Bev Ditsie: The world may be shrinking into self-preservation mode, too withdrawn to take on more

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

Puberty and breasts changed everything for Bev Ditsie. Her TV gigs playing boys dried up, depraved uncles started paying her unwanted attention and suddenly society presented her with a new set of gender rules and crushing hierarchies.

“I’ve spent my life asking ‘why’, so even as a child I would question, waiting for answers that made sense,” says Ditsie, a filmmaker, artist and activist.

When no good answers came, Ditsie had no good reasons to conform. She wasn’t going to wear a dress or “just have a baby” to make meddling aunties feel like the natural order of things was undisturbed.

It has become a simple test that has guided her sense of self and purpose, and forged a rebel spirit ready to rise to take a stand.

“This fight has been selfish really. I started acting at the age of 10; I wanted to be an actor and a musician,” Ditsie says. “Being able to express myself authentically was all I ever wanted, and I was never given those opportunities because I was neither boy enough nor girl enough. I was neither white enough nor black enough. I was all kinds of not enough.”

But it would become bigger than her. She soon realised that affirmation from a mother and grandmother who allowed her to be “their boy” and who firmly put nosy neighbours in their place was a luxury. Black lesbians were – and still are – targets to be taught a lesson, to be “raped right”, shunned and harassed.

Growing up, she also saw her singer mother suffer at the hands of abusive men – “beaten to a pulp”, she remembers. But Eaglette Ditsie encouraged her daughters to read and to be curious about the world beyond their four-roomed Soweto house.

She also didn’t shield them from candid conversations about freedom, the absence of it, and how apartheid should never be normalised.

And so Ditsie’s political consciousness, feminism and activism filled out in this frame. By the time Ditsie addressed the fourth United Nations conference on the status of women in Beijing in 1995 as a young activist, she says she felt it was her destiny to be at the podium.

“I had fought for that – I wasn’t the only activist in the fight, of course, because there were many of us, but why should it not have been me,” she says.

Owning that moment in history (“his-story”, she points out) without false modesty or hubris is acknowledging that, at that time, the struggles for a newly democratic South Africa were still sticky from too-recently spilt blood and sacrifice.

And, she says, in the mid-1990s words such as “lesbian”, “gay” or “queer” were only just becoming part of the everyday lexicon in South Africa.

She remembers that conference organisers wanted those in “the lesbian tent” to tone it down, to not disrupt the agenda and also to not run naked down Beijing’s streets.

The UN conference of 25 years ago, Ditsie says, marked huge strides forward for the rights and recognition for lesbian women, but also highlights the lull we are in now.

Deepening apathy and laziness makes society nod off too easily, she says. It has meant we’re not being critical or critically aware enough of how the world is propped up, who it serves and who is left out.

She says the world naps as capitalism and greed mean fewer people have a chance at a better life – ever. Misogyny, patriarchy and toxic masculinity are pawed at but not attacked. Racial privilege and entrenched historical advantage serve too many to actually be dismantled.

In her more subdued moments, Ditsie acknowledges that this ennui is the result of people growing bored and weary as they try to just survive.

Depleted and disillusioned people retreat to self-preservation, and also to the shallows. Ditsie predicts more pain coming, but she says it’s the crisis that is needed to edge the world to a necessary turning point.

“I am deeply spiritual and, to me, there’s a whole spiritual shift happening in the world right now. It needs to shift so that we can see and act on what is no longer serving us,” she says.

Ditsie, though, is not only about doom – she believes in humanity too much. She still believes in love and laughter in the life she shares with her partner TK in their Jo’burg home. There’s her mother, her sister and her close friends who can’t get enough of her speciality sweet chicken dish or her next South Indian curry culinary experiment.

She says she also believes in deep connection and personal responsibility and how the two are connecting in exquisite nexus now as the world needs it most.

This brings her to her fan-girl moment of the year. As 2021 began, she received a public shout-out from Brit pop star Boy George.

She whoops as she talks about his public salute to her activism for all of social media to see. Her delight is all “groupie glee”, remembering how, as a teenager, she had stumbled on Boy George, who was a revelation and a reflection of a kindred spirit.

The musician has also reached out to her personally since then.

It’s a nod to knowing that activism thrives when people show up for each other, when humanity means a project of more than one person or, as Ditsie puts it: Lesbians Free Everyone, the title of the retrospective film she made for the 25th anniversary of the UN Conference in Beijing.

Ditsie says: “It’s always been this fight to express myself in a way that I wanted to. And as a teenager when I found this pop star in this other country – Boy George – doing exactly that, it made me realise that I could do that too.”

Expression is her activism, it’s also her art – and the two are entwined. Added to this is feeling. She says it makes her activism neither cerebral nor political; it’s visceral.

“It is about feeling for me, because they tried to kill feeling. When you feel, you start to realise things and it’s then that you start to act,” she says.

Feelings and what you do with them can change the world. Ditsie may have been told differently, but she knows this now – actually, she’s always known, like she’s always been enough. DM168

5 QUESTIONS

What image is on your phone’s home screen right now?

It’s a photo of me and my partner TK. TK is carrying me on their back and we’re laughing – that’s our thing.

What would you spend your last R100 on?

I thought of home first – so milk, bread and loo paper. But if there’s something over, chips – Simba smoked beef flavour.

What’s the worst piece of advice you ever took?

“Give her another chance.” I see the good in humanity some people you meet set out to destroy.

What’s the one thing you wish you’d learnt earlier on in life?

Not to worry so much; worry calls on what you don’t want – so let go and let be!

Three books that have impacted on your life?

First is the Holy Bible, then Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name by Audre Lorde – and I will have to leave it at that because after three, it will keep tumbling to four and five…

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.