02 / Zulfah Otto-Sallies · A creative inheritance
She made room
for stories.
And for people.
My mother’s legacy lives on stages, on screens, in books and classrooms—and in the people she helped become artists.
Zulfah Otto-Sallies was a writer, playwright, lyricist, filmmaker and educator whose work carried the language and inner life of the Bo-Kaap into wider public view. Her achievement was not simply to represent a place. She gave its women and young people the complexity, humour, contradictions and authority to tell their own stories.
Her work moved between forms without losing its roots. A musical could become a novel; a family conversation could become a film; a young person at our door could become a filmmaker. That is the creative world I grew up inside.
01 / Theatre that travelled
From the Bo-Kaap
to an international stage.
Diekie vannie Bo-Kaap reached the Baxter Theatre in 1992 with a cast of 22 young actors. She wrote and directed the musical, placing a community’s own voices at the centre of the stage while South Africa was still under apartheid.
Her theatre extended to Koesister Mentality, Echoes from the Ghettos and Rainbow and the Moon Princess. Her dance musical Rosa travelled to Malaysia in 1994 and Indonesia in 1997: work grounded in the Cape reaching audiences across the world.
Theatre archive ↗ Theatre and cinema history ↗
02 / A life in Afrikaans literature
A story that stayed
with generations of readers.
Diekie was also a book. Published by Tafelberg in 1997, Diekie vannie Bo-Kaap became a high-school setwork. The Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre records more than 30 reprints—a literary life far beyond its first performance.
Her writing reached beyond that novel. Her story ’n Beter lewe vir Mams appeared in Keerpunt; her work was also included in Biltong en Barakat and Sweef en ander verhale. School examination papers on Storiejoernaal placed ’n Beter lewe vir Mams before another generation of learners. These were stories read, discussed and studied, carrying Cape voices into the classroom.
Author archive ↗ Sweef collection ↗ School literature record ↗
03 / Women behind—and inside—the frame
Love of a community.
The courage to question it.
In Raya, part of the Mama Africa project, she explored three generations of women in the Bo-Kaap. Through the Eyes of My Daughter brought our own relationship to the Berlin International Forum in 2004. Don’t Touch confronted the tensions between a teenager’s independence, family authority and cultural expectations.
Her screen work was wider still. The 2004 festival archive lists Kap and Driver, Stompie and the Red Tide, Whispers from the Cape Flats, From Zambian Soil, The Cape Minstrels and In Die Matrix among her earlier credits.
She spoke about the closeness of the Bo-Kaap as both a source of belonging and a pressure on individual lives. Her films held both truths. They made space for Muslim women to be complicated people, and for daughters to question the world they inherited without surrendering their connection to it.
Zulfah, in her own words ↗ Berlin festival archive ↗
04 / Opening the next door
Ahead of her time.
Making a way for others.
Being a Muslim woman with a public creative voice brought resistance. In interviews collected in her author archive, she recalled hostile letters and calls around Diekie. She kept creating, studying and taking work abroad. Her example challenged assumptions about who could lead, whose language belonged in art and what a woman’s life could encompass.
Her leadership included directing the Community Video Education Trust and curating for the Cape Town World Cinema Festival. She completed a master’s degree in Visual Arts, Multimedia and Theatre in Amsterdam. The learning did not stop with her.
In her tribute, filmmaker Nadine Cloete remembers borrowed equipment, late-night editing support and the confidence of being called a filmmaker. She also records Oliver Hermanus’s account of the welcome and guidance he received as a teenager. Our home was a place where young people could begin.
That is the inheritance I carry into my own work: take the story seriously, share what you know and make room for the person coming next.
Read Nadine Cloete’s tribute ↗ Filmmaker profile ↗
