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Kagiso Mnisis Correspondent
Plotted on a graph, the trajectory of post-apartheid South Africa would show an initial upward curve, followed by a gradual descent. Because it can go beyond the limitations of local news broadcasts, documentary film has had the most success charting this decline. Egyptian filmmaker Jihan El Tahri’s “Behind the Rainbow” is a brilliant example of how documentary film has been able to skilfully capture South Africa’s rise and fall.
“Behind the Rainbow” chronicles the story of the ANC’s inspiring liberation project and how the many compromises that led to the historic elections in 1994 ultimately led to the erosion of the promises and dreams sold to the electorate. The documentary’s narrative arc is divided into four quadrants.
The director takes the audience through the developments that accompanied the negotiations following Nelson Mandela’s release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, through the policies that were adopted after the ANC assumed power, the subsequent battle between the elite and the “commoner” within the party and, ultimately, the ANC’s Polokwane conference, which would change its trajectory forever. All of which, when meditated upon in the context of the present, evoke the question, “How did we get here?”
The legacy of the Polokwane conference
The Polokwane conference, in which Jacob Zuma emerged as the victor after a bruising battle with then president Thabo Mbeki, delivered a weakened party marked by warring factions. The party has also since been weakened by its own ineptitude to deliver services to the electorate, corruption, a weakening economy and a depreciating currency.
In addition, in recent years, the ANC has seen its political legitimacy being eroded by opposition parties, like the Economic Freedom Fighters, a breakaway party led by a former leader of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema. In addition, there have been scandals such as the Marikana Massacre (documented in Rehad Desai’s film “Miners Shot Down”), and an uprising by the “Fallist” generation, largely university students, who are disgruntled over the ruling party’s incapability to live up to its “Better Life For All” slogan.
In her previous life, El Tahri worked as a news correspondent for Reuters, the Sunday Times, Washington Post and US Report. Documentary filmmaking won over her heart when the Gulf War hit. “It was obvious in and around the Gulf War that the presence of the camera had much more power than anything else. In 1990 the image was taking over.
“If a dialogue was going to happen, the image was going to be at the centre,” El Tahri says. “I had questions, mainly regarding the domination of the image in the shaping of perceptions, but I also felt there was a combination of things that went deeper, beyond writing. My other preoccupation was the tyranny of space in newspapers and the bureaucracy of the newsroom.”
“Behind the Rainbow” deliberately embeds archival material from local institutions such as guerrilla footage from the 1980s, housed by the Mayibuye Archive and Afro-Vision. El Tahri lived in South Africa for a time in order to capture the nuances of the place. In her experience, “stories shot by foreign cameras, compared to those by local ones, might issue from the same place, but they are not identical”.
She views the archive as “a tool and a weapon” that, in the hands of a local storyteller, has a more substantial dynamic and is able to show complexity. To her it is all about “telling our story in its various complexities”.
A new generation of doccie makers
Today’s generation of political documentary filmmakers have a heavier reliance on visual poetry than the original tenets of long-form journalism might have allowed for. A case in point is Mpumi Mcata’s 86-minute film “Black President”, which is more art housey than journalistic and is deliberately meant to be an “impression”. This trend sees young filmmakers observing the implications of mainstream politics for the personal psyche.
The meeting point between El Tahri and Mcata, in this sense, is the quest to understand the anatomy of power as it has played out in post-colonial states. El Tahri’s body of work, however, casts a wider net, judging by her subsequent trilogy, “Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs”, which ponders how the events leading to Egypt’s 2011 uprisings were initially being set up.
Through studying the ideologies that figureheads like Gamal Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak upheld, the trilogy is diagnostic of the present as much as of the past. Her testament is, “We are a combined result of our past and this has to be learnt from. We, therefore, need to have some sort of idea why leaders lie to us so that it does not happen again.”
The politics of the post-colonial state came with narratives of unshackling the African from a tumultuous past, but evidently that is all it was – a narrative. As with any age, the storyteller has her place in the post-colonial one, one which Jihan El Tahri has taken on to critical admiration.
As we gaze at the flurry of headlines that detail the fractured ANC of 2016, the storyteller asks the important question, referred to earlier: How did we get here? In “Behind the Rainbow”, the filmmaker makes a moral argument as she addresses our political times. – thisisafrica.me
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