Seminar Sidelights｜Good Madam: Where Do the Ghosts Still Linger?

"The classic shot of this film is right here," said Attorney Chia-yun. "Look at the drainage ditch." The film begins with a dramatic close-up—ominous suspense music plays as wastewater pours into a rusted drainage ditch. The camera then pans up, following the harsh scrubbing sound, to reveal dark-skinned hands—plump yet beginning to wrinkle—clutching a scrubbing brush tightly. Mavis is at work. Contrasting with the wastewater splashing outward is this elegant and pristine house, and she is still there dusting it, dusting the house of her white master.

"So we must ask: in post-apartheid South Africa, has segregation truly come to an end?"

Mavis: When the Era Remains Carved in People, the Ghosts of the Era Still Linger

In South Africa in the early 2000s, barely two decades had passed since the end of apartheid, a policy that had defined most of Mavis's life. After segregation ended, it remained common for Black women to work as full-time domestic caregivers. Thus, Mavis—who had been doing care work since the old days—could not quite clearly see how many remnants of the master-servant dynamic, inherent to traditional domestic labor, still lingered clinging to the modern era. She simply understood that her employer, Diane, was meant to use fine white bone china, while she herself was restricted to a mug; or that when Diane rang the bell, it was time to answer her needs. She obeyed every demand of Diane, who was now severely ill and bedridden, because without Diane, Mavis did not know where she belonged.

The era of segregation had clearly passed, yet within that era remained her entire imagination of life, her accustomed working patterns, the accumulation of all her experiences and memories, her tattered and narrow single bed, and every bit of dependence she had desperately gathered through her life just to comfort her anxieties. Apart from that era, Mavis did not yet know how to live.

"So we must ask: in post-apartheid South Africa, has segregation truly come to an end?"

Tsidi: The Era Has Ended, but the Ghosts Have Not

"It's not that Mom doesn't like this house; it's that this house doesn't seem to like Mom," Tsidi told her daughter Winnie when they moved into the house tended by her mother, Mavis.

Every corner of this house reminded Tsidi of what she had lost within its walls: a mother who could only care for other people's children, a childhood where her mother was forever absent, and a younger brother who had been brought into the house to be raised—Black on the outside, but thoroughly white on the inside, a "Coconut." Tsidi could not quite put her finger on it, but she knew for certain that ghosts haunted the house: she constantly saw Diane's personal porcelain shaking violently for no reason and caught glimpses of her brother's white, menacing smile in the darkness. She felt the ghosts in the house were trying to keep her, just as they kept the souls of generations of Black domestic workers and gardeners who lay at rest here, binding them to serve this family for eternity. The house demanded Tsidi's hands as an inheritance of labor; it demanded that she walk the eternal path of servitude trodden by those before her.

Tsidi was undoubtedly struggling. This breakdown-inducing struggle stemmed from the peculiar nature of the era that raised her, making Tsidi the only subject in the film who clearly felt ghosts reaching out to her. This ghost is metaphorized in the film through suspenseful and terrifying supernatural phenomena, but it actually speaks to the legacy of the old apartheid era. Standing in the middle, she served as the pivot connecting two generations: while she retained memories of segregation, she grew up in the post-apartheid era. To her, the notion of Black souls turned into eternal servants was not a mere legend, but the sole destiny of her parents' generation, witnessed firsthand. Now, as part of the post-apartheid generation, the road ahead was barren, yet the ghosts of the old apartheid era still roamed the land. With no guide to point toward the future, she had to cautiously and fearfully discern whether the ghosts of segregation had grasped her shadow. Tsidi walked on unsteady feet, terrified that a single misstep would mean replicating the tragic destiny of her parents' generation.

"So we must ask: in post-apartheid South Africa, has segregation truly come to an end?"

Winnie: A Lost Era Left Unremembered

For Winnie's generation, apartheid belonged to the history of decades past—it neither shaped her memories nor participated in her life. Winnie could freely go to school, unhesitatingly accept goodwill from her white classmates' parents, and switch fluidly between her mother tongue and English.

Thus, it seemed the ghosts were gone.

Yet if the ghosts were truly gone, why were Gugulethu—where Winnie and Tsidi originally lived, a place Winnie described as "dirty and stinking," filled with dense, cramped houses—and the community where Diane's house sat, with its large mansion scattered among lawns, trees, and a swimming pool, tacitly divided into two worlds by skin color? And when Winnie anxiously urged Tsidi for the field trip money that "everyone else is paying," why was Tsidi still financially strained by an amount that was clearly not a burden?

And if the ghosts were truly gone, why did Tsidi always fly into a rage whenever Winnie spoke to herself in English?

"So we must ask: in post-apartheid South Africa, has segregation truly come to an end?"

Or perhaps, even after tangible policies were abolished, South Africa—having endured fifty years of segregation—remained compelled to uphold the invisible boundaries forged long ago by years of policy enforcement: including socioeconomic status and cultural capital lagging fifty years behind, and a cultural inferiority shaped over half a century that had already seeped into skin and bone. Black South Rfricans are perhaps doomed to try to answer this question generation after generation: How do we catch up on fifty lost years amidst rigid class reproduction? And how do we regroup and re-examine ourselves before the fences of segregation are lifted, and the dominant culture overwhelms us with fifty years of privileged memory?

How Can We Discern Where the Ghosts Still Linger in a Modern Era Where They Seem Absent?

After all, humans can never outrun time, and human memories are destined to age before any lamentations concerning an era. Thus, we forget where the paths before our eyes came from, imagining that the land has no roots and that the earth naturally maintains the cleanliness and order of our fantasies.

Yet everywhere people go, there is a path from which they came, and it does not easily dissipate. The path is such, and so are the ghosts that arrive on cue along human footprints. Every contemporary nation on the road today can be distilled into a single inquiry:

How can we discern where the ghosts still linger in a modern era where they seem absent?