Zamo Mkhwanazi, director of Laundry: “Real power remains in the hands of the white minority”

In one of the first scenes of Laundry, a Black laundry owner stands silently as white officials humiliate him. The men insult him, provoke him and throw darts at photographs of Black people on the wall. Enoch Sithole cannot react without risking prison.

The scene takes place in South Africa in 1968. Enoch, a respectable owner of a laundry, has come to deliver a bribe to his Afrikaner contact in the administration. Instead, the encounter becomes a performance of racist contempt, with Enoch forced to remain impassive as his colleagues escalate their abuse.

The sequence introduces the first feature film by South African director Zamo Mkhwanazi. Laundry draws on the history of her own family to tell a fictional story about daily life under apartheid-era power structures.

The film brings together ordinary lives, forms of resistance and betrayals imposed by circumstance. It also focuses on what major historical narratives often leave aside. Mkhwanazi’s framing is captured in the film’s central political assertion: “The real power remains in the hands of the white minority.”

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The real power remains in the hands of the white minority.