In the 1970s the legendary
American trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie remarked to Hugh Masekela, the
South African horn player that "I would like to be part of your revolution
because the people always seem to be singing and dancing", and one
could be forgiven for thinking that the struggle against apartheid from
the 1940s to the 1990s had its own distinctive soundtrack. As the country’s
violent history was unfolding, its musicians were producing the album,
finishing it in time for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, and
remixing it for the celebration of the 1994 elections.
The American director of Amandla!
A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is Lee Hirsch, known around the
South African television industry for directing kwaito music videos.
In this film he deploys the same skills he showed off there to good effect.
Chicco’s "Papa
Stop the War" was recorded during the desperate and violent late
1980s when the apartheid state increased the levels and intensity of repression
and the "comrades" turned violently on themselves, and in one
particularly effective sequence this song is played over scenes of popular
protest, the thumping beat of the music synchronised to the movement of
the dancing protesters.
Hirsch spent nine years from
1990 along with his partner Sherry Simpson researching, filming and interviewing
musicians, politicians and activists at rallies around South Africa, and
the film succeeds with its main aim, which is to testify to the power
of song and its ability to fuel struggle. Most of the songs featured in
the film became so popular that these songs -- along with the artists
who sang them -- were banned by the government.
The film, shot in the bright
colours so familiar to South Africa, opens with the exhumation of the
body of ANC political activist Vuyisile Mini from his pauper’s grave
outside Johannesburg in 1998. Mini was executed in 1964 and his body unceremoniously
dumped in a pauper’s grave -- but he was also a composer of songs
of struggle, including "Nantsi Indoda emnyama Verwoerd!" ("Here
comes the black man, Verwoerd!"). At
his exhumation and re-burial, Mini’s friends and family recall a
man of such courage and dedication that he defiantly sang one of his own
songs of freedom on his lonely march to the gallows.
The film then places Mini’s
musical contribution within the context of the broader struggle, by showing
how music fuelled resistance by black people to apartheid’s tyranny.
It takes up the story with the forced removals of 1940s, when black people
were moved from Johannesburg’s inner city (especially Sophiatown)
to the matchbox houses of Soweto. People sang a song, "Meadowlands"
(the name of the Soweto neighbourhood into which they were being moved)
at that time to express their anger and despair. "Meadowlands"
has a swing melody, and is sung in African languages, which masked its
indictment of the callousness of white racism. so that white government
officials and politicians, unable to understand, at the time thought the
song was cheerful.
Two jazz singers of that era,
Dolly Radebe and Sophie Mgcina speak about the forced removals, along
with the more well-known Miriam Makeba, who shortly afterwards went into
exile. Mgcina, a small woman with a powerful voice, probably makes for
the most powerful scene of the film when she performs the song "Madam
Please", which relays the struggles of domestic workers and gardeners
who worked in white households, but lived in the new segregated dormitory
townships. The influence of the civil rights movement in the United States
at the time is very clear on the biting ironic style of the song, which
reminded me a lot of the style of Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln or Billie
Holliday.
The film then proceeds to tell
the story of South African capitalism and its exploitation of cheap black
migrant labour, through Hugh Masekela’s song "Stimela"
("The Train") – which I have always felt brings the horror
of that system (still in operation) more clearly across than reams of
economic and sociological analyses.
"Sixteen
hours of work a day for almost no pay", sang Masekela on "Stimela"
("The Coaltrain").
"… Deep, deep
down in the belly of the earth, where they are digging and drilling
for that mighty evasive stone. They're dished up mishmash food on their
iron plates with an iron shovel or when they sit in their stinky, funky,
filthy flea-ridden barracks, they think about the loved ones they'll
never see again because they have been forcibly removed... Think about
their lands and their herds taken away from them with the gun and the
bomb and the teargas and the cannon."
The state dealt the resistance
movement a body blow with the imprisonment of the key ANC leaders for
life sentences in 1964, and the organisation’s forced exile had a
major effect on morale. The prayerful tone of "Nkosi Sikelel ’iAfrika"
("God Bless Africa"), which became very popular, captured the
widespread anguish, as did the mournful mood of "Thula Sizwe"
("Be Quiet People"). The latter morphed into the even more depressing
"Senzenina, Senzenina" ("What have we done?"). "Senzenina"
consists of the endless refrain of the title phrase. As jazz / opera vocalist
Sibongile Khumalo says in the film, "It was like beating yourself
against the head, goof, goof, goof." But this was also the time that
Abdullah Ibrahim made the song "Mannenberg", the beat of which
almost forecast the new resistance of the post-1976 generation. (Ibrahim
was then back in South Africa after a lengthy period of exile -- but he
would leave again soon.)
The style of the songs then
changed, becoming more combative and ever more urgent, and young people
were in the vanguard of this new mood. In the townships people sang of
Oliver Tambo, the exiled ANC President, bringing weapons as many went
off for training in neighbouring states in Southern Africa. The fatalism
of the period is perhaps best captured in "Shona Malanga", a
playful song dedicated to black housemaids meeting on their off-days in
central Johannesburg, changed to suggest a meeting place "where we
would rather not meet": in the bush, with guns, as guerrillas facing
down the South African government at great disadvantage.
In the late 1980s as the pressure
on the apartheid regime to negotiate with the ANC grew, and the resistance
movement appeared to run out of options, the songs also began to reflect
the times. Guerrillas in camps in Angola and Tanzania exhorted Tambo to
"Go and talk to Botha; tell him to free Mandela, so he can rule the
country", while inside South Africa recording artist Chicco (who
produced Brenda Fassie’s "Black President", which was banned
by public radio -- the only radio allowed at the time), made "Papa
Stop the War" as black people turned violently on each other.
The film comes to its end with
the triumphalism of Mandela’s release and the subsequent election
of the ANC, with beautiful scenes of a choir at an election rally belting
out the song "Nelson Mandela". Much can be said about the "ending"
to the story which also makes the film appear dated, but, then again,
Hirsch did not intend to make a film about the period after 1994, even
though he does include Sibongile Khumalo’s "Senzegakhona",
a song about the ancestors of the new leaders, reminding them of their
renewed responsibilities to the people.
Amandla! A Revolution in
Four-Part Harmony has a lot going for it. Many of the freedom songs
featured in the documentary were previously unrecorded and were in danger
of being lost. During production, Hirsch and executive producer Simpson
compiled hundreds of hours of these songs that they will donate to the
South African national archives at the Robben Island Museum to preserve
this part of the country’s cultural history.
The film also gives respect
to musicians who were exiled and have never received their due inside
South Africa – like Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim,
other than the nostalgia (of a sad kind) with which their music is being
approached today. It will also do wonders for the careers of the folk
singer Vusi Mahlasela and Sibongile Khumalo. With a film of this kind,
some musicians will be passed over, and significant omissions are the
contributions of James Philips (although the film is dedicated to him),
Kippie Moeketsi (a sax player of huge talent destroyed by apartheid),
Jonas Gwangwa, Mzwakhe Mbuli or hip hop group Prophets of da City, who
wrote a playful tribute to Mandela’s dance moves.
Also significant is the fact
that black people are at the centre of the film, with whites as bit-part
players. The only significant white opposition figure is Jeremy Cronin
-- who spent seven years on death row and talks about the rhythmic wails
of prisoners bidding their final goodbyes to their doomed fellow convicts
when they were taken to the gallows at the Pretoria Central Prison --
and Ronnie Kasrils, who reads a poem for Mini. The others are the prison
guard at death row and riot police who used to combat protesters in the
1980s. The police recalled how it felt to be overwhelmed by the loosely
choreographed cacophony of chants, stomping and dance --known as the
toyi-toyi employed by hundreds of marchers at rallies. This prominence
of the black musicians is a good thing, for it helps to overcome one of
the main problems of films about South African history, which is that
blacks are always placed at the margins -- Cry Freedom or A
World Apart or the numerous documentaries made about the apartheid
struggle are egregious in this respect. And
it is younger black people that are the central characters along with
the older musicians. Their participation also gives a glimpse of the vibrancy
of post-apartheid South Africa and implies that the same creativity envelopes
the new, different and sometimes carried-over struggles for basic human
rights under changed conditions.
The film has its shortcomings.
The history of the struggle is presented as the history of the ANC, considerable
liberty is taken with the questionable effectiveness of the "armed
struggle", and the film is a little too focused on Johannesburg.
But these criticisms do not take away from the effectiveness of the film
and it is strongly recommended. Since it has already won the Audience
Award and the Freedom of Expression Award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival,
now all we need is the album.
Amandla!
A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is directed
by Lee Hirsch; produced by Lee Hirsch and Sherry Simpson. The film was
produced in association with Cinemax, the South African Broadcasting
Corporation and a grant from the Ford Foundation.
