Romance, across African cultures, does not thrive independently or solely on love gestures between the partners involved. Its longevity, as South African producer-director Jayan Moodley makes us believe in Meet The Khumalos, is often strongly tied to family allegiances. Becoming engaged as a couple and getting married without parental consent is considered abominable to most autochthonous African traditions. These dynamics form the basis of the relationship between the Khumalos and Sitholes, two neighbouring South African families whose youthful children, Sizwe (Jesse Suntele) and Sphe (Khosi Ngema), fall in love with each other.
The narrative is as much a romantic rollercoaster and comic getaway as it is a family drama. In the opening scenes, the Sitholes, a seemingly aspirational family, have just moved into a high-brow estate, where they are introduced to their next-door neighbours, the Khumalos. This brief meet-up rekindles a deep-seated animosity between the wives of both families, Bongi Goodmore Sithole (Ayanda Borotho) and Grace Khumalo (Khanyi Mbau). We soon learn that these women used to be best friends, torn apart by a treacherous experience. However, now realising that their children seem to be getting along, the friends-turned-foes unite over the common, albeit hilarious quest to destabilise the budding union.
The plot in Meet The Khumalos mostly capitalizes on the friction and forced partnership between Grace and Bongi. With the overarching atmosphere of resentment tempered with religious humor, Jayan Moodley demonstrates mastery of the romcom and drama genre, an artistic inclination that dates back to her 2017 directorial debut, Keeping Up With The Kandasamys. Keeping Up With The Kandasamys was widely screened in the theatres as the first South African-Indian film with remarkable appeal and became the highest-grossing South African film of the year. Two years later, the sequel to the box office hit, Kandasamys: The Wedding, also co-written with Rory Booth and directed by Moodley herself, was released. This was followed by Trippin’ With Kandasamys, which premièred as a Netflix Original film in 2021, becoming the most viewed film on Netflix South Africa in its first week of release, and Kandasamys: The Baby in 2023.
Moodley has also been involved in other projects, including collaborations with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) on documentaries such as Ela Gandhi – The Hands That Serve, Finding the Peace Within and The Shembe Walk to God. But thematic patterns and stylistic nuances from her directorial chef d’oeuvre prevail in Meet The Khumalos. In Keeping Up With The Kandasamys, two women—Shanti Naidoo, an overprotective Indo-South African mother, and the posh, career-driven Jennifer Kandasamy—had to team up over an existing rivalry of theirs to thwart the burgeoning unwanted romance between their children, Prishen and Jodi. It feels, however, as though Moodley’s latest work were trapped between cinematic regurgitation and mild revisionist leaning, an attempt at replicating or outdoing her lofty antecedents.
Notwithstanding, Meet The Khumalos, when treated as a standalone craft without recourse to the filmmaker’s cinematic history, is an exemplum of excellence in modern African cinema, especially in the romcom genre. The cinematography, credited to Gavin Sterley, showcases a lot of colour and flamboyant lighting, which is not only befitting of a romantic atmosphere but also acutely captures the contemporary, sophisticated life of the middle-class in South Africa. Sterley’s shots give authenticity to the likes of the glamorous Grace, a character that embodies the pretentiousness of certain middle-class women who rose from the lower rungs of society.
Another eye-catching aspect of the production is the editing, championed by Tamara Tengende. There are moments in the film where the editor, using the cross-cutting technique, alternates between different scenes, making adroit negotiations between actions to capture the dramatic inter-family tensions. An example of this is when, following the meeting between the Khumalos and the Sitholes, the begrudging women vent their hate for each other before their respective families. Here we see how the quick switch between scenes captures the coincidental reactions of both women, establishing the major conflict in the rising action of the narrative and heightening audience expectations for how things might further unfold.
For Moodley, humour is a means to an end. It often disguises ambition in the capsule of low-brow entertainment. With this narrative tool, Moodley exposes, in a seemingly trivial and underrated manner, the dangerous potential of unhealthy rivalry and communicates the virtue of peaceful co-existence within families in a community. The reality of women making concerted efforts to stop their children from being together is itself a laughable irony. An instance is when the women trail their children to a campsite to stop them from spending the night together. While they are hidden in a bush, Sizwe casually walks over to urinate and unintentionally ends up soiling his mother’s treasured Versace bag. “There goes my bag, my Versace,” Grace quietly exclaims, careful not to draw unnecessary attention. “Now, it’s a Versa-pee,” Bongi mockingly responds. It’s in moments like this that the women’s rivalry reveals their outright overwhelming tomfoolery.
We also discover that the contrast in personalities—Grace with a sophisticated affectation as opposed to Bongi being unabashedly crass—underlies the clumsy moments in their temporary alliance. The older women come up with different strategies to bring Sizwe and Sphe apart, including setting them up with blind dates. One of the dates, Zakhole, Sphe’s long-term male friend, is a deluded up-and-coming rapper who overrates himself. “You can’t tell me that’s not a Grammy Award-winning rap right there,” Zakhole says confidently to Sphee at the end of a short session of offbeat rapping. “I mean it rhymes. And it’s loud. Very loud, so,” Sphee responds with a compliment the audience will either interpret as hilariously insincere or misguided. However, all along, one realizes that the whole energy from Grace and Bongi channeled into plotting against the children’s romance would have been better spent with the women properly communicating to address the elephant in the room and resolve their lingering differences.
While Grace and Bongi’s hate for each other is conspicuous to other characters for most of the narrative time, their husbands, Vusi (Bonga Dlamini) and Desmond (Siyabonga Shibe), maintain a secret friendship. In a scene, Grace enters her apartment unannounced and expresses her frustrations about the day to her husband, Vusi, who, unknown to her, has been inviting Desmond in. As Desmond tries to sneak out of the apartment, Vusi distracts his wife from noticing. Here, the filmmaker uses humour for dramatic irony, with the audience’s awareness of the development spotlighting Grace’s ignorance. Once again, this is an attempt at disparaging any inter-family grudges the women are keen on perpetuating. It is the filmmaker’s ingenious way of discouraging and lampooning antisocial behaviour.
Ultimately, Meet The Khumalos combines the ingredients of a good romcom, reminding us that the genre is an essential fabric of Africa’s contemporary eclectic storytelling ecosystem. The film highlights the importance of culture, as seen in the use of the indigenous Zulu with English and the reverence for Sphe’s memulo (also Umemulo). The Umemulo is a traditional ritual ceremony among the Zulu people of South Africa that marks a girl’s transition to womanhood. The film ends on this celebratory note, its resolution drawing mild comparisons to other intra-continental romcoms—such as The Wedding Party, Namaste Wahala and A Lagos Love Story, all available on Netflix Nigeria.
Meet The Khumalos is currently showing on Netflix.
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