|
|
|
|
|
|
This inspiring feature documentary tells the story of black South African freedom music and reveals the central role it played in the long battle against apartheid. The film focuses on the spiritual dimension of the struggle, as articulated and embodied in music that sustained and mobilized black South Africans for more than 40 years. The film's title comes from the Xhosa word for "power". In telling its story, AMANDLA! combines archival footage, newly recorded musical performances, as well as re-enactments and interviews. Dozens of songs are included in the film, sometimes drawn from original recordings, some as impromptu live performances by African musicians - both professional and non-professional. One of the primary characters in the story is the composer and activist, Vuyisile Mini, who has been writing political songs since the apartheid government came to power in 1948. Others include singer Miriam Makeba, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and singer/song-writers Vusi Mahlasela and Sibongile Khumalo. One of the film's most moving stories comes from the current member of parliament, Thandi Modise, who describes her ordeal as a political prisoner under apartheid. AMANDLA! concludes on a joyously harmonic note with the "Siyanqoba (Victory)" rally, held in 1995 just prior to the government's first democratic local elections. The film is a labour of love for the young American documentary filmmaker, Lee Hirsch, who visited South Africa many times in the early 1990s, and then settled there for 5 years while researching and preparing the film. Many of the songs he sought were taken for granted, never recorded and passed out of use, and were remembered only vaguely by elderly people. Gradually he accumulated an archival record of an authentic body of folk music that was in danger of being forgotten. As Hirsch says: "In many cases, the melody comes from songs that pre-existed in society - church songs, wedding and funeral songs. But the lyrics would change to reflect the situation at any given time. You don't know who changed it or when; it just happened, in a spark." |
|
|
Struggle for power - for the filmmaker"Amandla!" If you watched the TV news in the late 1970s and '80s the word became as familiar as the sight of thousands of black South Africans chanting and stamping their feet, clenched fists raised high, in dusty protests against apartheid. "Amandla" means power in Xhosa, one of the main South African languages. The hopping-from-foot-to-foot dancing protest is called the toyi-toyi, and I had always assumed that it went way back. In fact, according to this film about the part played by music in the black struggle against apartheid, it came from Zimbabwe, where it was part of guerilla fitness training. African National Congress guerillas in training there brought it back to South Africa, where it perfectly suited the increasing radicalism in the townships in the late '70s. "For us, the toyi-toyi was like a weapon of war," says one of the activists in the film. "For me it was irritating," says a large Boer policeman. "Even now." He is filmed with other white policemen at a barbecue. They all agree. At moments like these Hirsch's film is at its best. I didn't expect to get the perspective of these white servants of apartheid and it adds to the film's sense of inquiry. The problem is this openness isn't always present. A lot of the time Hirsch is more concerned with solidarity, with identifying himself with the struggle. Hirsch is a young American who has passionately identified with that struggle and the music since high school. In 1991, aged 22, he went to South Africa, just as many of the greatest South African musicians were returning from exile. That is, Hirsch arrived after the liberation struggle was largely won. He lived there for five years, getting to know many of the people he interviews in the film. Finishing the documentary took another four years. During much of those nine years he made music videos and it shows here in the hyperbolic style in which he films some sequences - swirling camera movements, crane shots, heavily edited montages. At times, these stylistic flourishes feel more important than the content, but it gets worse. Towards the end of the film, Hirsch's identification with the cause gets close to appropriation. Was this his struggle? From the way he builds the film's hectoring climax, he appears to think so. It's a pity, because the film has a lot of fascinating material, tracing the way music and musicians galvanised black opposition over more than 50 years. There are some superb performances, too - notably Hugh Masekela and band live - and a series of lively interviewees. Hirsch deserves credit for his pioneering work unearthing this history. I just wished he had let it be the unchallenged star of the show. Reviewed by Paul Byrnes, SMH, November 6, 2003 |
Mandela did his part. But songs saved South Africa In the early 1970s, with most of its leaders in prison and the country
quiescent under Prime Minister John Vorster's iron rule, the exiled ANC
struggled to get its soldiers closer to the South African border. The
two Zimbabwean liberation groups were intent on overthrowing Ian Smith's
regime: what better idea than to join forces? Thus did the ANC send men
from its small army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK for short), to fight alongside
Zimbabwean guerrillas. Watching the documentary, Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, I was struck by the way I had, until that moment, only thought of toyi-toyi from its inside. From its centre, it is a joyous, collective demonstration of togetherness. What had not occurred to me, however, was what it must have felt like from the outside. In the film a group of white security policemen are interviewed. Sitting around their braai (barbeque) these men, seemingly shell-shocked by what had happened to their country, describe how terrifying a chanting toyi-toying crowd was to young white soldiers, and how hard it was to get the raw recruits to stand their ground. The white nation's nightmare - a huge black crowd, armed only with imitation AKs, voices and thumping feet, and yet surging forward as if it were they who held the power. Such a South African spectacle, these two cultures, black and white, locked together and at the same time apart. And now a dance that expressed these tensions. No wonder that, in the Eighties, even the regime's politicians could see the writing on the wall. A revolution in four-part harmony, Abdullah Ibrahim calls it, and indeed it was. No one who went to an ANC meeting in London, or in Maputo or in Lusaka, could fail to be inspired by the spontaneous communality of singing that cut across all ages. No one could fail to be moved. But there was no time for pause. As the struggle intensified, and the death rate climbed, a slogan was introduced into ANC parlance: Don't mourn, mobilise. 'Don't mourn, mobilise,' my father, then MK's chief of staff, told his Mozambique-based soldiers as they buried another comrade: and 'Don't mourn, mobilise,' proclaimed the ANC posters at the Trafalgar Square demonstration organised to protest at my mother's assassination. Many years later, after South Africa's democratic election, I questioned former ANC combatants about the slogan. 'There were so many people dying,' one explained, 'that you couldn't afford to mourn. If you started crying, you would never have been able to stop' Now as I watched Amandla , I understood another piece of that response; why the communal singing that echoed through apartheid's four decades, always felt unbearably moving. It was because the songs contained the pain that must otherwise be suppressed. In the film, one woman recalls a song to the fallen. 'He is gone, the hero of heroes,' she sings, before grief overwhelms her. And it used to overwhelm me at meetings, I realised, because of this very contradiction: that this lyrical beauty was so full of anguish. That melodic graveyard song, 'Senzeni - what have we done' that was both a dirge and a call to action: or that maid's song to her employer, 'Madam Please' ('before you ask me if your children are fine, ask me when I last saw mine') that was a simultaneous cry of rage. This was what made South Africa's mass struggle unique. It had not only its schoolchildren casualties, its armed underground, and its peaceful defiance com mon to other revolutions, but also its unique particularities. Its poet/activists, its activist/disc jockeys, and there, amongst them, the cultural workers on the train whose job it was to use the arts to mobilise commuters. Mandela is such an icon that it is tempting to view the history of South African resistance through his example. Yet the peaceful revolution that made the democratic South Africa was not one remarkable man's achievement: it was a collective event, a protracted and twisting set of mass responses in which music represented and drove forward the struggle for freedom. - Gillian Slovo, Guardian Unlimited (UK), December 14, 2003 |
|
Lee Hirsch's stunning documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which has been warmly received at Australian film festivals, explores the role music, song and dance played in South Africa's fight against apartheid (which its inventor, prime minister Henrik Verwoerd, described obscenely as a "policy of good neighbourliness"). At the same time, the film tells the history of the infamous experiment in racism that began in 1948, and which ruined that country for so many years. "The thing that saved us was music," says one of the film's talking heads, and the subversive songs that emerged from the townships to confront the regime are remembered with a mixture of sorrow and joy by the survivors. Amandla means power in the Zulu language, and this truly inspiring film explores the power of music. Songs that mocked the white rulers, or lauded the imprisoned – sometimes martyred – heroes became sources of inspiration to an oppressed people. Exiles, including Miriam Makeba, talk about their experiences; activists and revolutionaries reminisce; Nelson Mandela is eventually freed, and is swept up in a sea of rejoicing people. But the most potent segments of this film are those that deal with the murder of Vuyisile Mini, a singer and activist who was hanged in 1964. The film begins and ends with sequences filmed at the paupers' cemetery where he was buried by the regime; in 1998, the body of this greatest composer of freedom songs, a man who allegedly went to his death singing, was exhumed and given a respectful burial. South Africans have succeeded in putting behind them years of shame and infamy; these two fine films should help remind us that injustice and oppression still need to be faced with humanity and tolerance, not oppression and incarceration. By David Stratton, The Australian, November 08, 2003 |
Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is a feature documentary from American-born Lee Hirsch about the music of the black South Africans during the decades of apartheid. From the early anthems of Vuyisile Mini when the apartheid government came to power in 1948 through the various international world-renowned musicians who committed their music to exposing the suffering of black South-Africans, like Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim to those actually experiencing the evils of the system in their home country, the power of the music to inspire was unquestioned. The use of archival film is insightful, the people interviewed about their experiences are fascinating. Director Lee Hirsch effectively captures the relationship between the music and the changing moods and political shifts and balances over the forty years of the regime. I particularly enjoyed the openness of singer/actress Sophie Mgcina talking with her friend the actress Dolly Rathebe, and the determination of parliamentarian Thandi Modise who was imprisoned during apartheid - but the core interest in the film is the way the music changed to serve different purposes at different times. It's a film that's immensely interesting and on occasions very moving. Reviewed by Margaret Pomeranz Comments by David Stratton: Fine documentary about the role music played in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Wonderful songs and amazing people are featured, plus a potted history of segregation and what it did to the country.
|
