The Bag Factory
05.04 - 26.04.2025

Yonela Makoba’s Johannesburg show ‘Lomfazi Yindoda’ (5 –26 April 2025), curated by Tristan Baia, offered continuation of their iterative series ‘iTi: Ritual Studies’. The series engages Southern African histories, ancestral knowledges, and women’s work, finding and producing ritual practices to carry, hold and think with neglected matriarchal traditions within the Xhosa cosmological frame.

Makoba presented ‘Lomfazi Yindoda’ at ‘Number Four’ at the Constitution Hill Precinct in Johannesburg, the site of the former black men’s prison built in 1902 at what was then the Old Fort. The prison closed in 1983, and continues to be known for its brutality, its centrality in the origins of the South African ‘Numbers’ gangs, and for housing political prisoners, including Robert Sobukwe. Like much of Constitution Hill, Number Four is a deeply traumatised site. The realisation of Makoba’s ritual work in relation to the site’s history of violated black masculinities allowed iTi to further excavate the gender ambiguity and queer tonality that roots its own evolving traditions, aesthetic practices, and politicised rigour. 

‘Lomfazi Yindoda’ formed the research outcome of a 2025 residency at the Bag Factory, and included Makoba’s holding of opening and closing rituals at the site, which memorialised and created space for the traumatised histories of both the women’s and men’s sides of the prison. The opening ritual involved song, the serving of tea, and the meditation and memorialisation of a patch of grass upon which women inmates would sing every Sunday that the prison was in operation. The closing ritual shifted its focus to the history of the men’s jail. Makoba descended, covered in white clay, from an upstairs former group cell into their outdoor installation, where a large circle of coarse salt acted as the main holding pattern for the ritual — which involved song, audio of a male prisoner, and the channelling of hope to the hopeless space. 

The rituals took place outdoors under a shaded roof canopy, within a mixed-media installation including the aforementioned grass and salt patches, a large, colourfully stratified candle, and surrounding textile works — ‘curtains’, which softly closed off the area. These curtains were brought in from a previous iTi ritual and were made from patched-together dyed cloth in hues of red ochre, dark blue, white, and pastel greens, with one printed as a cyanotype. An exhibition of mixed media works made from tea bags was exhibited upstairs in one of the former group cells.

Following the weekend of their closing performance, I met with Yonela at Number Four, where we sat outside on a bench within their mixed-media installation and talked about their life, work, and the history of the site. 

THULILE GAMEDZE: Can you talk about where performance and ancestral presence meet in your work?

YONELA MAKOBA: In 2019, I went to study Butoh in Japan with Tetsuro Fukuhara. At first, I understood Butoh to be a kind of slow movement because that’s what I had seen. So the first few times I did it, I was mimicking my teacher. But then what I started to figure out and am still working on, is that it is about the space you create within yourself, almost like a void — which my teacher calls “MA”. You create an emptiness and become almost vessel-like. 

While I was in that process, I started having dreams about my grandmothers, meeting them and meeting certain animals. So learning Butoh and that movement opened up a spiritual thing in me. We talked about how the white clay used in Butoh is similar to that used in traditional Xhosa rituals. 

TG: The white clay is striking. 

YM: There’s also something that feels weird there — I feel blacker and beyond in that white clay. Mbongeni [Mtshali], a lecturer at Hiddingh Campus  in Cape Town, would say it feels like ‘hyper-blackness’.

TG: That itself is its own wormhole, very interesting. Could you talk a little bit about the title of the show, ‘Lomfazi Yindoda’? 

YM: The title comes from a conversation with a security guard at Hiddingh Campus [at the University of Cape Town] some time ago. I was telling him about iTi, and my late grandmother. He asked, “Didn’t you say your grandmother was an igqirha?” When I said yes, he said that she should then be able to ukubuyiswa, and that the ritual of ukubuyisa [generally understood to be a ritual done for men, to return their spirits home after death] should be done for her. He said “ngoba lomfazi yindoda.” 

That conversation shifted me. He complicated something that I thought was already resolved by saying that she wasn’t just a woman who would have iTi. She could actually enter the man’s kraal.

TG: And what has it been like to continue the work of iTi at Number Four? Tell me about your conceptualisation of the exhibition’s closing ritual. 

YM: Ever since I stepped here, I’ve been on the clock. Sometimes I stayed here until around eight at night, and just watched the birds get more aggressive as it got later. Things change. It feels like they know that people are gone past a particular time. Sounds travel, it is more echoey at night. 

I thought of having the closing ritual at night, but then I realised I would just be opening up a can of worms before returning to the Eastern Cape…

I am glad to be off that clock now.  

TG: It is a clock that brings traumatic timelines into the present.  

YM: Yes. As I was trying to figure out the closing ritual, I just didn’t know what to do. When I got here, the first thing I realised was that there was no life. 

There’s one part of the audio I used on Saturday, where this guy [an ex-inmate at Number Four] said “we would get so excited if we heard a woman’s voice, or if we saw a bird…” and then he started getting more excited when he said, “but if you saw a star, that’s a lucky day.” 

That was tough. 

TG: So concrete.  

YM: Yeah. It’s concrete, it’s wire… It’s a very hectic space. So the closing ritual was hard. I was tired and was asking myself, “what are you doing this for?” I felt like it needed to be done though, but the movement wouldn’t come, there was no particular song… And then one of the nights when I was here it felt like I just needed to speak, cry, sound, wail, scream, and that was the thing that felt more real than any other thoughts I had had. 

Another day I heard music [from an exhibition at Number Four]. All this time I had been here and I had not heard that… They say that from two until late the men would start singing, and they would fill Number Four with sound and music. And that was the thing that held them. That was happening in the women’s jail too, so music and sound became a connection point…  

That’s where the song and the wailing in the ritual came from. I used lyrics from Simphiwe Dana’s Ndiredi. The part that I was singing says “phantse ndamamela wena, xa usithi andinawo amandla” “I almost listened to you when you said I don’t have the strength”. 

It felt like this place is where hope comes to die. In the ritual I centered hope, and ended by saying, “na lithemba”, that there’s hope. It felt like that was an incantation, a different kind of spell to bring into the space. 

TG: What needs to be acknowledged in your work?

YM: This is an iterative practice… I don’t like doing things, but the practice of iterating gives me grace — to not know something, but to be able to say I’ll iterate. I’m okay with not knowing. I know I’m meandering, I know I’m wayfaring. Every moment becomes a learning moment as opposed to a self-flagellating moment. 

TG: Iterating seems generative — it must help to keep things moving… What else?  

YM: My work is about ritual as opposed to performance, regardless of its performative aspects. I’m very intentional about creating a ritual space. I think about moments like Saturday, and how everyone understood that something had happened — not just performance. People felt like they didn’t want to speak and became sensitive to something else. The work is more ritual and more spiritual than cues and staging (not that that describes all performance art).

TG: I did experience Saturday like this. When you left us, people were walking around the exhibition upstairs like ghosts. It was mostly silent but there were tears, and those talking and greeting were doing so very quietly, with everyone moving slowly. 

When we left and encountered you on the way out — dressed and showered and excited to be done — it felt like you released us from that intensity. 

Can you talk more about ritual?

YM: I’m trying to get to something spiritual through art or through study… When I was doing the ritual, I realised that to close a continuous line, I could treat the work like a circuit. That made me think about energy flow and then my mind went into physics, and it didn’t stay in what would ordinarily be a spiritual space. I thought about the installation as a grid or a circuit that is all connected.

TG: Interesting.

YM: I started all of this because I was at a loss for ritual. 

The first tea bag work [a hand quilted tapestry made from used tea bags] was done in 2021. The first thing that had happened was that I had just lost someone in my family, and the mourning was heavy. I dreamt there was isimnyama, almost like a shadow of death. I didn’t know what to do with that… 

Then later on, something had happened that led to my late grandfather having a ritual called ukubuyisa, calling for his spirit to come back. But it got me wondering about my grandmother. This person [my grandfather] was married, he had umlingani, they were partners. But I was told “no, women don’t get returned”. I asked different people, and realised that there was no one narrative for what people do for women. But then my mom told me that it is called iTi, which is when I started wanting to know how to perform this ritual. 

TG: Yes…

YM: In my room, I created a square and decided that we were going to figure this thing out there. I started collecting tea bags and put them in the square. Once in a while when I felt something needed to be done, I’d light a candle and sit there. I’d rip the teabags apart, and put the bags on one side and the tea on the other. I feel like those first tea bag quilts are the attempts to figure out how to ritualise. Stitching them together made sense because my grandmother used to sew. I was also thinking about the history of quilts as ‘women’s work’ and had been reading Zakes Mda’s Cion (2007), where he writes about a slave woman who ‘writes’ ways of escaping into quilts for her kids.

I also love the lesson I learnt about quilting when I was at home. It’s about time, and slowing time down, what people in the village call ‘hithi chu’. It requires a very steady hand because sewing a tea bag is different from sewing other materials. It also requires steadiness internally. 

TG: I understand something about this ‘internal steadiness’ and processes like sewing…

YM: Last year, I decided to bring the quilts back into this ritual space because I thought it really closed the circle. 

The work is energy, right? I’m exerting and transferring energy. I set up these spaces and people come, and there’s energy in that. I serve tea and there’s energy in the boiling water going into the cup, going into the hands, into the body… But then what do you do? 

Before it gets into the water, the tea bag has so much potential energy. And then its energy goes into the water — and you have this tea bag that’s left behind and can be transformed again into a quilt. It felt like an exercise of transforming to transform to transform… I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the remaining tea itself. I did think about returning it to the earth as fertiliser, but I tried that and it just doesn’t feel like my final frontier (laughs). 

TG: Fair.

YM: I then wanted to make bigger works. And the idea of making tea bags into paper came. I was wondering how I could mix soil in and create something that felt like topography. In the process of making the paper works, I realised that something was changing — something about water. At the walkabout for this recent exhibition, someone said that even though the work looks so dry and earthy, it’s such a water-based project… I’m working with the tea bags but how they move, how they go onto the screen, and how they dry is so dependent on water. 

TG: Water as the invisible hand.

YM: I love that it just felt intuitive. The only thing me and Tristan [Tristan Baia, the curator] would speak about on some days would be like, “so are you doing an all blue one today?” And I’d be like, “yeah, I think so”. 

TG: Tell me about the candles.

YM: Do you know those traditional old candle alarms? They put nails in the candle, which would have a steel base, so that when it burns and melts over time, the nail would drop and then you’d know that you need to get up. It meant that they needed to listen carefully… The candles have different coloured layers of wax. We burnt it while working and during the rituals. I was asking questions like “what happens during ‘blue time’?” There’s two artworks titled The Time Was Blue (2025) and that was my attempt to study with the candles. I’ve been thinking about the candle as a metric for time — the closing ritual, for example, happened in ‘green time’. I was also thinking about colours and strata. In earth dating, there’s this thing called ‘original horizontality’, where sediment is said to layer horizontally. So if you want to date it, you can tell what came first, what came second, etc. So I was thinking about that and about ritual time, and colours offering frequency forms. 

TG: I’m thinking about your work and how much you’ve talked about circuits. If we imagine traumatised spaces as broken circuits, perhaps you are asking the question of what kinds of practices we can do to close these circuits and get the old electricity here moving again? The trauma is not going to disappear from places like Number Four, but the 1994 project created an unhealthy break in flow. South Africans were ready to move, with a whole lot of potential energy that got trapped, that now leaks everywhere, or is ungrounded? I like that you’re talking about your work in terms of movement and circuitry…  

YM: This is making me think about something that one of the old men in a video here [within the exhibition at Number Four, Constitution Hill] talks about. He says that this place is our history and that he wants future generations to come here and to ‘get’ something. Not a vacant kind of visit… he made it seem like you can get ideas. Something can be sparked in you here. For example, I was speaking to Kamva [Kamva Matuis; artist and friend of Makoba] after the show and he was saying that it felt scary, that I looked like an unsettled umkhwetha, a new initiate, stuck in the space… 

And the other day, when we were putting the curtains up while preparing for the exhibition, a guy came through and said, “are you making umdiyadiya?” He explained that in prisons, they would take their bedsheets and make enclosures for intimate things… for sassy, cute and violent things. He said I was making something relevant to a space like this. It also connected to another friend of mine’s work, Wezile [Harmans], who had done an enclosure called Umdiyadiya (2021). [The performance work takes place within a closed off installation of hand sewn mutton cloth, where strategically placed lighting renders the artist’s moving body as only shadow, engaging themes from queer subcultures and social taboo, to more abstracted commentary related to the nebulous notions of what is seen and unseen.] 

For me, it is just about taking something and connecting the circuit so we can collectively take things from the space — lessons, songs from unseen people. 

TG: It is such an intense site to work into or work with. 

YM: When I went to the women’s jail and I saw the patch of land and a little black card that said that they used to sing there every Sunday, I was wondering how to awaken that. If every Sunday for thirty years, people were singing on a patch of land, then that’s a holy space. That is automatically a space that can come alive and be enlivened again and again. It is like a circuit, because it’s just a matter of switching it on, plugging it in and connecting all of the things. 

And then we’re up — we’re up in ways that are ancestral, energetic, and all of those things…