Judge Dennis Davis
Film: Dry White Season
Judge Dennis Davis - Film: A Dry White Season
- I’m finding this talk difficult to give, because all of our thoughts at the moment are what is going on in Israel. Reports I’ve just learned, I suppose others have, from CNN and others, that there may be over 600 Israelis dead, which is just horrendous. And one’s thoughts, one’s prayers, go out to one’s friends, family, acquaintances. There’s a fundamental principle in Judaism called . Each Jew is responsible one for another. And in a sense, one feels in this particular part helpless that one can’t do anything about this absolutely horrendous attack, terrorist attack on Israel. I really don’t have much more to say than that, because it’s so breathtaking and much will be spoken about this in the weeks and months to come, and doubtless will talk ourselves about this. But at this point, I think the most prudent course of action is just to pray that as quickly as possible, peace and tranquillity can come to Israel, and that no more lives should be lost, no more people should be injured. And please God, this nightmare can be over as quickly as possible. And so yet again, as I say, you know, we always, as it were, live in the, not just the hope, but the belief, a belief which has been grounded in history, people of Israel live and will continue to live, but for some they haven’t. And that is why this is so tragic an event, which defies in a sense, it seems to me, a kind of rational discussion at this point other than prayer, hope, and I understand anger and frustration, but hopefully that will give way to better times. So again, one’s thoughts, one’s prayers, with those who are living in Israel at the moment under very difficult circumstances.
The second point I wanted to make, if I may, related. I did not listen to the particular lecture concerned, but I was told that the debate about Desmond Tutu, which I suppose is pretty predictable in light of talking as we are about South Africa, and his relation to Jews in general and Israel in particular came up. Again I don’t think, I have no emotional energy to deal with the Tutu issue at the moment, for the reasons I’ve just articulated. I understand that some people were upset by what was said, I understand that perfectly. All I can say is in the spirit of engagement and debate and respectful debate, may I refer you, if you wish to listen to it, to an engagement that I had with Rabbi Jeremy Rosen about 18 months ago. I’m sure the interview or the sorry, discussion, is available to all in which the whole topic was about Desmond Tutu and which I think, frankly, I suppose I’m not objective ‘cause I was a participant, but a really rational debate took place about these issues. And if you want at this particular point in time to ponder on those issues, I can commend you to that debate. I have one final preliminary comment, which mercifully takes us away from the horrendous circumstances that I’ve just articulated to a point that I got an email from somebody, an email that really struck me as quite right. It was during the conversation I had with Ali Baha, and someone pointed out in a couple of instances that I had sort of almost casually asked Ali Baha about issues, one example was the Hansie Cronje issue, in which people who are not from South Africa, and not South Africans or ex South Africans, or not even, what can I call it, cricket enthusiasts who wouldn’t have known about this.
It’s one of the dangers and the difficulties and the drawbacks, I should tell you, of lecturing on this method. I realise without it we couldn’t have these lectures and that would be tragic. But it’s one of the drawbacks for a lecturer that of course you can’t see people, and nobody can, you know, just sort of blurt out, “Can you explain that properly?” So I just wish if I, I will try my best to clarify things in order to obviate that problem, but if there are points that you think I should clarify because you don’t understand what I was saying, if you put it in the chat line please, and when we do the clips, I’ll check the chat lines and if there’s anything that you don’t understand, I’d be delighted to explain it as soon as we finish with a particular clip so that we can all be, as it were, singing from the same song sheet. Talking about hope and in bleak circumstances, this film, which was made, “A Dry White Season”, from the novel by Andre Brink, was made in 1989. When I saw it, and I remember because I discussed this with somebody, I’ll mention her in a moment, when I was in Australia a couple of weeks ago in Sydney, she reminded me that Lette my wife, I, and her, that’s very, very, very distinguished lawyer, Andie Durbach, who in 1989 had been involved in one of the most extraordinary cases in South African history, the Upington murder case, in which over 20 people were charged with murder on the Common Purpose doctrine. And as a young lawyer, she did absolutely remarkable, I mean, just breathtaking, remarkable work to save them from the gallows.
And we all three had gone to see “A Dry White Season”, the film, those of you who know Cape Town, at the Labia Theatre. It was a time of unbelievable desperation. Although de Klerk had taken over from PW Botha, in 1989 nothing seemed to have changed at that point. We seemed to be in a country of brutality, of violence, and of authoritarianism of a kind that you almost, well at that time, as Andie and I were saying in Australia, we really didn’t have very much hope that anything would change for the better. And the film in a sense reminded us both of those bleak times and how remarkably things can change quite quickly, as they did, but a few years, in fact within a year, when Nelson Mandela was released. So why, apart from the emotional link that I have with that film, why did I choose it in order to show it to you? Because we are talking about South Africa and South African history, and this particular film documents in many fundamental ways, something really vitally important about South African history. Yesterday those of you who would’ve listened to “Cry The Beloved Country”, which is probably the quintessential liberal novel of its time, in which the fates of Blacks and whites are luminously intertwined by Alan Paton in that novel. I’m not going to go and give my own interpretation that now. But it did strike me that what in fact Andre Brink was doing with “A Dry White Season”, within many instances of that book, focusing on something not entirely dissimilar, but in a very different and even far more violent context. The context in which this particular novel is located is, as it were, within the Soweto 1976 uprisings, and I will come to those in a moment. But there’s a broader context, and that context is the fact that from the early 1960s, the South African police were given enormous powers, initially a 90-day detention law, in which, and we’ve spoken about this too on this programme, particularly with the Subablusky book.
The 90-day detention law, which empowered the police to detain people without trial for 90 days, expanded to 180 days, and then in 1967 to indefinite detention without trial. The complete evisceration of the rule of law, and eventually the complete transfer, as it were, of vastly significant powers to the police. And I should say again, linking to lectures that have taken place on our programme, the wonderful lecture by Francie Jowell about her utterly remarkable mother, one of the true heroes of the second half of the 20th century in South Africa. It’s utterly shameful that members of the ANC today do not recognise the stellar contribution of Helen Suzman. But Helen Suzman was somebody who fought on her own throughout that period, the 1960s into the '70s, until she was joined, as you learned, with other Progressive party people, against detention with our trial and the brutality thereof. So what I wanted to focus on in “The Dry White Season” was its ultimate themes, and the ultimate themes of “The Dry White Season”, seems to me, as we will discuss by looking at some of the clips, the complacency of white people. And let’s be honest about it, many of us lived in South Africa during that period and must ask ourselves, what on earth did we do, if anything? Or what could we have done? Which perhaps is an equally reasonable answer to pose during that period. And we lived through a period of fundamental white complacency. White voters went to the polls time and time again, and certainly no one was poking their nose into the ballot box to see who they were voting for.
And the National Party returned time and time again in order to implement the kind of policies which “The Dry White Season” documents. And so, and on the other hand, there is a fascinating implication of the film, of the way in which ultimately for some whites, the horror of what apartheid was dawned on them, and in effect, what dawned on them was the cost to Black people, the fact that Black people were essentially oppressed in the most remarkably awful ways. And in 1976 uprisings began after 15 years of fairly quiet, well less, about 10 years of fairly quiet political non-activity, to focus attention on just how you couldn’t suppress people on any length of time. And I’m reminded in this introduction that I’m giving you of a famous quote by Sydney Kentridge, our greatest advocate, certainly of my lifetime, who in famous lecture said about the National Party and the construction of apartheid, that, “The tragedy is that when you look at what they’ve done, they destroyed better than they knew,” and that particular legacy haunts us every day. But with those remarks that’s really the justification for why I thought in a series on South Africa, we should choose such a film, to at least engage with you about that particular important period of South African history and what it threw up. Now, let me make a couple of further introductory remarks before I play you the first clip. The author of the novel is himself an interesting character, Andre Brink. He was the first Afrikaans writer to have a book banned by the South African government in the decades when the National Party was in power. The novel “Kennis Van Die Aand” in 1973 dealt not only with torture under racial segregation, but it also detailed a passionate affair between a kind of mixed race man and a white woman. The book was later translated into English called “Looking on Darkness” in 1974.
And it was there from that particular point that Andre Brink was marked out as what we would call a , a traitor to his people. Dominie Koot Vorster, who was mentioned by Milton Shein in his excellent series of lectures last week, who was a minister of the Dutch Reform Church. And the brother of BJ Foster, the Prime Minister, said, “If this is literature, then a brothel is a Sunday school.” Well, I suppose he really had a way of speaking, did our Koot. Brink was the most prominent of a group of dissident young Afrikaans writers who were called , the 60-ers. The group included the novelist Etienne Leroux, and the poet who became internationally famous, Breyten Breytenbach. And they, all of whom may been born in small South African towns, transcended the restrictive nature of their upbringing, having witnessed brutal mistreatment of Black people, they start to write in the language of Afrikaans about the possible emancipation of Afrikanadom from the evil of apartheid. Brink really started change when he went to Paris with his first wife in 1960, and the Sharpville massacres confirmed a growing sense of the misguidedness of what he regarded as his people. And from then on a string of novels emanated from his pen. He wrote in Afrikaans and then in English, a series of internationally prize-winning novels about apartheid, “Rumours of Rain”, 1978, “A Dry White Season”, which we’re speaking about this evening, 1979, and “A Chain of Voices” in 1981. He continued right through the '90s, a whole string of novels, which concentrated on thinking about the role of colonisers, servants, slaves, as well as ideas of history and gender.
So his fiction evolved quite markedly during that particular period, “Rights of Desire”, “The Other Side of Silence” and “The Blue Door” being three of these particular books. He became a professor of literature at University of Cape Town. Remarkably University of Cape Town, my university where I teach, had two extraordinary distinguished novelist professors of literature, John Coetzee, JM Coetzee, and Andre Brink at pretty much the same time. He was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, recipient of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and a range of other international awards. I can go on, but I don’t want to, because I’ve got a lot to get through, with your permission. I want to as well talk about the director of the film, 'cause Brink of course writes this book, and it’s not a, you know, it as it were stays as a novel some while, and all of a sudden a director, and I’m going to mispronounce her name, so I’ll spell it. Euzhan Palcy, E-U-Z H-A-N P-A-L-C-Y, decides that she would like to set the novel as an apartheid thriller called “The Dry White Season”. She grew up on the island of Martinique, where there were no filmmakers. She says, quote, “I used to go to the movies as often as I could, and Black faces, Black characters were totally absent. And very rarely when we had a Black character, a Black actor, it would always be in a very degrading part. That would make me very sad.” When she was 13, her mother gave her the novel “Sugar Cane Alley”, a semi autobiographical work by Martinique author Joseph Zobel, that would later become a celebrated film directed by Palcy.
And she then lands up, by leaving Martinique, studying literature and film, and working on the script for “Sugar Cane Alley” in France. She makes a connection with Francois Truffaut, and the legendary director becomes a mentor. The film, which is “Sugar Cane Alley”, wins a Silver Lion at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, and the French Cesar Award for the first feature film, and earned rave reviews from all sorts of sources, including the “New York Times” and Roger Ebert. Now, she then said she wanted to make a film about Alice Walker’s “The Colour People”, but then she heard that Steven Spielberg had already owned the rights, so she turned her attention to South Africa. She said this, “When I came across the book, 'A Dry White Season’, I saw immediately what I could do, because it’s about the awakening of a white man, an Afrikaner. He saw the light and decided to fight his own brothers in the name of justice. I decided to make the adaptation a story of two families, one Black and one white.” Though the film was shot in Zimbabwe, she travelled undercover to Soweto to research the details, of course during the apartheid era. The lead Afrikaner roles in “A Dry White Season” were played by Hollywood stars, Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, and you’ll be interested to note, coming out of retirement after a decade-long hiatus from films, there was Marlon Brando, we’ll come to him later.
But she stipulated that the Black characters had to be portrayed by Black South Africans rather than African Americans. “We had to give these people a voice,” she said. “Remember when I’m making the movie, Nelson Mandela’s in jail, the Special Branch are killing people like flies. I was ready to make that movie at any cost, but if I did that, I wanted to make a real movie about the situation.” And of course, a number of really respected South African performers, Winston Ntshona, particularly famous for many of the Athol Fugard plays that took place in South Africa during that period, and Zakes Mokae, they were part of the cast. And it’s a film, as it were, which did have strong reviews, and Oscar nomination for Brando, by the way, at the same time. So I wanted at least to give you some sense of the director and of the author. May I now, if I could ask you Lauren to, and thank you very much for your assistance again, to play a clip, which actually does have the director introducing the film.
“A Dry White Season” is about the Soweto uprising that occurred in ‘76, where they killed so many kids.
This is a peaceful demonstration. We know the police will come, but be calm, be cool. Remember, this is a protest march. We are not here to fight the police, let’s go.
When I read the book, I saw the movie and I said, “I’m going to do that.” And of course I had to go to South Africa to investigate. In order to adapt the book, I needed to feel the country, to meet the people. So I went underground.
Fire! Watch out!
Hold on!
What could I do? The only weapon that I had was my camera and also my pencil. Write a script, adapt the script, and fight to get the money to make the movie. So if I couldn’t do that for me, I was thinking, “I don’t deserve to be called a filmmaker.” Usually, when Hollywood produces films about Black folks, you know, in another country, in a foreign country, they will use African American actors to portray those Black people, as if those people, they don’t exist and they can’t play, they can’t act. They don’t even look to see if they exist. And I said, “Look, this is it. Talking about casting, I want Black South African actors to portray themselves, to give them a voice. By doing 'A Dry White Season’, it is a very important act. It’s a political act, it’s a statement, and I don’t want to cheat with that.” And that’s what I did. And they are in the movie, and some of them are in “Black Panther”, you know? And they did some, I mean, they are great.
So sorry about what happened.
Don’t stop, Pa. Please, I don’t want you to give up.
For that movie. Donald Sutherland was my guy. He was the character, because Donald Sutherland is such an incredible actor. And when he’s on screen, he’s not Hollywood, he’s not a Hollywood baby. You know, you don’t think of Hollywood and a Hollywood actor. And I was worried that people will be distracted, you know? And they wouldn’t identify themselves to that Afrikaner who said, “I didn’t know what was going on,” and was crying and everything.
Oh, I’m terribly sorry, would you like a cup of tea?
No, no thank you, no. Um, no I’m, I’m here on a matter of justice.
Oh, justice. Well I, I’m afraid that’s a trifle more complex to serve you up than a cup of tea.
This was the first time that he was directed by a woman, and they asked him a question about it after the shooting. He said that he was very happy, it was, I mean, an extraordinary experience with a female director, and I gave him the desire to work again with women. And he did, the next movie he did after “A Dry White Season” was directed by a woman. Thanks. So that gives you a sense of who the director was and she what was about, and we’ve already got acquainted with two of the famous actors in this film, Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando. But let’s just, I’m going to play you the clip of the first few minutes, but let me try to pose within that the context of what this film’s about. Assume that you are a white school master in South Africa. You live in a comfortable suburban home with your wife, probably in Johannesburg. In those days rolling lawns, no fences. Security wasn’t a particular concern. You have a wife and your two children. By the way, the wife of Donald Sutherland is played by a hugely distinguished South African actress who’s appeared here on lockdown a couple of times, named Janet Suzman. And all of a sudden your African gardener’s son, who you have tried to help in relation to school, emerges with the gardener, and he’s been brutally beaten by the police. But you live in a cocoon, in a white ghetto, if you wish. And your perspective of the world at that moment in time is entirely one that you cannot grasp the magnitude of it.
And of course the novel is, and the film is, a journey of this very, of this Afrikaans school teacher played by Donald Sutherland, and I might add, played with a great deal of empathy and understanding by him, it’s a journey, it’s a voyage of discovery in which we’ll see what happens to him, what the cost is to him, in an apartheid society where white people are just in utter denial of the reality of the country. And so the first few scenes of this film frame the entire conceit. And that’s why I wanted, if you wouldn’t mind, just to watch the first five minutes. You’ve got the credits, in the first five minutes you’ll see a lot of famous actors in this film, but leave that aside. It’s the first five minutes that I wanted to capture.
, so how can we fight for freedom when our fathers sit in the government’s beer halls and get drunk? Boycott these places, the beer that you drink buys the bullets that kill your-
Come on boys!
Watch your flank!
Yes, yes. Yes!
Yes!
He’s got a great future.
That was brilliant!
Like father, like son.
To your family!
To our headmaster.
Coming Gordon?
Yes, Mr. Ben. Jonathan will come and help me.
How is Jonathan? The algebra still giving him trouble?
He’s working hard, Mr. Ben.
Your money will not be wasted. Emily and me will always thank you.
That’s fine, see you later, Gordon.
[Gordon] Bye bye, Mr. Ben. Come to Grandpa, ooh. Just like your Ma.
Be gentle with Grandpa.
Okay. Oh, don’t hurt Grandpa. Mm, smell.
Almost ready Chris, 20 minutes.
No, come on, keep your hands off, man. Johan, hey, all right man, come on, bring it. Oh, next time you get the fork.
Jonathan.
I’m sorry Gordon, but they must have had a reason.
I know my son, Mr. Ben. If he says he was not doing anything, I believe him.
The Court didn’t, was he represented?
Our lawyer, Julius Ngakula, is in detention. That’s why I came to you-
Ben?
Mr. Ben.
I’ll be there in a minute, darling. Get some iodine, will you?
God, Johan?
Jonathan, did you tell the Court exactly what happened?
What does he know about Court? Before he knew, it was all over. We need a good lawyer, Mr. Ben.
It’s too late for a lawyer, Gordon. There’s nothing to be done now.
You don’t understand, Mr. Ben, I don’t want him to have a police record. It will be there for the rest of his life.
Such a minor matter. Let it go, Gordon. Yeah, put that on his backside, and-
I’m not worried about those wounds. I know they’ll get better. It’s the wounds here, these are the ones I worry about.
There’s nothing to be done.
The cuts look terrible, Pa.
Mm-hmm, he must have done something.
It’s an extraordinary framing of the film, if I could just sort of recapitulate. There is the brutality which was exhibited on children. We know that the police killed many. You’ll notice as well, and the director is quite rightly clear, there’s Black and white policemen who were involved in that. And it’s extraordinary to watch, it seems, the dichotomy between the situation faced by the children, and remember this takes place in the 1970s when school children of Soweto, an African township just outside of Johannesburg, held a series of protests because they wanted to be educated in English, not in Afrikaans. They regarded Afrikaans as the language of oppressors, and they certainly didn’t want to speak it. And the result was that there were these massive uprisings in 1976, to which I’ve made reference, and which in many ways is the context of this particular book. And you see, as it were, the distinction between the older generation who essentially, you know, go and drink beer and don’t really care, because they’ve just been battered into submission, and a younger generation who simply are not prepared any longer to put up with the repression of apartheid, and want to do no more than protest relatively peacefully. In fact, peacefully to be perfectly blunt, relatively, because police never allowed them to do that. And then the film, I think just wondrously connects to the lawn at Ben’s, at Sutherland’s character’s house.
How many of you who have lived in Joburg would’ve sort of acknowledged having similar and perhaps even much more palatial houses, on a relaxed Sunday afternoon braai, when just down the road, children like this were being brutally tortured and beaten? In short, the film locates the dichotomy between the daily grinding existence of Black South Africans under apartheid, and the way in which whites lived at that particular point in time, a level of social amnesia, if you wish. And of course, we then get the classic situation. The gardener, played by Winston Ntshona, as I said, the very famous South African actor, comes with his son, who effectively is being sponsored and you know, very decently by the school master so that he can continue his studies at a decent school. And the question was, what did he do? How many times did we hear that during apartheid, “Where there’s smoke there must be fire,” “Vorster knows what he’s doing,” you know, “These people must have done something to elicit police reaction.” And Brink the novelist and the the director here placed that in embarrassing kind of contradiction and focus attention on it. I can’t describe in a sense the condition of South Africa during that particular period better than the way those opening five minutes documented frames the entire film. Because as I say, at the beginning the Sutherland character really doesn’t believe this is really happening without reason. But boy, does he go on a journey, through a voyage of hell to discovery of what had actually happened. And effectively what does happen in a situation like this is both the gardener and the gardener’s son, who the school master is helping, find themselves at the wrong end of the apartheid system. Jonathan, the little boy, is arrested almost at random and jailed with many other demonstrators.
And then a chain of events which happened in South Africa so often, leads the Ben du Toit, that’s the Sutherland character, into a fundamental set of changes, right? The movie follows him in a desperate attempt as he starts to think the unthinkable. How could it be that a society such as the one he lived in, in fairly lavish conditions, could have effectively murdered both the little boy Jonathan and the gardener who was seeking justice? And then of course, the film goes on to capture something else, which is poignant. The film then talks about the fact that the gardener’s wife is now no longer able to live in an urban area because her husband is dead, and because the Pass Laws now restrict her from entering an urban area on her own, because she’s not employed legally as he was, as a result of which she loses a house. So the film focuses then on fundamental core, oppressive apparatuses of apartheid, the denial of people the right to live where they wanted to, and the splitting of families and murder. And what occurs, which happened in South Africa throughout, and here the film, I think kind of mirrors, if you wish, the Biko inquest and many other inquests such as this. So just to explain to people who were not aware of this, South Africa had an extraordinary young leader called Stephen Biko, Stephen Bantu Biko, who was a medical student at the University of Natal, and who really was extraordinary, and I know this, I can prove this simply by referring you to books that he wrote in in his 20s.
“I Write What I Like” is one of them, and I certainly commend that to anybody who wants to understand Biko, who believed in the Black Consciousness Movement, in which effectively what he was talking about, which replicates what you’ve just seen already, was young, Black people saying, “We can’t rely on whites to basically liberate us. We have to liberate ourselves, we have to gain freedom for ourselves. And when we’ve done that, perhaps we can then reconstruct a non-racial society.” And Biko was captured by the security police, brutally tortured, unfortunately totally and utterly maltreated, or should I say, subject to the negligence, the criminal negligence of certain doctors. I’m not going to mention them, but they come from Port Elizabeth, and where the Medical and Dental Council finally did have something to say about them. And Biko was schlepped 1000 miles in a shocking condition, to Pretoria, strapped to irons, where he was killed.
Why do I tell you this? Partly because it’s important, and partly because in relation to this novel, what occurred thereafter was an inquest in which Sydney Kentridge, the Great South African advocate, together with George Bezos, of which I’ll mention in a moment, represented the family. And after a trial, where it was perfectly obvious that the security police had tortured and murdered Biko, the magistrates and apartheid apparatchik, found no one was responsible. And the novel actually tracks that sort of narrative in relation to Ben du Toit’s desperate attempt to ensure that they can appeal the inquest to find the police guilty for the murder of both the gardener and the son. And he comes across a lawyer who I think, represented by Marlon Brando, I’ve often wondered when I watched this, whether he modelled himself on George Bezos. But it’s a remarkable short role played by Marlon Brando, for which he was justly nominated for an Oscar, and I think that’s the next clip. Just a moment, I forgot. I wanted to show you a clip earlier of the dilemmas that elderly Black people like the gardener have with their children, warning them not to go protesting because of the consequences that occur. I’m sorry, I forgot about that. So let’s watch this. It’s a wonderful illustration of generational differences under any repressive system, in this case apartheid.
I don’t care what other parents are saying. Now listen to me, I tell you, no demonstrations. Tomorrow you go to school.
But there’ll be nobody at school Baba.
Then you and Robert will be the only ones. What do I say to Mr. Ben? “Thank you for the school fees, but my son doesn’t want to learn?”
Let Mr. Ben keep his white money for his poor education. We want to learn in English, we don’t want to learn Afrikaans.
You don’t understand Baba, they don’t want us to be really educated. If we learn in Afrikaans, we have no future, Baba. they want us to be messenger boys, mine boys-
And garden boys like me.
Yes, Baba. Everybody knows that you’re a wise man. Everybody comes to ask for advice, and they respect you. You should be a lawyer, Baba, but what are you?
Okay, thanks Lauren. It’s really extraordinary that, you know, as a parent you can understand that, the tensions between the younger generation and the older in a repressive society, such as apartheid South Africa. And what happened in 1976 is precisely that, where younger black South Africans said, “Enough is enough.” And of course, in many ways that led a decade later to that which I’m sure Professor Bundy has discussed, which is of course the sustained protests of the 1980s. But as I indicated earlier, the child and the father meet their death at the hands of security policemen, including a particularly brutal security policeman, whom slowly but surely as the film unfolds, Ben du Toit, the Sutherland character, actually begins to realise is at the heart of the problem. And of course let me say this, whilst he is able to access the legal system, that only takes place until he’s accused by the security police of asking the wrong questions and adopting the wrong attitude. He’s ostracised, he loses his job. Shots are then fired through the windows of his house. His wife, Janet Suzman, acted by Janet Suzman, who plays a really wonderful role as a brittle and unforgiving wife, is furious that he’s betrayed the family by appearing to be what we call the K word, the most disparaging word used against Black people, the kaffir, which I suppose literally is a non-believer, but it’s the most disparaging racist term used by whites at the time, and sadly to some extent still. His daughter finds him a disgrace. Only the little son whom we’ve been introduced to who goes to that privileged school, only he stands by his father. And it’s at this particular point in time, absolutely desperate to try to find out the truth, that he approaches the famous lawyer, and we see the wonderful scene now with Brando.
For Gordon Ngubene, you remember the story of Gordon Ngubene?
Yes, yes, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful story.
I want justice for him, to the full extent of the law.
You see justice and law, Mr. du Toit, are, are often just, well they, I suppose they could be described as distant cousins. And here in South Africa they’re, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all. And I have, I familiarised myself with your dossier, and I’m afraid that my counsel to you is to just give it up.
Give it up?
Yes.
Because there is nothing to be done? That’s what I, that’s what I said to his son when his son was caned, and now his son is dead. That’s what I thought about Gordon when he was jailed, and now he is dead because of my neglect. I have known that family for 15 years, Mr. McKenzie. I cannot give it up.
Yes, it does make a difference, of course.
There must be some penalty under law for those who commit murder.
Mr. du Toit, may I ask you, how long you have lived with us in South Africa?
All my life.
I am afraid that I am, I’m just not the barrister that you’re seeking, I’m sorry.
I’m confused. Mr. McKenzie. I thought that you had undertaken many cases and won them in support of human rights.
No, you see what you don’t realise, that every time I, I won a case, they simply changed the law. So therefore, my considered counsel to you is to just simply chuck the lot.
I shall find another barrister, and I shall prove you wrong. Good afternoon, Mr. McKenzie.
Please sit down, Mr. du Toit, I will take your case. I will take your case if only to make it abundantly clear how, how justice in South Africa is misapplied when it comes to the question of race.
It’s an extraordinary scene. There’s so much to talk about there. The wonderful line which comes from the book that, “Law and justice are distant cousins who haven’t met for years in South Africa,” what an extraordinary thing. I even wonder to be perfectly frank, whether that isn’t true today, that for millions of South Africans today, just as it was then, law and justice have never met, or they’ve met, they’ve met just fleetingly in the corridors. The second thing about that exchange is the point made by the Brando character, “I won many cases, but they’ve changed the law.” Every time that the Human Rights Bar, and there were very heroic members of the Human Rights Bar in South Africa, all of whom deserve mention, if not a full lecture on the role of many of them, many of whom I might add were Jewish lawyers, for which we should be very proud. Every time they won the law was changed to subvert the outcome, absolutely extraordinary. And of course, quite rightly, the Brando character says, you go to court and either you’re going to get a corrupt magistrate or an unbelievably co-executive minded judge, perfectly selected by the judge’s president, who at that time were appointed by the Minister of Justice, in order to ensure the preservation of white hegemony and authoritarian legal practise, and you lose. And then of course there is the case of du Toit, Ben du Toit, who’s on a voyage. That’s the whole thing of the novel, that here is this character for whom the sheer horror of apartheid has dawned, who loses his wife, loses his daughter, loses his job, but he will not give up, because he’s seen just how compromised his existence is, because of the nature of apartheid. That’s in a sense the central core of the novel, the central core of the film. And of course inevitably, inevitably, the du Toit character played by Sutherland it ends in tragedy. And I’m going to therefore just play you one of the penultimate clips to show that, very sad, very poignant and very accurate.
One final point, the security policeman is killed by someone who had befriended Donald Sutherland, the Ben du Toit character, and that was a taxi driver. You get flashbacks from him to all of the horrendous murders that had taken place, orchestrated by that security policeman, and of course he finally kills him. But by that stage, of course, du Toit’s dead. But it was interesting is that right at the end there is the newspaper clipping about the exposure of torture, tension, and murder. And that too essentially reflects South African history. An extraordinary set of incidents in Port Elizabeth, in which a young district surgeon at the time called Wendy Orr found, she was there, and she of course experienced the way all these people were coming into hospital absolutely brutally tortured, and of course as a district surgeon, they had to document this. And Wendy Orr unbelievably courageously, through indirect circles, got hold of, again one of South Africa’s most extraordinary human rights lawyers, a man called Halton Cheadle, and they brought a case, really just such imaginative lawyering at the time.
They brought a case getting an interdict against the police for torturing people at the St. Alban’s Prison in Port Elizabeth, which basically blew the lid off it all. So there is a reflection that something finally happened that the arc of justice, as Martin Luther King once said, did bend, albeit very slowly. But I think in a sense I wanted to show you this because of its way in which it reflected the dilemma between Black and white, the Black condition, which was brutalised by apartheid, and on the other hand just how most whites were complacent, and how the du Toit character tries to focus on those rare moments of people who stood up against injustice. And eventually, as you know, the film made in 1989, it wasn’t all that longer that Democratic South Africa dawned with all its imperfections. So that’s all I have to say. I’m going to just go to the Q&A, if I may, to see what there is.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: Yeah, would I consider doing a lecture on Breytenbach?
A: Yes of course, I think it’s very, very important from all sorts of points of view.
Quite right Monty, and I agree with that. Thank you very much.
Yes, “The book by Alice Walker”, says Betty, “of course is not ‘The Coloured People’ but ‘The Colour People’.” Yes, I’m sorry, my mispronunciation. But that was the book that the director wanted to do, is “The Colour People”.
Yeah, Donald Sutherland was a Shakespearean actor from Nova Scotia, thank you Harriet. What I’m always getting my head around was that the first time I ever saw him was in “MASH”, which he, you know, played a very different character at the time. The film was made, Gita, in 1989.
Michael says, “It reminds me of Jewish capos,” I think you’ve mean in relation to the Black policeman. Indeed, that is correct.
Patricia, you can see the film because if you just go onto YouTube, you can download the whole thing.
Gail, I found that very funny, that Brando looks someone like Paul Boberg, for those of you who know Paul Boberg was the, PQR Boberg, Paul Quentin Regnar Boberg, a very, very brilliant South African professor of law at Wits University, who was a colleague of mine when I first arrived there. He’d been there for many years. Maybe he does, hadn’t thought of that. But he certainly seemed to model it partly on the George Bezos character.
Siobhan, “‘For my friends justice, for my enemy the law’ is a quote I recall from somewhere.” Now I’m not quite sure Siobhan, that I know that, but it’s a very fine quote. Not quite sure what you mean by governing throughout the lecture, but wishes are with Israel today, well certainly I do too, and thank you very much for the other compliments.
So that concludes my lecture. Again, my prayers go out to Israel, and we’ll meet soon in another lecture. Thank you very much.