Come Back Africa (dir. Lionel Rogosin), Mapantsula (dir. Oliver Schmitz) and Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood) mark three distinct eras in South African cinema. The oldest of the three, Come Back Africa, shot secretly in the late 1950s, shows the routine violence of the apartheid state. by Brittany Duck
The viewer experiences the monotony of social exclusion through the life of Zachariah, a man displaced by rural economic hardship and forced to find work in Johannesburg. The director, through his clandestine approach, captures the apartheid city functioning as intended. Surplus black labor swirls amidst menial jobs in mines, restaurants and luxurious homes. The white faces are appropriately villainous, spitting racial epithets and enjoying the social and economic privileges of apartheid rule. By the 1980s, the unmooring had begun. The Johannesburg of Mapantsula is more chaotic and uncertain. Viewers are introduced to Panic, a petty criminal, turned possible police informant. Apartheid is presented as untenable, as protests erupt in the townships and jails swell with political prisoners. If the fall of apartheid is anticipated in Mapantsula, the uncertainties of the post-apartheid state are captured in Tsotsi's ambivalence about the new trajectory of the rainbow nation. In Tsotsi, black urban wealth exists alongside the poverty of black townships, and the gatekeepers of privilege are no longer exclusively white. While differences among these films abound, they are unified by tropes of redemption enacted through the figure of a black, male anti-hero. I conceive of redemption as a move toward personal salvation, attempting to right perceived wrongs or failings. In what follows, I demonstrate how concepts of redemption found in these films are implicated in the wider national history of South Africa.
Come Back Africa opens with a series of movements, bodies moving here and there, in and out of shadows. This opening is apt for the narrative arc of the film. The protagonist, Zachariah, embodies the perils of movement under apartheid. At the start of the film, Zachariah is forced by drought from his home in the countryside. He leaves his wife and children to find work in Johannesburg. This forced migration leads Zachariah to various jobs, including as a mine worker, a housekeeper and a waiter. Through a series of mishaps instigated by racial antagonism, Zachariah is forced to move from job to job. But the work is low paying and often hard to come by. Zachariah also lives in constant fear of being arrested for having insufficient working papers. Despite these events, Zachariah continues to see work as his path to salvation. Here, work is not merely about material survival-though that is important. Work emerges as a way to rationalize one's position, and it is linked to ideas about redemption. Zachariah aims to redeem himself as the provider for his family through work, and he continues to promise his wife that life will be better once he finds a steady job. Indeed, Zachariah's aversion to his wife taking a job reveals the way work acts as a means for him to redeem his masculinity. However, the mechanisms of apartheid have stacked the odds against him, and Zachariah's attempts to find long-term employment are continually thwarted. Zachariah's unrelenting faith in the redemptive power of work demonstrates how the processes of apartheid were rendered livable. In this environment, the daily grind of attempting to secure work routinizes life. Here, visions of salvation are contracted, as concerns about the next pay check transform into attachments to fleeting moments of stability. The black apartheid subject is redeemed by (making apartheid) work.
COME BACK, AFRICA
Historian and philosopher David Theo Goldberg describes aspects of this lived experience of apartheid in A Political Theology of Race (On Racial Southafricanization). Goldberg describes the period following the 1948 codification of apartheid laws as one of perceived triumph ( triomf ) for the Afrikaner regime (300).
The apartheid government succeeded in compartmentalizing nearly every aspect of black life and it rendered social exclusion commonsensical and livable. For Zachariah, the consummate 1950s black apartheid subject, redemption is ultimately elusive. Two scenes in the film underscore this point. The first moment occurs when Zachariah encounters a group of South African intellectuals and activists in a bar. Their conversation begins to broaden his understanding of the intricacies of life under apartheid. This scene is supposed to be a moment of politicization, where Zachariah discovers the merits of the struggle. However, the director does not take the obvious trajectory here. Zachariah does not join the would-be revolutionaries, and he does not dive headlong into the anti-apartheid movement. His response is more subtle and representative of the 1950s time period. Zachariah speaks of an innate feeling that activists' words have resonance for his life. He says, I don't understand, but I like it. The concluding scene of the film is where the trope of work as redemption is irrevocably severed. Zachariah's wife is murdered after a violent altercation with a fellow township resident. When Zachariah returns home, he is distraught. His final cries of anguish, which conclude the film, reveal the pervasive cycles of violence birthed by apartheid-all are affected, even those who attempt to find avenues to make apartheid livable. Ultimately, Zachariah's efforts to make apartheid work, to essentially play by the rules of the system, do little to protect his family. His vulnerabilities as an everyman are exposed as the film closes.
Mapantsula also shatters the image of apartheid as a workable system. Set in the late 1980s, the film follows Panic, an anti-hero engaged in a life of petty crime, while the city
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Come Back Africa (dir. Lionel Rogosin), Mapantsula (dir. Oliver Schmitz) and Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood) mark three distinct eras in South African cinema. The oldest of the three, Come Back Africa, shot secretly in the late 1950s, shows the routine violence of the apartheid state. by Brittany Duck
