The Tokoloshe Film

Synopsis

The final instalment of our Decolonising the Speculative strand is Jerome Pikwane’s South African horror The Tokoloshe. Busi, a young destitute woman with dangerously repressed emotions, lands a job as a cleaner at a rundown hospital in the heart of Johannesburg. Desperate for the money so she can bring her younger sister to Johannesburg, she must cope despite the predatory and corrupt hospital manager. When Busi discovers an abandoned young girl in the hospital, who believes she is tormented by a supernatural force, Busi is called to faced down her own demons in order to save the child from the abusive monster that pursues them both relentlessly. Set against the harrowing backdrop of sexual violence and child abuse in contemporary South Africa, and with a fierce heroine at the helm, this is a horror that, as with all best iterations of the genre, is as much scare as it is social commentary – not least because of resonances with the #MeToo and #Time’s Up campaigns.

Following the screening we will have a wine reception to launch Dr Rebecca Duncan’s new book, South African Gothic: Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-apartheid Imagination and Beyond (2018).