'Amandla' Evokes Anti-Apartheid Musical Legacy

About an hour into Amandla, a new documentary on the role that song played in the battle against apartheid in South Africa, South African Parliament member Thandi Modise appears onscreen to recount her experiences as a freedom fighter.

Modise, who was arrested as a teenager and spent the second half of the 1970s in prison, does not begin her testimony with stories of military triumphs or interrogation and torture.

Instead, she remembers what any woman would remember from when she was 19: her first love.

“Thandi’s story is one of my favorites because it’s so unexpected,” says director Lee Hirsch.

Amandla: A Revolution in Four Part Harmony opens next Friday at the Harvard Square Loews theater.

The film begins with the singing of children who watch the exhumation and reburial of their executed father’s corpse.

Closing with the sight of newly-elected president Nelson Mandela gleefully dancing amid throngs of followers, Amandla constantly reaffirms the humanity and emotion of both its Afrikaaner and black South African subjects.

The movie tells the story of black South African freedom music and how it articulated and embodied the people’s spirit during the struggle to end apartheid.

In 1948, the all-white National Party came to power in South Africa, and apartheid began. The next forty years were a whirlwind of riots, insurrections, arrests and massacres, with black South Africans the greatest victims of the violence.

“Amandla,” the Xhosa word for “power,” was the rallying cry that activists used to punctuate the end of many songs.

The songs’ actual content changed over the years, reflecting the shifting political climate in the country.

In the 1950s, the African National Congress (ANC) organized a massive non-violent campaign against apartheid. Songs like “Nkosi Sikelel’i,” the People’s Anthem, a prayer for peace and harmony, accompanied the rallies.

But as the struggle turned more violent, so did the songs.

In the 1980s the music was combined with a sort of high stepping dance, known as toyi-toyi to both the police and the participants.

Toyi-toyi became a valuable tool, both as an effective way to physically condition members of the underground and an intimidation technique against the police.

Hirsch says he first became interested in the subject of freedom songs as a high school student in the late 1980s, when one of his friends, an exiled South African, discussed the oppression in South Africa and taught him some of the songs.

Hirsch points to his own Jewish background as a further personal connection to the victims of apartheid.

“I’m surprised there’s not more empathy in the Jewish community as a whole, given our history,” he says.

His last film was a profile of his 94-year-old grandfather, a survivor of the Holocaust.

Amandla is a compilation of personal interviews, musical performances, reenactment and original clippings from newsreels and films of rallies.

“I want the film to touch people no matter how much they know or don’t know about the story,” Hirsch says.

No single type of footage dominates Amandla.

Images and songs are allowed to present themselves, appearing with minimal explanation and subtitles. The frames practically drip with color, as though every object within them bursts with the same energy and vitality reflected by the nation as a whole.

“There is a fantastic creative chemistry between music and visual and it can be used to tell a story,” executive producer Sherry Simpson writes in the film’s notes.

That lofty goal wasn’t easy to achieve. Hirsch spent nine years on the film, five of them on location.

“South Africa became my second home,” Hirsch says. “The people put so much faith into me as an outsider to make their story told.”

And it was not easy to secure funding.

“Raising the money was by far the most difficult part of the production process.”

Nearly as difficult, though, was culling the 200 hours of collected footage into a finished product.

Hirsch credits editor Johanna Demetrakas with the achievement.

“She has a great gift for storytelling that is built on emotion, like the music itself,” he says.

She also showed objectivity that proved invaluable, especially for the film’s more difficult segments.

One such instance was the interview of former prison official Johan Steinberg, in which he described his work as a warden on death row in Pretoria Central Prison, where many activists were hanged.

“There were dozens of ways we could have humanized him more or less, and Johanna was really good about helping us see the balance,” Hirsch says.

However, Hirsch does regret the cutting of one powerful moment when Steinberg expresses empathy for the executed, asking, “What’s wrong with fighting and dying for what you believe in? I would do it.”

The film met with positive reviews at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and the soundtrack is being released by ATO Records, headed by musical icon and South Africa native Dave Matthews.

Hirsch says he hopes that one of the messages audiences will take away from the film is “the importance of song for activist movements across the world.”

However, more important than anyone else’s reaction for Hirsch was that of the cast and their families, the men and women who lived through the struggle.

“The film stands up for South Africans first and foremost,” he says. “This is their story, their history, their phenomenon.”