"HOW, I WONDERED, COULD ANYONE BE A PREMATURE ANTI- FASCIST? COULD THERE BE ANYTHING SUCh AS A PREMATURE ANTIDOTE TO A POISON? A PREMATURE ANTISEPTIC? A PREMATURE ANTITOXIN? A PREMATURE ANTI-RACIST? IF YOU WERE NOT PREMATURE, WHAT SORT OF ANTI-FASCIST WERE YOUSUPPOSED TO BE?" - BERNARD KNOX
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The other night I watched a very good movie “In My Country” , starring Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson and Menzi Ngubane. I characterize it as a “very good movie” because while both entertaining and thought provoking, it disappoints it’s audience in the way that only a film that has the makings of a truly fucking great movie, but falls just short, can.
I don’t fault the actors, however, their performances were uniformly superb.
The movie, and the book on which it’s based (which I simply must find), “Country of My Skull ” by Antjie Krog, is set in South Africa in 1994 just after the fall of Apartheid. Samuel L. Jackson portrays an American Newspaper reporter, Langston Whitfield, who has been dispatched to cover Nelson Mandela’s brilliantly conceived “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” hearings.
These commissions, as you know, allowed White Afrikaner security officials and police to be granted amnesty in exchange for telling the truth about their heinous and often brutal treatment and disappearances of the native black guerrilla fighters (whom they termed “terrorists”) and many other just regular folks unlucky enough to have known or been related to them.
At the first commission hearing Whitfield encounters Anna Malan, an accomplished Afrikaner poet and radio reporter (portrayed by the impossibly beautiful Julliette Binoche) and her assigned sound engineer, the irrepressible “Dumi” - fleshed out endearingly by Menzi Ngubane.
The movie is good enough that I don’t want to drop any spoilers here but I will say that it does a heart and gut wrenching good job of showing the savagery of the Apartheid regime and the incredibly blase attitude with which the police went about their gruesome work. Scenes between Jackson and Brenden Gleeson (who plays a former highly placed security official) are particularly intense as the Whitfield character cannot hide his contempt and hatred for the admitted murderer and his matter-of-fact justifications for his bloody crimes; whereas the cop not so subtly implies that Whitfield (and implicitly the audience) - as witnessed by his (our) capacity for hating him - would have behaved with equal cruelty were the situations reversed.
No one gets off the hook.
Which is why I said it had the makings of a great movie.
But it fell just short.
That’s another Diary.
Nonetheless, what inspired me to write this diary, or closer to the truth, influenced the way it is constructed - as I had determined to write on this subject anyway - was a word in the film that I had never encountered before, uttered contemptuously in the movie by a ex freedom fighter as he is about to extra legally execute an informant for the fallen regime.
He calls him “Mbembe”….