About a week ago, I saw A Dry White Season on HBO. The movie, released in 1989, is about a white South African, (Ben Du Toit, played by Donald Sutherland) from an upper middle-class background who discovers first hand how brutal the Apartheid system was.
About a week ago, I saw A Dry White Season on HBO. The movie, released in 1989, is about a white South African, (Ben Du Toit, played by Donald Sutherland) from an upper middle-class background who discovers first hand how brutal the Apartheid system was. His black gardener (Gordon Ngubene, played by Winston Ntshona) has a 12-year-old son who is friends with Du Toit’s own son. One morning Gordon picks up his son, who was whipped by the South African police to the point of having his back covered in bleeding welts. A few days later, Gordon’s son is missing and witnesses say he was rounded up in a dragnet arrest in the "township" (a cross between a ghetto, a trailer park and a refugee camp) where poor blacks are forced to live. Gordon is frantically trying to find his son and asks Ben for help.
Ben asks around and discovers that Gordon’s son is dead, and as is typical for a tyrannical regime like Apartheid, the usual bullshit excuses are trotted out and the police insist they did nothing wrong, when it is obvious they killed a 12-year-old boy. Now Gordon Ngubene is on the shit list and he turns up missing. Again, Du Toit asks around and is informed by the police that Gordon is in police custody on grounds of "Terrorism", which Ben finds absurd. He asks that Ben’s wife be allowed to bring some new clothes to the police station for Gordon to wear, since surely he’ll be released soon. The police agree and seem very friendly to Ben -a little too friendly. The next time Ben sees Mrs. Ngubene, she shows him what she found in Gordon’s old clothes: two of Gordon’s teeth that have obviously been knocked out while in custody. Of course Gordon is also killed in police custody and his mangled body shows that not only were his teeth knocked out, but his face was crushed, his genitals burned and other hideous wounds from where he was bound and beaten. The police claim it was a suicide.
Honest! Shackled prisoners hang themselves all the time!
Du Toit knows Gordon and Gordon’s family well enough to know that he was no "terrorist" and that he certainly wasn’t the suicidal type. He enlists a liberal attorney (Ian McKenzie, played by Marlon Brando in arguably his last great performance) to represent Ngubene’s family at the inquest. McKenzie, while cross-examining the detective who gave Gordon "enhanced interrogation techniques" (to use a modern euphemism), asks how exactly a man who was bound and gagged managed to kill himself. The detective’s answer was pure horseshit, but since Apartheid-era South Africa was engaged in a "war on terror" (to use another modern euphemism), the court agrees to the story concocted by the police and admonishes McKenzie for stirring up trouble.
You gotta be shitting me!
Du Toit is vilified for lifting a finger for "kaffirs" and "terrorists", is fired from his job, his son beaten up and expelled from school, his home ransacked and later, bombed. The police even badger Ben’s own daughter into spying on him. Clearly, the feelgood hit of the summer.
The movie has one shortcoming: It is very dated, even though it’s only two decades old. I remember when the movie was released and pro-Apartheid types thought it (and Lethal Weapon 2) unfairly demonized South Africa and Apartheid. In other words, the disappearing, torture and murder carried out were not acceptable for any civilized country. They were lying, naturally. Everyone knew South Africa was torturing and killing people in droves, but even that nation’s apologists felt the need to distance themselves from such fiendish acts. South Africa’s name had been so sullied in the 1980s that a Republican Senate voted to override Reagan’s veto of sanctions against South Africa.
Compare that period to what we have today. Back in 2006, the Navy and the Bush-Cheney Junta announced that three "terrorists" had been found hanged in their cells and not only claimed the trio had killed themselves, but that in doing so, they were engaged in yet another act of "terrorism"! Scott Horton has done saintly duty by publicizing the work of students and faculty at Seton Hall University, who have shown that the Navy and Bush’s Willing Executioners are lying and are even more shameless than the South African police as depicted in A Dry White Season. The three men murdered were found not only hanged, but with cloth rammed down their throats and their hands bound. Since rigor mortis had set in, they had been left hanging for some time. Horton asks many pertinent questions about these deaths, but it’s obvious (unless the guards who have come forward are all lying) that these men were abducted and murdered by the United States Government after being subjected to organized, premeditated sadism. Yet the government and media in the U.S. actively cover up the atrocities, and attack those who want an investigation as not being "serious".
A few years ago, humorist Chris Kelly noted that thanks to the Bush Junta’s fondness for torture, most classic movies set during World War Two have been pretty much ruined. This in on the grounds that it’s rather tame to see Nazi guards in movies like Stalag 17 making an American POW stand upright for 36 hours (you know, "stress positions") when the Land of the Not-So-Free and the Home of the Not-So-Brave uses water torture and worse.
It takes the worst kind of savagery, barbarism and sadism to make Apartheid-Era South Africa seem tame.