After posting my thoughts and observations on Invictus I could not stop thinking about South Africa and all I had read of its history. Then my son, Arun, called and we fell into a long conversation on Mandela and the three blog posts he had written. In the first post he wrote of himself in 1974 (my boy grown tall, towering over me).
Nelson Mandela 2008
“… I first heard about Mandela in the 1960s—before my teen years—, no doubt from my parents, who instilled in me a precocious indignation toward apartheid South Africa. And I most certainly mentioned his name in my first exercise at public speaking, at an all-day teach-in on South Africa at my high school—the organization of which I initiated—, on the 14th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. …”
In his second blog post on Mandela, he wrote of a documentary film, Plot for Peace, that “… tells an “untold story” of how the apartheid regime in South Africa came to an end. …” Here’s the synopsis from the film’s website … ”
His third Mandela blog post is on a biopic, Mandela, a Long Walk to Freedom,which he considered “ … acceptable. It’s engaging enough and with its strengths, though is not perfect. Squeezing the high points of a life such as that of Nelson Mandela into a 2¼ hour film would be a challenge for even the best of screenwriters and directors. …” He liked the review by Uris Avnery, as did I.
During our back and forth on South Africa I told Arun that reading about the Afrikaners had me thinking about “nationalists.” It bothers me that our President calls himself a nationalist. The American alt-right political groups call themselves nationalists when in fact they are White Nationalists, racists protecting their White privilege within our racially and ethnically diverse American nation, citizens committed to the Constitution. The Afrikaners who devised and enforced apartheid were 19th century nationalists. They believed then, and probably still believe, that the world’s people are naturally divided into nations, each nation being people who share a language, a culture, a history, physical traits, and excluding all other peoples, own a territory in which they self-govern. i.e. the nation-state. (It’s an up-graded form of tribalism.)
Routes of the largest trekking parties during the first wave of the Great Trek (1835-1840) along with key battles and events
When the Dutch, the future Afrikaners, arrived in present-day Cape Town in the 17th century, they saw the land as empty, as theirs for the taking, to farm with slaves brought in from S.E. Asia. When the Cape came under British rule in the 19th century and slavery was outlawed, up to 14,000 Afrikaners choose to make a Great Trek north, a difficult movement of families in covered wagons that ended in Natal with settling on land taken in war with the Ndebele and from the Zulu. An Afrikaner religious holiday celebrates the 1838 Trekkers victory over the Zulu.
Beginning in 1886, farming ceased being the country’s main industry. Diamonds had been discovered near Kimberly and the world’s largest gold rush ever began, the Witwatersrand gold rush, followed by the mining of minerals, of coal and iron ore, all of which created jobs for a very large number of both White and Black workers. It meant the growth of cities and urbanization of the Bantu people, of their taking on a South African identity beyond their tribal identities.
In 1934, the country became a dominion within the British Empire. In 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated government instituted apartheid, the enforced separation of races,
using all means of persuasion and violence to convince the Black majority that they were separate nations and must reside in, become citizens of, several self-governing territories, the Bantustans. In cities, residential segregation was strictly enforced, with Africans living in “townships.” The British remained separate from Afrikaners but were accepted within the ruling affluent White upper caste. In 1961 the country became the Republic of South Africa. In 1994, Mandela was elected President and apartheid ended.
I liked the way Arun ended his first blog post on Mandela. He wrote that the level of political violence was high in the final years of the apartheid regime, that the orderly transition was no sure thing even with Mandela leading it, and quoting from an expert on South Africa’s apartheid, he continued with — “An organized group of Afrikaner rejectionists, led by General Constand Viljoen, were hostile to President F.W. de Klerk’s negotiations with Mandela and the ANC. They were heavily armed and ready to launch an OAS-style terror campaign in 1994, which, had it come to pass, would have plunged South Africa into a heretofore unheard of level of violence, brought about a bloodbath, and upended the transition, resulting in a who-knows-what outcome but that would have most certainly been catastrophic. However, Mandela, just prior to the ’94 election, invited Viljoen and associates to his Johannesburg villa and, speaking to them in Afrikaans (which he had learned on Robben Island), assured them that the white minority would have its full place in the new South Africa and that there would be no retribution or vengeance. With that, Viljoen & Co were disarmed, both figuratively and literally. They dropped their plans for a terror campaign and agreed to participate in the transition. If Mandela’s gesture was not the mark of greatness, then I don’t know what greatness is.”
Cry Freedom gives an authentic picture of life under apartheid during the late 1970s – of the Afrikaners’ pride in their history, of the British White subculture, of how apartheid affected the lives of both Blacks and Whites who protested, of police violence and the people’s suffering. We see Kevin Klein as Donald Woods, British South African family man in his forties, Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper critical of the South African government, and Denzel Washington as Steve Biko, Xhosa, a charismatic anti-apartheid activist, tall, handsome, fearless, brilliant, unusually gifted, a writer and highly effective speaker. The Director is Richard Attenborough.
Roger Ebert reviewed the movie in 1987 and complained, as did other reviewers, that the movie promises to be an honest account of the turmoil in South Africa but focuses instead on White people. “ ,,, Whites occupy the foreground and establish the terms of the discussion, while the 80 percent non-white majority remains a shadowy, half-seen presence in the background. Yet “Cry Freedom” is a sincere and valuable movie, and despite my fundamental reservations about it, I think it probably should be seen. – and — Although everybody has heard about apartheid and South Africa remains a favorite subject of campus protest, few people have an accurate mental picture of what the country actually looks and feels like. It is an issue, not a place, and “Cry Freedom” helps to visualize it. …”
Here for a detailed account of the movie’s plot. Additionally, excellent background information is provided on Biko uniting Black community organizations, student groups and unions under the Black People’s Convention, and his social work approach to resisting apartheid.
It is noted that the reviewers praised the acting and the crowd scenes but considered the movie, negatively, as a White man’s story. Some discussed it as a White Savior film, but I would not include Cry Freedom in that genre. The movie is, after all, based on a book written by a White South African journalist on how the apartheid government acted against him and his family as well as against Steve Biko. Woods the journalist is naturally in scenes that show the Afrikaner political framework, political personnel and policy, that present Afrikaner history and Afrikaner mindset, but most of the movie is about Woods and Biko, two men of equal stature from opposite sides of the society becoming friends, both influenced and aided by the Catholic Church. (Bishop Desmond Tutu at that time was a priest in the Anglican Church based in the independent states of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, formerly British Protectorates.) Biko and Woods are shown working against apartheid while each is under house arrest, each banned from meeting with more than one person at a time, each being guarded and spied upon by government agents to prevent him from writing, from publishing anything he had already written. The police murdered Biko and were arranging prison or worse for Woods.
Unfortunately, the movie’s ending, while based on what actually happened, is over-long, gets lost in the complexities of South Africa’s unusual governmental structure, and is all about Woods. He and family had to escape from South Africa but a more fitting denouement for the story could have been devised.
Invictus had me puzzling over the nature of South African society and its history, over Afrikaner nationalism, the current rise of nationalism and White nationalism. Cry Freedom touches on another issue that has become part of life today in the U.S. – a serious concern for freedom of the press and the future of our democracy. It was the press getting information about South Africa out to the world that finally brought apartheid to an end. While watching the movie I wished for more emphasis on the role a free press played in fighting an authoritarian police state, in rallying moral outrage internationally to bring down apartheid and pave the way for Mandela to become President of a democratic government.
Regarding Steve Biko and the importance in his life of a steady flow of information from the outside world — South Africa today has one of Africa’s worst school systems. Under apartheid schools for Black children were few, nearly non-existent, but Biko was fortunate. He attended the Church of Scotland’s Lovedale education and training institute in Eastern Cape Province, Xhosa homeland and near East London. He continued on to study medicine at the University of Natal and there joined the National Union of South African Students, an organization dominated by well-intentioned White liberals who were polite with their few Black members but, as Biko realized, could never understand the experience and needs of the Black majority. He left the organization and became a leader in the Black Africans Students’ Organization, (“Black”meaning Bantu, Coloured and Indian) whose official ideology was Black Consciousness, known to South African students from the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, an American scholar.
By the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung foundation.
Biko read widely and was influenced, as were many revolutionaries, by Frantz Fanon, the famous physician, psychologist and philosopher from Martinique who lived and worked in France. (Ravi and I were familiar with one of Fanon’s many books, his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth.) In the movie, Biko is shown in a trial setting using the words “Black” and “White” to designate South Africans of non-European and/or European descent, and states that Black is Beautiful, a phrase from the African-American Black Power movement, which he obviously had been following, all without any indication in the movie that he was knowledgeable about what was happening in race relations across the world.
Biko is known as leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, so I tried writing its meaning in a brief statement, in a sentence or two, but found the ideas it encompasses too complex for that. Biko’s Black Consciousness did entail, though, the Bantu people and other non-Whites in South Africa taking pride in their own identities, feeling equal to the Whites, taking charge of themselves and their communities and letting the White society and government know they planned to peacefully bring about change. Most Afrikaners and some British saw it as a threat to their way of life.
Part of the Biko-Woods friendship evolved from their sharing and discussing the philosophies that underlay their opposition to apartheid. For example, from an obituary of Wendy Woods, one very much worth reading, “ … Wendy went to visit Biko during one of his terms in prison – this time for “defeating the ends of justice”. On being told that “whites never visit blacks in jail”, she demanded to see the commandant. 
Biko was brought in, angry and withdrawn. His face lit up on seeing Wendy, but with the jailers in the room he adopted his usual stony approach of drawing a veil between himself and his interrogators. Wendy handed him George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and left.”
Biko’s coffin featured the motif of a clenched black fist. Many in the Black Consciousness Movement used this fist as a symbol.
Steve Biko. Stained glass window by Daan Wildschut in the Saint Anna Church, Heerlen (the Netherlands), ca. 1976. One of 12 modern saints and martyrs.
A trailer for Cry Freedom has the Woods-Biko friendship as the movie’s theme. I think about how the story could have been structured with freedom of the press and democracy as its theme. In the movie, Wendy questions her husband about writing a book on Biko, and I cannot remember his response. I can, though, think of what it should have been. I am struck by the religious nature of both the men, both affiliated with a church and each grounded in humanitarian concerns. The ANC was political, a fight for Blacks to participate in government; the Black Consciousness Movement insisted on the equality and the equal rights of all persons, no matter what their race or ethnicity, and that this be recognized and officially accepted. Equality and equal rights are the very basis of a democratic government. Biko led a moral crusade and was made known to a world-wide public through Woods’ writing and international advocacy. For Black South Africans, Biko died as a saint.
Perhaps the press as an instrument for democracy in this setting would be difficult to write into the movie’s action and dialogue, but a knowledgeable and skillful screenwriter could do it. In Marshall, the screenwriters, Michael Koskoff, a lawyer, and his son Jacob, a professional screenwriter, dramatized the action and dialogue of that movie in such a way that I learned from it as well as being entertained.
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Iris sans frontières 
Cry Freedom – Addendum to Invictus, learning from history
Posted in Comments on interesting movies on November 6, 2018| 2 Comments »
After posting my thoughts and observations on Invictus I could not stop thinking about South Africa and all I had read of its history. Then my son, Arun, called and we fell into a long conversation on Mandela and the three blog posts he had written. In the first post he wrote of himself in 1974 (my boy grown tall, towering over me).
Nelson Mandela 2008
“… I first heard about Mandela in the 1960s—before my teen years—, no doubt from my parents, who instilled in me a precocious indignation toward apartheid South Africa. And I most certainly mentioned his name in my first exercise at public speaking, at an all-day teach-in on South Africa at my high school—the organization of which I initiated—, on the 14th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. …”
In his second blog post on Mandela, he wrote of a documentary film, Plot for Peace, that “… tells an “untold story” of how the apartheid regime in South Africa came to an end. …” Here’s the synopsis from the film’s website … ”
His third Mandela blog post is on a biopic, Mandela, a Long Walk to Freedom,which he considered “ … acceptable. It’s engaging enough and with its strengths, though is not perfect. Squeezing the high points of a life such as that of Nelson Mandela into a 2¼ hour film would be a challenge for even the best of screenwriters and directors. …” He liked the review by Uris Avnery, as did I.
During our back and forth on South Africa I told Arun that reading about the Afrikaners had me thinking about “nationalists.” It bothers me that our President calls himself a nationalist. The American alt-right political groups call themselves nationalists when in fact they are White Nationalists, racists protecting their White privilege within our racially and ethnically diverse American nation, citizens committed to the Constitution. The Afrikaners who devised and enforced apartheid were 19th century nationalists. They believed then, and probably still believe, that the world’s people are naturally divided into nations, each nation being people who share a language, a culture, a history, physical traits, and excluding all other peoples, own a territory in which they self-govern. i.e. the nation-state. (It’s an up-graded form of tribalism.)
Routes of the largest trekking parties during the first wave of the Great Trek (1835-1840) along with key battles and events
When the Dutch, the future Afrikaners, arrived in present-day Cape Town in the 17th century, they saw the land as empty, as theirs for the taking, to farm with slaves brought in from S.E. Asia. When the Cape came under British rule in the 19th century and slavery was outlawed, up to 14,000 Afrikaners choose to make a Great Trek north, a difficult movement of families in covered wagons that ended in Natal with settling on land taken in war with the Ndebele and from the Zulu. An Afrikaner religious holiday celebrates the 1838 Trekkers victory over the Zulu.
Beginning in 1886, farming ceased being the country’s main industry. Diamonds had been discovered near Kimberly and the world’s largest gold rush ever began, the Witwatersrand gold rush, followed by the mining of minerals, of coal and iron ore, all of which created jobs for a very large number of both White and Black workers. It meant the growth of cities and urbanization of the Bantu people, of their taking on a South African identity beyond their tribal identities.
In 1934, the country became a dominion within the British Empire. In 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated government instituted apartheid, the enforced separation of races,
using all means of persuasion and violence to convince the Black majority that they were separate nations and must reside in, become citizens of, several self-governing territories, the Bantustans. In cities, residential segregation was strictly enforced, with Africans living in “townships.” The British remained separate from Afrikaners but were accepted within the ruling affluent White upper caste. In 1961 the country became the Republic of South Africa. In 1994, Mandela was elected President and apartheid ended.
I liked the way Arun ended his first blog post on Mandela. He wrote that the level of political violence was high in the final years of the apartheid regime, that the orderly transition was no sure thing even with Mandela leading it, and quoting from an expert on South Africa’s apartheid, he continued with — “An organized group of Afrikaner rejectionists, led by General Constand Viljoen, were hostile to President F.W. de Klerk’s negotiations with Mandela and the ANC. They were heavily armed and ready to launch an OAS-style terror campaign in 1994, which, had it come to pass, would have plunged South Africa into a heretofore unheard of level of violence, brought about a bloodbath, and upended the transition, resulting in a who-knows-what outcome but that would have most certainly been catastrophic. However, Mandela, just prior to the ’94 election, invited Viljoen and associates to his Johannesburg villa and, speaking to them in Afrikaans (which he had learned on Robben Island), assured them that the white minority would have its full place in the new South Africa and that there would be no retribution or vengeance. With that, Viljoen & Co were disarmed, both figuratively and literally. They dropped their plans for a terror campaign and agreed to participate in the transition. If Mandela’s gesture was not the mark of greatness, then I don’t know what greatness is.”
Roger Ebert reviewed the movie in 1987 and complained, as did other reviewers, that the movie promises to be an honest account of the turmoil in South Africa but focuses instead on White people. “ ,,, Whites occupy the foreground and establish the terms of the discussion, while the 80 percent non-white majority remains a shadowy, half-seen presence in the background. Yet “Cry Freedom” is a sincere and valuable movie, and despite my fundamental reservations about it, I think it probably should be seen. – and — Although everybody has heard about apartheid and South Africa remains a favorite subject of campus protest, few people have an accurate mental picture of what the country actually looks and feels like. It is an issue, not a place, and “Cry Freedom” helps to visualize it. …”
Here for a detailed account of the movie’s plot. Additionally, excellent background information is provided on Biko uniting Black community organizations, student groups and unions under the Black People’s Convention, and his social work approach to resisting apartheid.
It is noted that the reviewers praised the acting and the crowd scenes but considered the movie, negatively, as a White man’s story. Some discussed it as a White Savior film, but I would not include Cry Freedom in that genre. The movie is, after all, based on a book written by a White South African journalist on how the apartheid government acted against him and his family as well as against Steve Biko. Woods the journalist is naturally in scenes that show the Afrikaner political framework, political personnel and policy, that present Afrikaner history and Afrikaner mindset, but most of the movie is about Woods and Biko, two men of equal stature from opposite sides of the society becoming friends, both influenced and aided by the Catholic Church. (Bishop Desmond Tutu at that time was a priest in the Anglican Church based in the independent states of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, formerly British Protectorates.) Biko and Woods are shown working against apartheid while each is under house arrest, each banned from meeting with more than one person at a time, each being guarded and spied upon by government agents to prevent him from writing, from publishing anything he had already written. The police murdered Biko and were arranging prison or worse for Woods.
Unfortunately, the movie’s ending, while based on what actually happened, is over-long, gets lost in the complexities of South Africa’s unusual governmental structure, and is all about Woods. He and family had to escape from South Africa but a more fitting denouement for the story could have been devised.
Invictus had me puzzling over the nature of South African society and its history, over Afrikaner nationalism, the current rise of nationalism and White nationalism. Cry Freedom touches on another issue that has become part of life today in the U.S. – a serious concern for freedom of the press and the future of our democracy. It was the press getting information about South Africa out to the world that finally brought apartheid to an end. While watching the movie I wished for more emphasis on the role a free press played in fighting an authoritarian police state, in rallying moral outrage internationally to bring down apartheid and pave the way for Mandela to become President of a democratic government.
Regarding Steve Biko and the importance in his life of a steady flow of information from the outside world — South Africa today has one of Africa’s worst school systems. Under apartheid schools for Black children were few, nearly non-existent, but Biko was fortunate. He attended the Church of Scotland’s Lovedale education and training institute in Eastern Cape Province, Xhosa homeland and near East London. He continued on to study medicine at the University of Natal and there joined the National Union of South African Students, an organization dominated by well-intentioned White liberals who were polite with their few Black members but, as Biko realized, could never understand the experience and needs of the Black majority. He left the organization and became a leader in the Black Africans Students’ Organization, (“Black”meaning Bantu, Coloured and Indian) whose official ideology was Black Consciousness, known to South African students from the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, an American scholar.
By the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung foundation.
Biko read widely and was influenced, as were many revolutionaries, by Frantz Fanon, the famous physician, psychologist and philosopher from Martinique who lived and worked in France. (Ravi and I were familiar with one of Fanon’s many books, his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth.) In the movie, Biko is shown in a trial setting using the words “Black” and “White” to designate South Africans of non-European and/or European descent, and states that Black is Beautiful, a phrase from the African-American Black Power movement, which he obviously had been following, all without any indication in the movie that he was knowledgeable about what was happening in race relations across the world.
Biko is known as leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, so I tried writing its meaning in a brief statement, in a sentence or two, but found the ideas it encompasses too complex for that. Biko’s Black Consciousness did entail, though, the Bantu people and other non-Whites in South Africa taking pride in their own identities, feeling equal to the Whites, taking charge of themselves and their communities and letting the White society and government know they planned to peacefully bring about change. Most Afrikaners and some British saw it as a threat to their way of life.
Part of the Biko-Woods friendship evolved from their sharing and discussing the philosophies that underlay their opposition to apartheid. For example, from an obituary of Wendy Woods, one very much worth reading, “ … Wendy went to visit Biko during one of his terms in prison – this time for “defeating the ends of justice”. On being told that “whites never visit blacks in jail”, she demanded to see the commandant.
Biko was brought in, angry and withdrawn. His face lit up on seeing Wendy, but with the jailers in the room he adopted his usual stony approach of drawing a veil between himself and his interrogators. Wendy handed him George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and left.”
Steve Biko. Stained glass window by Daan Wildschut in the Saint Anna Church, Heerlen (the Netherlands), ca. 1976. One of 12 modern saints and martyrs.
A trailer for Cry Freedom has the Woods-Biko friendship as the movie’s theme. I think about how the story could have been structured with freedom of the press and democracy as its theme. In the movie, Wendy questions her husband about writing a book on Biko, and I cannot remember his response. I can, though, think of what it should have been. I am struck by the religious nature of both the men, both affiliated with a church and each grounded in humanitarian concerns. The ANC was political, a fight for Blacks to participate in government; the Black Consciousness Movement insisted on the equality and the equal rights of all persons, no matter what their race or ethnicity, and that this be recognized and officially accepted. Equality and equal rights are the very basis of a democratic government. Biko led a moral crusade and was made known to a world-wide public through Woods’ writing and international advocacy. For Black South Africans, Biko died as a saint.
Perhaps the press as an instrument for democracy in this setting would be difficult to write into the movie’s action and dialogue, but a knowledgeable and skillful screenwriter could do it. In Marshall, the screenwriters, Michael Koskoff, a lawyer, and his son Jacob, a professional screenwriter, dramatized the action and dialogue of that movie in such a way that I learned from it as well as being entertained.
Read Full Post »