Sollywood: the extraordinary story behind Sou Africa s blaxploitation movie boom

It pumped out hugely successful cowboy films, heist dramas and Bond-style thrillers. It launched a Hollywood career and made the world's first Zulu-language film. So does it matter that the explosion of black cinema in apartheid South Africa was funded by Pretoria - and led by an Afrikaner construction boss?

Last year, Tonie van der Merwe clutched that most Afrikaans of drinks, a double-brandy and Coke, as he accepted his Simon Sabela award as one of four heroes and legends at the Durban international film festival. Without being racist, I thought a white guy won't easily win a prize, but I was wrong, he said from the stage, in his tux and big owlish spectacles.

Certainly, few white guys in the new South Africa receive awards for films they made under an apartheid subsidy scheme to create films for black audiences. Yet here he was - 20 years after apartheid - his massive yet ambiguous role in South African film finally being acknowledged.

To many, the B-scheme movies he'd made - escapist fantasies, boys' own adventures, morality plays - were the film equivalent of apartheid's watered-down native beer , sold in government beer halls; a cynical National party-sponsored diversion designed to encourage the native population to stay on the reserves. At the end of one such movie, its star, Popo Gumede, turns to the camera to say: All this violence could have been avoided if we just sat down and talked about it. Others point to how seminal Van der Merwe was in setting up any kind of black film industry at all; to how seeing so many black faces on screen inspired a generation.

All this, from a man who, at the age of 30, had seemed happy enough running a construction company in Johannesburg. It was on a construction job that Van der Merwe met Louis and Elmo de Witt, film-making brothers who inspired him to try his own hand. More entrepreneur than auteur, he'd already spotted a business opportunity after watching his 200 workers hoover up US blaxploitation flicks at Saturday night on-site screenings. Blaxploitation in the land of black exploitation? Well, why not?

It was clear to me that this was the market of the future, Van der Merwe recalls from his offices in suburban Cape Town. Now aged 74, he is full of bluff old-world Afrikaner courtesy. So I financed the whole thing. And we used all of my equipment as props. My diggers. My airplane. My cars.

Joe Bullet was the result. Van der Merwe produced, Louis de Witt directed, and the cast was entirely black. Ken Gampu, who later found success in Hollywood, starred as Bullet alongside singer Abigail Kubeka. Modelled on something between Shaft and James Bond, Joe Bullet had Gampu drinking, doing karate, driving sports cars, throwing knives, climbing up mineshafts and shooting guns.

The movie was a big hit in Soweto - for slightly less than a week. The censors decided that this swish thriller portrayed black people in far too aspirational a light. The film was banned, and for Van der Merwe, who'd spent 18 months making it, that spelled financial disaster.

Undeterred, he spotted another opportunity, and successfully lobbied the government to set up a subsidy for making black films: the so-called B-scheme. The catch was that it meant making the sort of films Pretoria liked to see. In all, Van der Merwe had a hand in around 400 such movies. At his peak, he was churning out one a month. The subsidy created a mini-goldrush where, according to Darryl Els, a Johannesburg independent cinema owner: It was pretty much the best investment you could make if you had a spare 10,000 rand lying around. Many of these films could gross 70,000. So the returns were excellent.

But I always strove for quality, Van der Merwe says. Louis de Witt taught me that no cut should last longer than 11 seconds. Some other directors - they would have single cuts that lasted 11 minutes, which was the length of a roll of film, because that meant they could work faster to get their subsidy. A lot didn't even shoot to scripts.

Van der Merwe wrote many of his own scripts, light, adventure-packed storylines that never wandered into the miseries of the socio-economy. He says he never supported apartheid. But I am not a radical and never got involved with politics.

The message of my films was always crime does not pay', says Steve Hand, an Afrikaans farm hand who started out as Van der Merwe's Zulu translator, before moving on to direct his own B-schemes. On set, Abigail Kubeka remembers Van der Merwe as a gentleman. Very kind. He had no airs or graces. There was no apartheid when we were shooting. Yet because of the laws of the time, the black actors and mainly white production crew would often have to dine and sleep separately on location. But we didn't mind that so much. Our rebellion was simply to be involved in the arts and to do our jobs to the best of our ability.

Down the years, a few more subversive scripts did manage to nip past the censors. The most notable was David Bensusan's My Country My Hat (1983) - a critique of the pass laws, which forced black South Africans to carry internal passports when travelling outside their townships or homelands.

Despite a lack of radical credentials, Van der Merwe achieved at least one historic first for black nationalism, when he made the world's first Zulu-language film - Ngomopho (Black Spoor). Unfortunately, he couldn't understand it (his Zulu remains basic). And neither could the film's editor, which created all sorts of problems. So he developed a system of on-the-spot editing, alongside the camera. Everyone in the industry copied it after a while. It saved a lot of time, money and frustration.

So much so that in 1986, he would make the film he considers his finest work, entirely in Zulu: Umbango (The Feud). Umbango was a great hit, says Han

LINK:	http://www.filmcontact.com/news/south-africa/sollywood-extraordinary-s...
	See more stories from filmcontact

Most recent headlines