By Gillian Schutte
Tomorrow, September 14, Kai would have turned 25. My heart explodes with an unbearable longing, wondering what he would look like now, his gangly phase behind him, his features maturing, his eyes still bright with the light of his dreams.
I ache to know where his talent in filmmaking might have taken him, what stories he would have told, what magical worlds he would have created. Instead, I am left with the memory of finding his lifeless body in his bedroom on December 1, 2019, just two months after his twentieth birthday.
There are no words to describe what happens to a mother who finds her child after suicide. It's like an atomic explosion that obliterates everything you ever believed to be true. Your solar plexus implodes, your heart shatters, and your womb is torn from your body. You hear a disembodied, primal scream that is both yours and not yours. You fall into a timeless black hole, with no material safety holds to cling to, and you keep falling and falling and falling. Read my early account here.
Sipho had to take Kai down while I struggled to phone an ambulance through my screams. He was the father who had cut the umbilical cord of his son at his birth, and now he had to cut the cord from around his neck at his death. His pain and trauma are immeasurable.
Kai’s decision to leave this realm was not made lightly, as I learned in the months following his suicide. During that time, I discovered that he was caught in a desperate struggle against a darkness that had taken root within him—anxiety, depression, and at times, rage—nurtured in a broken heart by a world seemingly conspiring against his very essence. His anger was not his alone; it was the rage of a young spirit, overwhelmed by shadows others projected onto him—a press distorting truth about his parents into grotesque spectacle, friends who turned their backs on him in envy and betrayal, and a society that found satisfaction in the suffering of the other.
He once described to me that he felt like a vessel for all that was denied, repressed, and unacknowledged in others, a target for those unwilling to confront their own emptiness and shadows lurking in their inner selves. Kai was gifted with exceptional looks and a magnetic, compassionate personality. Like many beautiful people, those around them tend to claim them as any one of their unstable fantasies and he was dealing with this in real time. It caused a schism between who he knew his authentic self to be and the shallow rendition of who he was expected to be for every new person that came into his life.
At his most vulnerable, and after a two month cancel campaign orchestrated by his closest male frenemy, he was banned from an event that he had helped build and falsely accused - ironically by those he trusted most. Their desire, eros and malice wrapped around him like a straitjacket, seeking to snuff out his inner light. This was the culmination of Kai’s struggle—not only against his own inner turmoil but against the shadow selves’ others had thrust upon him. In the end, the unbearable burden of this collective projection led him to his death—an attempt to escape the shadows that had begun to overwhelm him, along with the added anxiety of watching his parents being destroyed in the media.
I have come to accept that there was a certain courage in his decision to end his life on his own terms, as a last act to regain the agency others had clawed from his very being.
In my grief, I could not remain silent. The relentless shadow-dance of falsehood had already laid its claim upon me in the year before Kai’s suicide, when Odwa Shweni, our dear friend and cast member, fell to his death on our film set in April 2018. The press seized upon this tragedy, with one Charl Blignaut leading the charge, seemingly salivating at the chance to craft a narrative that painted us as murderers, villains without conscience, delighting in the spectacle of our supposed guilt. His tabloid rendition of that fateful day spread like wildfire, and every adversary I had ever encountered crawled out of the woodwork, relishing the opportunity to take me down.
The truth was different. We had planned every detail with care, from safety measures to choreography, but the press ignored the facts, creating a story that suited their need for drama. The footage showed the real story: Louw Venter, our lead antagonist, taking control of the shoot in our absence, ignoring safety protocols, and deviating from the rehearsed choreography, leading directly to Odwa’s (accidental) death. He apparently, told every paper that the director had called the shot, but evidence shows a very different story.
The attack on us was relentless. This included the South African Guild of Actors (SAGA), which chose to use Odwa’s death as political football to lobby for actor’s rights and spread gross untruths about us based on accounts from a camera crew and Venter, who were desperate to cover up their role in the accident, including their disregard for contractual film set law. Chair of SAGA, Jack Devnarain pontificated loudly on social media on a list of falsified transgressions, followed by Rehad Desai, and his organisation, IPO, who claimed we had no permissions to be there, no contracts, and other fictions. Desai went so far as to claim publicly that he expected me to be found guilty of manslaughter soon. He seemed to savour the idea of getting back at me for being the only film critic in the world to write a critical review of his film, "Miners Shot Down," for its ignorance of women's agency and role in the struggle for justice in Marikana and for overlooking the entire matter of Lonmin and its white London management team’s clear participation in the heinous massacre of 34 of its employed miners.
Melody Emmett wrote an account of the accident in Business Day without contacting us for our side of the story, and when my account came out, she insisted publicly that we were lying. She went as far as to WhatsApp me and accuse me of lying when I asked her why she had not contacted us for our side of the story. She quoted Charle Blignaut as her source, stating that he gave her permission to use his “research” in her article.
We watched in real-time as these characters, among others like Marianne Thamm, along with Charl Blignaut, openly plotted on Facebook and X to expedite the case, seemingly to ensure the arrest of Sipho Singiswa (my life partner) and me. Thamm went as far as to declare a few times on public social media platforms that she “suspects a police cover-up” in some sort of fantasy that I wield major power in high places. Previously she had written into a dreadful whodunnit article a connection between my whistle blowing on Judge Mabel Jansen’s overt racism as a move to interfere with Julius Malema’s tax case. The mind boggles, since the entire exposure of Jansen happened on my Facebook page and was eventually shared on Black Twitter, where justice was finally found after a year of me agitating for action. Equally mind boggling was the matter of how many middle-aged white men claiming to be anti-racist activists jumped on the band wagon, linking the film accident to my demonic outing of a racist judge. (?)
It seemed that anyone with a gripe against my writings critical of liberalism, neoliberalism, US foreign policy and media propaganda found a niche in this backlash. No one was interested in the truth from our perspective.
Out of respect for Odwa’s family and the ongoing investigations, we stayed silent. But this silence allowed the falsehoods to spread and the lies to take root. When I could no longer bear it, two months after Kai’s death, I wrote my account, exposing the reckless assumptions and baseless accusations, revealing what really happened. That’s when the attacks began.
Capella Riley, someone I do not know and have never met, struck first, her words sharp with malice: “Gillian Schutte REALLY!!!!!!! DISGUSTING that you can lie. Your loss of your son has only partly paid the price for all your abuse and dark lies about crew and cast!!!” Her words were, in Jung’s framework, a brutal example of the shadow's projection—an attempt to cast her unresolved darkness upon me, to cleanse herself of her discontent by making me its target. She did not stop there. She accused me of withholding money from Odwa’s family, twisting my grief into an accusation: “Given that Odwa is a family friend, WTF has she not given his family money from the R8 million that they have?” Many other names known to me joined in the attack, making wild claims about my intrinsic evil. They needed me to be the villain, to satisfy their need to disown their own shadow, their own hidden fears and desires.
Four months later, Herman Lategan joined in with his own sneering derision. This was on a friend's Facebook post, where I had commented on the use of the term “committed suicide,” suggesting that “died by suicide” was the preferred term, as it removes the notion of a crime being involved in the act of taking one's own life. Herman ambushed me with the aggressive refrain: “Oh God. Are you still around with your pedantic moaning and groaning?” Still deep in my grief, only six months after Kai’s death, his words hit my solar plexus like a hammer. He had dismissed my pain, trivialised it, reduced it to nothing. Then he went further, plunging deeper into his well of malice for me: “If I had to live with you, I wouldn’t die by suicide, I’d murder myself, that’s how bad it would be.” Here, my interest in Jungian psychology informs me, was the shadow's full capacity for cruelty, its ability to strip away all empathy, to see only its own projections staring back. After I had put the video up showing Lategan’s insensitive comments I received an email from him thanking me for the publicity. Another act of sheer hate.
Even as their words pierced my vulnerability, I recognised them for what they were—the desperate cries of shadows unable to bear looking into their own depths. I had seen this before. At age 27, I experienced an involuntary Kundalini awakening, a profound encounter with the unconscious that tore my mind wide open. In that moment, I saw the interconnectedness of all life, felt the hot white light shooting up my spine and out the top of my head—the cosmic thread that binds us all. I understood then that death was not an end but a transformation, a return to the great source of all things. This awakening dissolved much of my own fear, freed me from the grip of anxiety and depression, and revealed the truth of the divine oneness that underlies all existence.
And yet, even with this spiritual armour, the loss of a child is a wound that cuts deeper than any philosophy can reach. Kai was not just a child; he was a radiant being, a unicorn in a world that often fears its own light. His beauty, spirit, and magnetism made him a target of both desire and hatred, of Eros and envy. His death was a profound rupture in the mirage of my existence, a shattering of everything that no spiritual insight could soften. In this wound, I saw the shadow at its most potent—the projection of fear and hate by those who could not bear to confront their own inner demons. I had also beheld a radiant light and felt wrapped in an expanse of love that no earthly words can adequately describe, as if transported beyond the limits of the material world.
At the same time, I knew I could not let this cruelty slide. This unthinking dumping of unresolved darkness onto my mother-wound could not be left unchallenged. It has taken me four and a half years to process this, to emerge from the haze of grief and motherhood lost, to confront my own disgust and pain at the utter hatred and slander in their calculated attack on me. For what? For my leftist ideology, for my writing and my work in this world. I have now faced the bitter taste of my own anger, my own desire for justice—not just of the divine kind, but the human kind. I have wrestled with my own shadows of doubt, of wondering how my own golden boy, brimming with love and light, fell through my fingers. I have cried enough tears to fill a river and I have swum through that river of tears to meet myself on the other side.
I think often of the other mothers who have reached out to me since Kai's death—the corporate IT mother of Kai’s close school friend, who took his own life just a year after Kai; the sensitive artist mother who lost her teenage son to suicide nine years earlier and who reached out to aid me and Kai’s friends to comfort us in our pain; the well-known journalist mother whose own son succumbed to the same fate in the same year as Kai’s death. We are all bound together in our grief, in our loss, in our shared understanding that not all souls are made for this world, that some beings are too rarified, too sensitive, too pure, too open to endure the brutality and cruelty that so often marks human existence.
And I ask myself, are we all to stand accused of our sons' deaths? Are we to be blamed for their decisions to leave this world, to escape the pain they could no longer bear? Or can we recognise that their choices were not a reflection of our failures, but of a world that often fails to nurture its most sensitive souls? A world that can be so unkind, so unforgiving, so quick to judge, and so slow to love. A world that drives so many to the brink with its demands, its expectations, its relentless refusal to see the beauty and the fragility in each of us, including those to whom we hold up a mirror.
This is what cyber hate looks like.
Rest in Peace Kai Singiswa and Odwa Shweni – both light bearers and beautiful beings.
Do You Know Someone Who May Be Suicidal?
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Looking out for a friend or loved one is an important part of preventing suicides.
In South Africa there are 23 suicides a day recorded and 230 serious attempts.
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* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.