Tag: South Africa

See ‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ for Naomie Harris’s Winnie Mandela

Where Long Walk to Freedom is able to offer something new and compelling is in its depiction of Winnie Mandela, played by Naomie Harris in a stunning, ferocious performance. Winnie’s story isn’t as well-known, and she’s not as saintly a figure, so the film is able to actually take a point of view in its portrayal of her.

Idris Elba and Naomie Harris as Nelson and Winnie Mandela
Idris Elba and Naomie Harris as Nelson and Winnie Mandela

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is such an old-fashioned, pro-forma biopic that it’s almost hard to believe it was made in 2013. We begin with a quick, symbolically loaded note from Madiba’s youth as he completes his Xhosa coming-of-age ritual, swiftly move to his entrance into anti-Apartheid activism, neatly transition into the second act with his arrest and 27 years as a political prisoner, and end with his release from prison and subsequent election as President.

I may have a slightly skewed perspective because I have lived in South Africa for the past year and a half, but I think most of the audience for this film comes in with this basic knowledge. Nelson Mandela’s life story is already a profoundly moving inspiration to people worldwide, without a dramatized cinematic portrayal. So seeing it played out note-by-note like this doesn’t have much value. It’s emotionally moving, but intellectually hollow. I’d much rather have seen a film like Spielberg’s Lincoln, focused on Mandela’s vital role in the reorganization South Africa as a free country.

Poster for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom with tagline "The Leader You Knew, The Woman You Didn't"
Poster for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom with tagline “The Leader You Knew, The Woman You Didn’t”

Where Long Walk to Freedom is able to offer something new and compelling is in its depiction of Winnie Mandela, played by Naomie Harris in a stunning, ferocious performance. Winnie’s story isn’t as well-known, and she’s not as saintly a figure, so the film is able to actually take a point of view in its portrayal of her. The film could have demonized Winnie for her radicalism to further beatify Mandela for his post-imprisonment commitment to peace. Instead, it presents her politics as an understandable reaction to the brutal oppression of Apartheid; and moreover, her particular persecution by the government, including her own imprisonment and a year and a half in solitary confinement. But Long Walk to Freedom does not gloss over Winnie’s endorsement of violence, including “necklacing,” brutal murders of suspected informants by setting tires around their necks on fire.

Naomi Harris as Winnie Mandela shortly after she is released from prison
Naomi Harris as Winnie Mandela shortly after she is released from prison

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’s nuanced depiction of Winnie Mandela owes a lot to Naomie Harris’s incredible performance. She should be a front-runner in this year’s Oscar race, although I am not sure if she’ll be put forward for the Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress category (the choice will probably depend on the rest of the field; although her role is certainly as substantive as what last year’s Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence had in Silver Linings Playbook).

Harris also benefits from playing a woman whose face isn’t as iconic as Nelson Mandela’s, even though she doesn’t much look like Winnie Mandela. One of the film’s significant problems is how Idris Elba can never quite disappear into his role because he looks nothing like Mandela, particularly in his later years, where Elba is saddled with extremely awkward age makeup.

Naomie Harris is barely aged when playing Winnie Mandela in the 1990s, but Idris Elba is buried under makeup.
Naomie Harris is barely aged when playing Winnie Mandela in the 1990s, but Idris Elba is buried under makeup.

Strangely, Harris is barely aged through the course of the film, despite her role spanning 40-odd years of history. While this decision smacks of sexism, suggesting the filmmakers’ unwillingness to depict an older woman on screen, Harris’s performance ultimately benefits from the absence of distractingly bad age makeup.

So while Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is far from a perfect movie, Naomie Harris’s near-perfect performance saves it from total mediocrity. The power of her acting and the complex depiction of Winnie Mandela are almost entirely what makes the film worth seeing, unless you know nothing of Nelson Mandela’s story.

2013 Oscar Week: Searching for Sugar Man Makes Race Invisible

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Rodriguez, the central figure of documentary Searching for Sugar Man
Searching for Sugar Man, considered the front-runner for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards this weekend, shares the unlikely story of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure failed musician in the United States who became an icon on the other side of the planet in South Africa. Rodriguez is a figure of mystery to his fans, and urban legends bloom about his having committed suicide on stage. A group of fans seek out the truth in the 1990s, and find Rodriguez is alive, still living in poverty in Detroit, completely unaware that to a generation of South Africans, he’s a rock god. 
It’s a fascinating stranger-than-fiction story that is heartwarming and inspiring: perfect subject matter for a documentary. And Searching for Sugar Man is undeniably well-crafted, building suspense and mystery in the first half of the film on the hunt for Rodriguez, yielding to a very satisfying emotional catharsis in the second half of the film, where we meet Rodriguez and his daughters and see his triumphant arrival in the land that adores him. The stand-in music videos for Rodriguez’s songs that pepper the film are gorgeous to look at and the songs themselves are a revelation.  Searching for Sugar Man is an excellent film that has a huge problem: the invisibility of race. 
Searching for Sugar Man is about white South Africans. This is not in of itself a problem. White South Africans have stories that deserve to be told. [I am a white American living in South Africa and I think you should hear me out, for example.] But race is an intrinsic part of any South African story, especially any apartheid-era South African story. And Searching for Sugar Man is barely interested in race. It presents white South Africans as synonymous with South Africans, which is an exceptionally outrageous instance of white cultural hegemony given this country’s very recent history of extreme racial oppression. 
Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, one of the South African Rodriguez fans integral to solving the mystery of the musician’s fate, does qualify Rodriguez’s South African fans as the “white, liberal, middle-class,” but it’s a quick aside in one of many descriptions of Rodriguez’s South African ubiquity.  We see how the white conservatives in the apartheid government responded to Rodriguez (by censoring his records and banning airplay). But at no point in Searching for Sugar Man do we hear from a black or coloured South African on Rodriguez (with the very small exception of a news broadcaster in archival footage). I wanted to know if Rodriguez’s influence made it outside the white bubble in apartheid-era South Africa, but Searching for Sugar Man wasn’t interested in telling me. Documentaries should not leave glaring questions unanswered.
Another South African blogger had the same curiosity, and asked a  black friend    about his memories of Rodriguez:

He replied that he had known of the artist, but only because he used to work in broadcasting. This short and interesting answer was essentially all I asked for; a black South African commenting on the fact that Rodriguez was virtually unknown or seemed to not have played a vital role in the lives of black South Africans. Not to prove that Rodriguez did not matter, but to acknowledge that though Rodriguez fan base was mainly white, it does not mean that black South Africans have nothing to contribute with in this particular and fascinating aspect of South Africa during apartheid. A story about Rodriguez would be incomplete without the mentioning of apartheid, and a story that talks about apartheid without including a black South African experience feels incomplete to me. 

Searching for Sugar Man‘s treatment of apartheid is also limited to the white middle-class perspective. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics are said to have ignited political awakening in the white Afrikaner youth in South Africa. The white male Rodriguez fans elaborate: one saying Rodriguez’s song “The Establishment Blues” taught them the very concept of being “anti-establishment”, planting the idea that “it’s OK to protest against our society; to be angry against your society.” 
Segerman adds, “Because we lived in a society where every means was used to prevent apartheid from coming to and end, this album somehow had in it lyrics that almost set us free, as oppressed peoples. Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently.” 
South Africans protesting apartheid in the Soweto uprising of 1976.
While there is no doubt that the apartheid government was oppressive to all South Africans, I bristle at hearing a white man refer to himself and his Afrikaner friends as “oppressed peoples” in a film that doesn’t provide the context of how apartheid shaped the lives of people of color in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement we see in Searching for Sugar Man is one of privileged white youth rebelling against the censorship and control of their ultra-conservative government; when the fight against apartheid was a life-and-death struggle for basic human rights and freedom for millions of black and coloured South Africans. 
Searching for Sugar Man‘s narrow white perspective on apartheid-era South Africa is all the more troubling because Sixto Rodriguez is himself a person of color (Mexican and Native American) living in extreme poverty in Detroit. Clarence Avant, an African American record producer who worked with Rodriguez, is the first and only person in the documentary to suggest that Rodriguez’s race may have contributed to his commercial failure in the United States. Rodriguez does not appear to be concerned with material wealth, having given away most of the money he’s earned touring after his rediscovery in the late 1990s (Since the release of this documentary, Rodriguez has embarked on a world tour). But when one compares the urban blight Rodriguez sang about on his albums to the circumstances of many South Africans two decades after the end of apartheid, the omission of their story in this documentary is even more appalling. 
I’m delighted that Searching for Sugar Man has helped expose Rodriguez’s fine music to a wider audience (including myself); and as a resident of South Africa it is nice to see this country have a worldwide cultural moment. I just wish that the documentary that achieved all this was more fully and honestly representative of South Africa and its history.