Facing History & OurselvesMovie-Sarafina
What does Apartheid look like?
Sarafina is a young girl living in one of the designated black townships of South Africa. Set in the midst of the apartheid struggle, Sarafina is influenced by the powerful teachings of Mary (Whoopi Goldberg), who feels she needs to teach her students historical truths not found in the government approved texts. As Sarafina observes her friends, many of them openly rebelling against the government regime, and the opinions of Mary, she tries to come to conclusions about what is right, and what is the best way to try and obtain freedom.
Although criticised by others for not having a definite hard and fast conclusion, I feel the film does a wonderful job of showing the complexities of what is often presented by the media as a simple situation. Sarafina is a girl who, like many of us, cannot come to her own conclusion as to what is right and wrong. Unlike most movies, the writer does not do the job of making our minds up for us.
Oddly enough, at the cries of other critics, the producers of this film have re-edited the end many times to try and bring it to a more definite decision. I am glad they have not succeeded with their task.
Be warned that this film contains a great deal of violence, and is not suitable for younger children. However, the violence, in my opinion, is not gratuitous and represents a realistic situation.
There is one fatal flaw in the film. At one point a gang of black kids, including Sarafina, is involved in the brutal murder of a black policeman. After setting the live man on fire, they watched him burn to death. Yet they were never directly punished for this murder, and instead were punished for their oppression of the white regime. We know that the soldiers murdering schoolchildren are wrong, but the film seems to justify the actions of the youths murdering because the policeman was an informant to the whites. Murder is murder, and this lack of justice is a tragic decision in the screenplay.
Rod Gustafson
© 1993 One Voice Communications. All Rights Reserved
Sarafina-The MovieWhat does Apartheid look like?Facing History and Ourselves
Questions- Answer any five (5) in complete sentences and develop your answers with specific examples from the film.
- What does the movie “say” to us about the institution of Apartheid?
- Why is the role of a teacher and education important to the story?
- In the film critique the reviewer has a problem with what is done to the “constable” as a representative of the police force? What do you think would be right if you wrote this screenplay?
- Do we see the frustration of the children become a reason for the “police state” to strike back at them and the township in general?
- What role does Nelson Mandela play in the actions of the people of South Africa?
- What would you do different if you had been someone like “Sarafina”?
- What Human rights abuses become evident to you from this film? (list more than 3)
- Do you agree with the need to create a different set of endings as mentioned in the reading above?
Helpful definitions-Do you think the Global Apartheid definition is accurate?
Apartheid (International Phonetic Alphabet[əˈpɑː(r)teɪt] or [-taɪt] in English and [aˈpartheit] in Afrikaans) is the policy and the system of laws implemented and continued by "White" minority governments in South Africa from 1948 till 1990; and by extension any legally sanctioned system of racial segregation. The first recorded use of the word, which means "separateness" in Afrikaans and Dutch, is in 1917 during a speech by Jan Smuts, who became Prime Minister of South Africa in 1919.
Global Apartheid
The view that rich democratic Western nations are acting in much the same way as white South Africa, by exploiting or ignoring the plight of people in developing countries. White South Africans justified their actions in that black South Africans were nominally removed from them in terms of geography and therefore citizens of another territory.