Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony

African Arts, Summer, 2003 by Ian Barnard

Directed by Lee Hirsch Produced by Sherry Simpson Kwela Productions, 2002. 108 minutes. U.S. distributor: Artisan Entertainment.

This documentary film by first-time U.S. director Lee Hirsch chronicles the role of music in South Africa's antiapartheid movement from the 1940s through the 1990s. Amandla! argues that music took on numerous functions in the Struggle. It was able to reach and politicize people who might not be moved by speeches and pamphlets; it served as a source of strength, pride, and support; it boosted morale and inspired action; it served as a secret communication tool among activists; it chronicled the history of the Struggle; and it even acted as a weapon in itself, as with the fear-instilling Toyi-Toyi dance-song combination. Moreover, as musician Abdullah Ibrahim says in the film, music was not only part of the liberation struggle but also part of the process of self-liberation for black South Africans. In addition to being heard as a soundtrack to visual images, the music per se is presented a) in the form of archival footage of singing and dancing in concert and other public settings (such as political rallies), b) in contemporary community and studio performances (presumably created for Amandla!), and c) in the more informal singing of many of the performers and activists interviewed (who sing unaccompanied, often in their own homes and usually seated in their "interview" chairs).

The film has a potentially important point to make about the imbrication of politics and

music (and art in general); and its attention to superstar professional musicians, such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, together with singing individual activists and groups of everyday citizens suggests a democratic view of art, a view contrary to those paradigms that normalize individual star "specialists" and narrow aesthetic criteria. Such paradigms are tellingly exemplified in Christopher Null's review of the film on the Web site filmcritic.com: "Note to filmmaker Lee Hirsch: A bunch of people singing out of key is not a four-part harmony."

British and U.S. punk musicians of the 1970s and 1980s similarly challenged political and artistic norms with their usurpation of elitist assumptions of qualifications for musicianship: according to their democratic adage, anyone who could hold a guitar could be a good punk musician (see Hebdige 1979). The recent controversy around the Poets Against the War in the U.S. has rightly renewed debates about definitions of "good" art. Amandla!'s filmmakers are to be commended for not whitewashing the militancy of some of the freedom songs' lyrics ("We will shoot them with our machine guns") in order to placate more conservative viewers, such as the author of a letter to South Africa's Sunday Times, who wrote in response to the newspaper's review of Amandla!:" 'Whites watch out, we are going to kill you ... slowly' even as a quotation from the past is still shocking, vicious, racist, barbaric, uncalled for, and damaging. Living in southern Africa as an elderly white male is stressful enough without having ignorant American revolutionaries cashing in on the situation" (Thesen 2002).

And just when we might be wondering about the many pieces of music in South Africa that, even in the midst of the most dire conditions of discrimination, oppression, and brutality, must not have had overt political content, the film shows how this "non-political" art becomes unexpectedly politicized in the context of apartheid. Thus a love song becomes a Struggle song as it functions as a means of communication between an underground guerrilla fighter and her or his lover; a song like "Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika" ("God Bless Africa"--now the official national anthem of South Africa), which has no "political" content, becomes politicized by reason of the contexts in which it is sung; people transform a seemingly innocuous old song into something more militant by "putting an 'AK' [machinegun] there, taking out a 'Bible' there" to reflect growing protests against apartheid; and linguistically challenged white South Africans paternalistically applaud the singing of black South Africans, symptomatically oblivious to the fact that the songs are actually criticizing and threatening the white listeners, and are nut about the stereotypically banal matters the onlookers clearly think the singers are addressing.

Given these promising premises, it is disappointing that Amandla! doesn't explore the wider (and more challenging) implications of its thesis about the interweavings of music and politics. Such an exploration would necessitate moving beyond the specifics of music and South Africa to at least a gesture in the direction of what this thesis means for art in general and for music and art ha the rest of the world. This extrapolation is especially important given that the filmmakers are U.S. Americans and that the film has, until now, been most widely shown in the U.S. (The recent controversies around the timid and subsequently retracted antiwar statements of Madonna and the Dixie Chicks point to the need for this kind of discussion in the U.S.) Alas, Amandla! resists making such connections by emphasizing the specialness of the South African case; it ends with Abdullah Ibrahim asserting that the South African "revolution" was the only one to have been "done ha four-part harmony." it also reinscribes racist essentialisms. All the black people in the film sing; the white antiapartheid activists make speeches and write poetry. Its ultimate effect is to rehearse the distance between subject and object that made antiapartheid activism such a comfortable cause in the U.S. in the 1980s: as long as American liberals could decry the exceptional horrors of South Africa, they didn't have to interrogate racism in their own country or delineate the continuities between South African apartheid and U.S. racism.