The documentary that shows how music helped defeat Apartheid

Interview, March, 2003 by Susan Johnston

In 1948 the ruling white government of South Africa created what it described as a "policy of good neighborliness." Most of the rest of the world called Apartheid what it really was: a horrific system of racial segregation and oppression that forcibly moved millions of black Africans into ghettos, where they were denied the most basic human and civil rights. For 43 years, until the system's demise in 1991, South Africans engaged in largely nonviolent protest against the regime; one of their most potent weapons was music.

A powerful new documentary, Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, illuminates the integral role that song played in the nation's journey to freedom. using interviews with artists and activists along with shameful, often graphic newsreel and government propaganda footage, and soaring clips of the masses' prayerful anthems of protest and lament, director-producer Lee Hirsch has created an important history lesson that earns a place among the canon of works exploring one of recent history's grossest injustices.

Amandla! begins with the disinterment of legendary composer-activist Vuyisile Mini from a pauper cemetery and ends with his reburial among family. Between the bookends, the film is less a condemnation of Apartheid and its architects than a testimony to humanity and the power of art, and art's ability to mobilize, empower, and resurrect. This resurrection--of a country and its people--serves as a reminder, particularly in a world in which struggles ancient and new are erupting on many fronts, to artists and freedom-loving peoples of their importance to one another. It's a reminder of the bounds of art's purity and man's atrocity, one we'd be foolish to ignore.

Playwright Susan Johnston will premiere three of her productions this year.