Kalushi: the struggle to show the struggle

6 March, 2017 - 06:26

Chatting over the phone from a snowy Sweden, Mandla Dube often refers to Solomon Mahlangu simply as Solomon, like an acquaintance, a friend.

The Kalushi director, co-writer and co-producer is in Stockholm because his Mahlangu biopic is opening yet another African film festival with a gala event at the sizeable CinemAfrica venue, filled with ambassadors, department of arts and culture officials and VIPs.

Of all the unsung heroes of the struggle, why him? I ask.

There's silence for a moment. He struggles with how to put this.

I ... I ... Well, I went through quite a little bit of a turbulent time when I was finished with my [film] studies and was working in Los Angeles. I found myself going through an incarceration period and I met this warder there. His name was Solomon...

In different ways, he tells me, the name has cropped up in his life for years, like a sign. Back in South Africa, he took a job lecturing in film at the University of the Witwatersrand.

While I was there, I saw the apathy among students. I was like, but guys, do you know where we come from? What we've been through? As that was going on, I was introduced to Solomon's family, in about 2006, I think. There it came again. This name, Solomon. I started connecting the dots.

The universe will do that, I suggest.

You just have to be awake to it, he replies.

A 10-year journey

I ask Dube how the movie came to be opening festivals and picking up awards around the world, how it came to be at all. It's still a rare thing, an anti-apartheid-era film by a black film maker.

What I realised is that with Solomon it's been a curatorship rather than just a simple act of film making. Kalushi [Mahlangu's nickname] started as a play, which I co-wrote and co-produced with the State Theatre's Aubrey Sekhabi.

Some of us had started the Solomon Mahlangu Family Trust. It happened through a committee that was put together for the 30th anniversary of his death in 2009.

We were able to advocate for his face to be on a stamp issued by the SA Post Office and to get his name put on the wall at Freedom Park. Then we were able to work with the City of Tshwane to get the family home to be declared a museum. We built a new house for them behind the family home. We did an exhibition on Mahlangu and the Rivonia Trialists. The project was called The Legends of Freedom.

Before this intervention, Mahlangu was little remembered in a public heritage space.

I think the reason that we haven't seen a celebration of the unsung heroes, the foot soldiers, is because before then there really wasn't the political will. If you don't think about Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, then you are not thinking of the struggle. Mahlangu's legacy was overshadowed by somebody like Steve Biko, who died in 1977.

The theatre was packed and Kalushi, the play, taught Dube that there was an appetite for a story about a regular 19-year-old during apartheid, selling vegetables on the train, who is harassed by the police to the point that, after the brutality of June 16, he leaves his girlfriend and mum to join his friends in crossing the border to take up the armed struggle.

Dube wanted to turn the play into a TV series. But I realised this story deserves a bigger canvas.

Three years for the helicopters

There's a scene in Kalushi that will give you goose bumps. Mahlangu and his fellow cadres are crossing the border into Mozambique on their long journey to an Umkhonto weSizwe training camp in Angola. Suddenly, over a ravine, 1970s SA Defence Force helicopters rise like a giant fist into the sky behind them. You then grasp the enormity of the apartheid machine.

It took three years just to negotiate the helicopters, says Dube. For about 40 seconds on screen.

Putting the financing in place with co-producer Walter Ayres took the same.

In many regards, they had the full support of the state film system, which has backed Kalushi from the get-go. The National Film and Video Foundation paid for the script, the department of trade and industry offered rebates and the National Lottery donated generously to a project whose time had come.

But even then, it's been an uphill struggle to show the struggle. As film maker Zola Maseko often states, black film makers in South Africa are able to make a film of R4 million or R5 million, but expand your scope and vision upward of R10 million - as he did for The Whale Caller - and you're left out in the cold.

Dube agrees. You go to the funders and there are all these questions. Have you made five films in the past five years? What are your box office results? Who's the international lead in it?

They wanted an American star in the lead? I ask, knowing the answer.

Of course. That was suggested more than once. I said, not only are we going to use local actors, we're going to use indigenous languages. Solomon Mahlangu spoke Ndebele, he came from Mamelodi, with Sesotho and isiZulu all mixed in ... and that's the only way we'll be able to take cinema to the people. It's a wonderful thing to go and watch a film and see these people speaking your language.

I was determined to go out there and make a statement that black South African directors can make these films, that black South African actors can tell these stories and tell them well.

The song of the unsung

There is another scene in Kalushi that gave me goosebumps. In the camp in Angola, the cadres gather around and they are addressed by Oliver Tambo over a radio. It's scenes like this, of normal life among soldiers in the camps, that we have hardly ever seen on our screens, big or small.

Over the line, Dube laughs. I did Tambo's voice in that scene.

Today, in part because of #FeesMustFall, in part because of Dube's ef

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