Though the baby boomer stranglehold on the media would have you believe that it’s the 60s, a far stronger case could be made that the 1980s were, on the international stage, the most revolutionary decade in the half century following World War II. Despite the fact that this ten year span saw the fall of communism, the spread of the AIDS virus, and the riots in Tiananmen Square, there are depressingly few definitive texts on any of these topics, with all too many prominent historians preferring to focus on either the glory days of the greatest generation or the discontent and revolt of their children.
To this narrow landscape, Have You Heard from Johannesburg is an almost invaluable contribution, an expansive yet cohesive history on the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. Though the last few years of the struggle (which finally culminated with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in the first few months of 1990 and free democratic elections in 1994, though the most tumultuous years of the struggle were in the 1980s) would have certainly made for stirring enough material, documentarian Connie Field tracks the effort from its very beginnings with the founding of the United Nations to its end, showing the multi-pronged efforts that activists from around the world utilized to cause the collapse of a government that was backed by major western powers and make a civil rights movement with most of its backers in exile the focus of the entire world.
Though the broad strokes of the apartheid struggle are fairly common knowledge (the oppressive police force, the white minority, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela), the details are a little more obscure, with many prominent figures and events largely unknown in the Western world. Beginning its story in the 1940s with the forming of the United Nations (when South Africa was one of the only countries not to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), Johannesburg charts the formation of the African National Congress from its first peaceful actions to subsequent violent radicalization to eventual expulsion from the country, with its leader, Oliver Tembo, living in exile for nearly thirty years.
After that, Johannesburg breaks off into different areas of the struggle to bring the Congress back into South Africa, which include the divestment of major financial resources from the country, efforts to censure the country in the United Nations, boycott its goods, and to get it expelled from the Olympics. In focus at all times is the fundamental ridiculousness of the government’s policy, the ingenuity of the activists working in all corners of the globe, and the fundamental apathy of most of the world, which was at the time caught in the deadlock of the Cold War, and unable to see the country’s struggle as anything other than another playing piece in that overarching struggle (the Soviet Union was one of few countries willing to provide aid and support to the ANC, which led many in the west to write them off as communists).
What makes Johannesburg such a distinct achievement is that it manages to create, across a span of decades, institutions, and countries, a rather coherent narrative thread, complete with rising action, inciting incidents, and climaxes, out of people who never met each other. Though there are figures that appear recurrently throughout the seven different segments (among them Tembo, Mandela, Steve Biko, Hendrik Verwoerd, Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and P.W. Botha), the only true protagonist could be said to be the desire for freedom and democracy itself, and the apathetic need to maintain the status quo its primary antagonist. Abstract concepts like those could easily be mishandled (and frequently are), but they find more than suitable vessels in the principals here, and the rage, depression and joy that they experience as being thrust through the hurdles of a long, dispiriting fight for their rights is never less than fully expressed.
The final segment here (entitled 'Free At Last', one of many clearly drawn parallels with the American civil rights struggle), in which Mandela is freed from prison and some order and sense is finally restored after the country has been thrust into chaos, is emotionally stirring in a way that very few films are (Shoah is the only other that comes to mind), and perhaps only very long films can be. It's involving because the great level of detail demands such a commitment; it's satisfying because the many promises made along the way (even if you know exactly what's coming) are fulfilled.
This review is, admittedly, lacking in some perspective because there are no other really major works on this subject with which to compare it, and that more or less underscores how important Johannesburg is. But even with such an empty playing field, Have You Heard From Johannesburg can be referred to as a definitive work without feeling like a cop out. It is, like all great histories, a work of great empathy as well as cohesion, carefully laying out the expenditures of both sides in terms that are mostly practical and political but never anything less than human.
Johannesburg recently ran in New York at Film Forum, and will open up in the San Francisco Bay Area on June 25. If you have the time or the interest, I strongly encourage you to go see it. It is a generous film that will reward your investment of time and energy.
"Have You Heard From Johannesburg" opens June 25, 2010 and is not rated. Documentary. Directed by Connie Field. Written by Connie Field, Ken Chowder, Jon Else, Gregory Scharpen. Starring Abdul Minty, Albertina Sisulu, Barbara Masekela, Barend Du Plessis, Billy Modise, Cecilie Counts, Cheryl Carolus, Conny Bream, Eddie Funde, Fons Geerlings, Frene Ginwala, George Schultz, Govan Mbeki, Jacqueline Derens, Kenneth Kaunda, Les De Villiers, Lord Robert Hughes, Mac Maharaj, Mike Terry, Murphy Morobe, Per Wastberg, Peter Sluiter, Rev Albert Van Den Heuvel, Rev Allan Boesak, Sampie Terreblanche, Tony Bloom, Walter Sisulu.
