***The Spear Of The Nation-Nelson Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mandela_-_Long_Walk_to_Freedom_poster.jpg

 

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.