Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence by Mitchell Jolyon;

Author:Mitchell, Jolyon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1097862
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Last Grave at Dimbaza (Nana Mahomo, 1974)

Up to this point I have concentrated upon feature films. There are also a significant number of groundbreaking documentaries, produced during and after the 1970s, which revealed some of the realities of apartheid to audiences outside South Africa. Nana Mahomo's The Dumping Grounds (1973) and Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974) are two of the best known.68 The South African government banned them both and attempted to counter these clandestine productions with their own documentaries, such as Land of Promise (South African Information Service, 1974), which defended the establishment of the apartheid regime and celebrated a South Africa where there was supposedly ‘a roof for everyone and clothing and enough to eat’. Last Grave at Dimbaza was broadcast on PBS in the USA in October 1975, as well as on Canadian and British television. It revealed how the black communities suffered under apartheid, enduring overcrowding, poor health care and grinding poverty. It is full of poignant images, such as a ‘black nurse feeding her white employer's child’ with the commentator revealing ‘that her own son died of malnutrition’. The conclusion of the film is particularly painful, taking the viewer to a township called Dimbaza, in the ‘homeland’ of Ciskei, and a special ‘children's graveyard’, where the camera lingers on some of the 450 graves of ‘African children marked with plastic feeding bottles’, most of whom ‘died before the age of two’.69

Short films and documentaries became increasingly popular and significant forms of anti-apartheid expression. Over 200 short fiction and non-fiction documentaries were produced in South Africa between 1980 and 1995.70 Barry Feinberg directed some of the most memorable, such as Any Child is My Child (1988), a film about the severe hardships of children under apartheid, or another about the life and work of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston. Feinberg's work and many other films were funded by the IDAF (International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa).71 Production companies from outside South Africa also produced documentaries, which acted as Witness to Apartheid (Sharon I. Sopher, 1986). Like other international films this documentary combined news footage with interviews and speeches of leading activists such as Desmond Tutu, who declares in this film that ‘the primary violence in this land is apartheid’ and ‘no country can afford to bleed like South Africa’.72 Graphic images of television reporters being beaten by police combine with an artist's impressions of the time the American production team were arrested and detained for carrying out interviews in the townships. Producing films was a way of both retaining visual records of what was left out of the official accounts and educating international publics about some of the truth of what was happening in Southern Africa. These films largely bear witness to the ‘truth’ of what was happening rather than highlighting the need for ‘reconciliation’.

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