory, you say. True enough, and yet I never felt more welcome here, as myself, than I did in her presence. Something to mull over, that.

I will follow this young artist’s work with keen interest. Thank you, Nokuthula, for sharing your work and world with us.