傻瓜

The film opens with a magnificent panoramic shot of the Charterston roof-tops (the black ghetto of Nigel), drenched in the early morning light, their chimney smoke wafting in the same oblique line. The impression stays with us, the film being anything but straight, cold, objective. It is not the documentary on apartheid Western spectators may expect, and it is certainly not about the eternal conflict between the devilish White and the magnificent Black that Hollywood regularly dishes up for a world anxious to expurgate its guilt over its primarily economic complicity with an extreme regime. Ramadan Suleman has chosen a shortly story by Njabulo Ndebele for the first feature film freely directed by a Black South African. It is not an innocent choice, Ndebele being the theoretician of the "rediscovery of the ordinary" (the title of one of his famous articles published in 1986), convinced that "only an art of quality can efficiently contribute to awakening the censured conscience of the oppressed, and thus free their humanity by instilling in them the desire to fight in order to achieve a creative life". This represents the aesthetic and political choice of starting with the self, of accepting the necessary introspection in order to reach the state of acceptation that is so hard for oppressed peoples, inclined by History to see themselves more as victims than as bearing any responsibility. This requires a transparency which deals with the Black integration of the violence of an apartheid-ridden society, rather than revelling in the spectacle of oppression. It is the choice of the future: the legacy of apartheid is deeply entrenched, and this violence is omnipresent.