***The
Spear Of The Nation-Nelson Mandela: Long Walk
To Freedom
DVD
Review
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Nandela: Long Walk To Freedom, Idris Elba, Naomie Harris, 2013
No
question after the black civil rights struggle here in America, headed at various
points by Doctor Martin Luther King, subsided with some partial victories
around voting and freeing work opportunities the axis of the international
black liberation struggle shifted, shifted in American eyes, to the horrible
conditions of blacks in South Africa. There under the conscious apartheid policy
complete with the hated pass system of the Afrikaner government blacks were
held as little more than chattel. And were expected to like it to boot.
Something about the white man’s “civilizing mission” although more likely, much
more likely his craving for cheap labor to work those money-filled,
resource-filled mines that drove the South African economy. The situation
called for black resistance, called big time for black resistance, since the
white government was not interested in the least in sharing power, any power,
except maybe that given to their black front men to control the masses. Enter
the African National Congress (ANC), or actually the arrival through fits and
starts of lawyer Nelson Mandela into the ANC and you have a leader who the
world came to know as the icon of that organization. And this film, Nelson Mandela: A Long Walk To Freedom
based on his 1995 autobiography and which opened late in 2013 as he passed away
traces the evolution of the man from a free-lancer lawyer to a serious
anti-apartheid revolutionary leader.
Of
course any political liberation movement, the black civil rights movement here
in America with its bookends of Doctor King calling for non-violent resistance
to the oppressor for the redress of grievance and Malcolm X calling for “by any
means necessary or the freedom struggle in the early days in the ANC with it
non-violent resistance policy and after Sharpsville with armed resistance, has
to deal with how it will conduct the struggle. Nelson Mandela (played in a very
strong performance by Idris Elba) as shown graphically in the film as the
repression worsened helped move the ANC from one policy to the other as the circumstances dictated and paid the price.
That price being the incarceration along with the central leadership of the ANC
on desolate Robbins Island for over twenty-five year.
Now
in this country we are no strangers to the plight political prisoners,
particularly back in the 1960s and the heyday of the Black Panthers some who
are still languishing relative obscurity in American prisons. And that has been
the fate of any number of political prisoners over the years in many countries.
The different in South Africa was that Nelson Mandela and the struggle for his
freedom was made a continual international campaign. And in a sense as the film
also shows there was no more tireless freedom fighter in her own right for
Nelson’s freedom than his second wife, Winnie (played by Naomie Harris).
Obviously the love story, the long term deprived of love one story, is a good
cinematic hook to tell the story. Tell the story of a personally-driven
struggle to get her man back at first. Then as the years passed and new
generations were coming to the struggle with more in-your-face ideas about how
to bring down the regime how Winnie moved politically to Nelson’s left on the need
to do that (as well as growing personal estrangement). That shift in the
struggle as exemplified by the Soweto uprising in the mid-1970s did not get
enough attention in the film since Nelson was removed from what was going on. That
too is the plight of the political prisoner isolated as new possibilities
emerge and constituted a strong reason to get him out of jail-fast.
Since
we all know that in the end, after all hell broke loose in the early 1990s,
that South Africa shifted from white to black-centered rule and Nelson Mandela
became the first black president. What is interesting in the last part of the
film before he became president is the personal and organizational struggles
he, Winnie, and the leadership of the ANC went through to get the white
government under de Klerk to see the writing on the wall. No question Mandela
was significantly to the right of Winnie (along with other younger fighters)
and her “make the townships ungovernable” policy with his sense that blacks
could not win a civil war against a determined army and to offer up what, in
effect, was a race-neutral black- led government. He may have been right at
that time but the evolution of the struggle in South Africa since then with
plenty of tough times for the black population and whites still in effective
control of the economy makes me wonder.
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