People ask us all the time - what is White Shaka really about? What is it trying to say?
Why is it a Graphic Novel? Is it for Children? Is it a true story?
Now that the full book - Volume 1 and 2 is finally off the press - we can answer all these questions.
1. The Greatest Story You Never Heard about the Zulus and South Africa - The White Chief White Shaka isinspired by a true story.
In 1858 King Cetswayo nominated a white hunter as a chief because he needed an intermediary between the Zulus and the British. He gave him land the Zulus don't normally value - coastline property less than 2 hours from Durban. And he gave him, as is Zulu custom, 49 wives.... They developed an amazing hybrid society that lasted until 1879 when the Anglo-Zulu War tore them apart. The book deals with the consequences of this from the perspective of an unwitting descendant growing up in today's New York.
If you are South African you probably know everything you need to understand why this story was never included in your history lessons. If you are not South African, then will understand this as a kind of Hemmings-and-Jefferson story. Today, it is more complicated because the real family which had trouble fitting in with the old White minority government is still unsettled in the new black majority government.
2. Why is it Fiction? How did Gandhi get in there?
There are several reasons it is fictional - some having to do with the continuing violence in the area. But the main reason is that we wanted to make it speak to American readers without getting too bogged down in local history. We also wanted to explore ideas that you can't really do in non-fiction. For example, we have good reason to believe that Gandhi learned certain key lessons from Shaka by way of the Bambatha Rebellion. Hard to prove but in fiction, we can explore this amazing story and then turn it into an even bigger one that holds a lesson for us all.
3. Why is it a Graphic Novel - is it for kids?
Fortunately, there is a graphic novel version of Mandela's life story and it's not just
for kids either! However, we chose this format because it does speak to a new audience,
because we can incorporate our beloved South African music and art and because we thought this whole story was movie-like and ought to be seen. At the end of the day, this a story adults can read and enjoy while kids can just absorb the pictures - and get the idea. Hopefully, they will ask questions. (We are adding a Study Guide on the website so they can learn.)
4. Can you see the White Shaka experience at your school?
Yes! We will give free readings if the author is in the area and in some cases we will even arrange to bring in our Zulu dancers for a Show and Tell.
Email ellen@whiteshaka.com for details. That's it! So order your copies!
Available on Amazon and select bookstores. Free CD with direct orders at www.whiteshaka.com or (800) 273-2832
A few words about the author: Alan Brody is the Durban-born journalist who first brought the story of Mandela's impending freedom from jail to New York Newsday in 1989. He has written numerous business strategy articles and books that subtly underlie this complex story of South Africa's 4 races, the legacy of King Shaka, the origin of Gandhi's passive resistance, feminism and the transformative possibilities of the New Africa.
A Great Graphic Novel Experience about a bi-racial African with a musical soundtrack featuring the hot new sounds of urban South Africa! www.whiteshaka.com
Saturday, March 27, 2010
What is the New White Shaka All About?
White Shaka II is Now Out
The award winning complete version of White Shaka Boy is now out on Amazon or directly on the White Shaka Website.
Read our posts about the discussion points on White Shaka - its history, its music and its controversy.
About the music.
The theme song "Yeah, Yeah" and "Umile" have reached as high at #2 on the Overplay indie website.
White Shaka features music sung by the "discoverer" of Lady Gaga, Wendy Starland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMLjuBsfp7Q
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
"Invictus" - A South African Review
Great Try!
If you don’t know rugby, a touchdown is called a try. This movie about the great World Cup rugby game at the beginning of Mandela’s Presidency definitely scores. It takes place when South Africa’s shaky new multiracial democracy was still finding its feet after years of white rule. Mandela needed to make peace and heal the land. He saw an opportunity to create rapprochement and a national bonding experience by embracing the game beloved by his former enemy and despised by his supporters.
However, there are also some fumbles - the other meaning if you will – of “try”.
Without doubt, Morgan Freeman gives an Oscar-worthy reincarnation of Mandela – thus putting himself firmly in the King-Poitier-Ali-Crosby-Oprah-Obama pantheon of black-people who radically changed white perceptions. Matt Damon too, gives a great aw-shucks performance as an innocent racist who understands how much he has to change. You’ll barely recognize this bulked up version of Damon and his South African accent is flawless. But, for the most part they are stock characters – you don’t really know what makes Mandela tick and you can’t fully grasp the transformation of Pienaar (Damon), the rugby captain, because you just don’t know that much about him.
While the movie works well at the storytelling level, it also rings somewhat hollow. You see this momentous change in a terrible political situation through old newscasts but not through the cast. The black presidential security detail has to make peace with white special service cops who may once have jailed them. The white cops are now reporting to people who may once have tried to blow them up. But you see none of this in personal backstories. The pacing is slow but it is steady and it builds. The end may be predictable but the audience still applauded. If you have no idea what rugby is you will leave the theater unenlightened and those of us who know about rugby can see the ball was somehow dropped.
Therein lies the problem: this is a movie about symbols, the kind that can bring everyone together, make peace and bind a nation. If you can’t really explain the true nature of rugby, you can’t really explain its significance in this story. As for the title: what is a nice Latin word like Invictus doing in an African movie? Shouldn’t Mandela - just one generation away from living in a hut with a polygamous family - be reaching back to an African poem for inspiration? Wouldn’t you expect something more African than classical?
In a way, it echoes the story of the kouros statue the Getty Museum once acquired. Scientists analyzed the stone and lawyers certified the paper trail. But when Thomas Hoving of the Met took one look at it, he knew it was fake because it looked “fresh” – something you don’t expect in a 3,000 year old statue. In fact, it was a modern reproduction made from authentic stone from that period.
That is not to say this movie is a fake but it is obviously made – well made, mind you – by people of a different age, place and time who have fused the authentic with something that isn’t quite right. The author is a British journalist who covered South Africa, the screenwriter is a non-rugby loving ex-patriate South African living in Morro Bay, California. The supporting actors and Damon’s voice coach are all authentic South Africans but the director and the two lead actors are American. As good a job as they did technically, something got lost in the mix. Instead of being too lively, this movie is, if anything, muted - even somber. You’d have to wonder what it would look like if a South African director had made it. What if, say, Gavin Wood (Tsotsi) or an up-and-coming African director had done it, how different would it would be?
First, you would get a visceral sense of the times. People were very scared, very divided but also hopeful. The townships were bursting with exuberance. The whites experienced fear, loathing but also optimism. You see it in Invictus but you really don’t feel it. The celebration of the blacks matched the viciousness of the old white regime while the crime spree justified their old fears. Houses once designed to be open - even admired - became surrounded with walls, then barbed wire, power gates and finally, electrified fences. Yet the whites felt somehow liberated too and to understand that you’d have to see how war and rebellion-weary they had become. You never quite feel the two different cultures – an African world drenched in music, dance and excitement versus a stiff, though cordial white world where the music is at best, restrained.
Most of all though, you would understand why rugby really matters. It is not just that the white Afrikaners were the country’s exclusive payers of rugby, it is that it’s a territorial game. Rugby is played around the scrum, that beehive formation of men from each team pushing against each other in contention for a ball thrust in its midst at the beginning of each play. Whichever team plucks it out – usually by foot – gets to run with the ball. The traditional advantage of the South African team is that they are one of the heaviest in the game. That is why Damon filled up on pap ‘n wors for the role. The heavier the scrum the better the chance they have of pushing the other team out of the way and grabbing the ball.
The point about rugby in South Africa is not just that it is the game of the oppressors but a kind of reenactment of the way they pushed the indigenous people off the land to get at its resources. That explains why the formerly great Bokke had lost their mojo. Thanks to majority rule, they were being pushed off their land and they just couldn’t pull off their old act on the rugby field any more. At least, not until they had gotten permission, marching orders and reassurance from the new black president.
The poem, Invictus, is never fully fleshed out and in truth it was an obscure 19th century poem written by a 12 year old who’d lost his leg to TB. While understandably awkward as a poem it ends with these two resounding lines:
“I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
In fact, Mandela never sent that poem to Pienaar. He had been inspired by it in jail but he actually sent the rugby captain a version of Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech to inspire him.
Regardless of the actual poem, what matters is that Mandela reached out to a third place – a non-African heritage - to bring these former warring Africans of different races together. How do you explain that to Americans? They see these great aerial shots of Cape Town, the sophisticated cities contrasted with the black shantytowns (although you never go into any of these “informal” houses) and they must wonder: What Africa is this?
That is not say this isn’t a very good movie. It is not “Biko”, “Gandhi” or even “Chariots of Fire” though it is at least at the very front of the second tier. There is an academy award nomination or two in this and Clint deserves kudos for taking on something so far afield from his usual fare: Dirty Harry reincarnated as a couple of near-saints. As a feel-good movie it does indeed score: almost everyone wins – the whites, the blacks (he did forget the Jewish guy, Joel Stransky, a kind of South African Sandy Koufax who actually won the game with the drop kick.) The New Zealanders - ironically called the “All Blacks” on account of their uniforms - get to be the losers here even though they were a much more racially integrated team.
Not only that, but the All Blacks began each game with a fearsome Maori wardance called a Hakka which seemed to be lead by the blondest player. All the Bokke could do was glare back. But any South African knows they have their own ceremonial weapon, which is just as formidable: the Zulu War Dance. Yet no one mentions it – perhaps because Afrikaner rugby players don’t dance like that – ever - and Mandela was Xhosa as were most of the ruling ANC party and they were feuding with the Zulus. The New Zealanders even had rugby’s first true superstar, Jonah Loma, a terrifying figure who could simply plough through the opposing team with legs as thick and as unstoppable as tree trunks rolling down a cliff.
Nevertheless, Mandela’s support, Afrikaner determination and a little Hebrew footwork won the day and put the country on the track toward unity. In the end, this movie wins the cup but you get the idea there is more to be drunk from it along with a few more visits to the well.
© Alan Brody
If you don’t know rugby, a touchdown is called a try. This movie about the great World Cup rugby game at the beginning of Mandela’s Presidency definitely scores. It takes place when South Africa’s shaky new multiracial democracy was still finding its feet after years of white rule. Mandela needed to make peace and heal the land. He saw an opportunity to create rapprochement and a national bonding experience by embracing the game beloved by his former enemy and despised by his supporters.
However, there are also some fumbles - the other meaning if you will – of “try”.
Without doubt, Morgan Freeman gives an Oscar-worthy reincarnation of Mandela – thus putting himself firmly in the King-Poitier-Ali-Crosby-Oprah-Obama pantheon of black-people who radically changed white perceptions. Matt Damon too, gives a great aw-shucks performance as an innocent racist who understands how much he has to change. You’ll barely recognize this bulked up version of Damon and his South African accent is flawless. But, for the most part they are stock characters – you don’t really know what makes Mandela tick and you can’t fully grasp the transformation of Pienaar (Damon), the rugby captain, because you just don’t know that much about him.
While the movie works well at the storytelling level, it also rings somewhat hollow. You see this momentous change in a terrible political situation through old newscasts but not through the cast. The black presidential security detail has to make peace with white special service cops who may once have jailed them. The white cops are now reporting to people who may once have tried to blow them up. But you see none of this in personal backstories. The pacing is slow but it is steady and it builds. The end may be predictable but the audience still applauded. If you have no idea what rugby is you will leave the theater unenlightened and those of us who know about rugby can see the ball was somehow dropped.
Therein lies the problem: this is a movie about symbols, the kind that can bring everyone together, make peace and bind a nation. If you can’t really explain the true nature of rugby, you can’t really explain its significance in this story. As for the title: what is a nice Latin word like Invictus doing in an African movie? Shouldn’t Mandela - just one generation away from living in a hut with a polygamous family - be reaching back to an African poem for inspiration? Wouldn’t you expect something more African than classical?
In a way, it echoes the story of the kouros statue the Getty Museum once acquired. Scientists analyzed the stone and lawyers certified the paper trail. But when Thomas Hoving of the Met took one look at it, he knew it was fake because it looked “fresh” – something you don’t expect in a 3,000 year old statue. In fact, it was a modern reproduction made from authentic stone from that period.
That is not to say this movie is a fake but it is obviously made – well made, mind you – by people of a different age, place and time who have fused the authentic with something that isn’t quite right. The author is a British journalist who covered South Africa, the screenwriter is a non-rugby loving ex-patriate South African living in Morro Bay, California. The supporting actors and Damon’s voice coach are all authentic South Africans but the director and the two lead actors are American. As good a job as they did technically, something got lost in the mix. Instead of being too lively, this movie is, if anything, muted - even somber. You’d have to wonder what it would look like if a South African director had made it. What if, say, Gavin Wood (Tsotsi) or an up-and-coming African director had done it, how different would it would be?
First, you would get a visceral sense of the times. People were very scared, very divided but also hopeful. The townships were bursting with exuberance. The whites experienced fear, loathing but also optimism. You see it in Invictus but you really don’t feel it. The celebration of the blacks matched the viciousness of the old white regime while the crime spree justified their old fears. Houses once designed to be open - even admired - became surrounded with walls, then barbed wire, power gates and finally, electrified fences. Yet the whites felt somehow liberated too and to understand that you’d have to see how war and rebellion-weary they had become. You never quite feel the two different cultures – an African world drenched in music, dance and excitement versus a stiff, though cordial white world where the music is at best, restrained.
Most of all though, you would understand why rugby really matters. It is not just that the white Afrikaners were the country’s exclusive payers of rugby, it is that it’s a territorial game. Rugby is played around the scrum, that beehive formation of men from each team pushing against each other in contention for a ball thrust in its midst at the beginning of each play. Whichever team plucks it out – usually by foot – gets to run with the ball. The traditional advantage of the South African team is that they are one of the heaviest in the game. That is why Damon filled up on pap ‘n wors for the role. The heavier the scrum the better the chance they have of pushing the other team out of the way and grabbing the ball.
The point about rugby in South Africa is not just that it is the game of the oppressors but a kind of reenactment of the way they pushed the indigenous people off the land to get at its resources. That explains why the formerly great Bokke had lost their mojo. Thanks to majority rule, they were being pushed off their land and they just couldn’t pull off their old act on the rugby field any more. At least, not until they had gotten permission, marching orders and reassurance from the new black president.
The poem, Invictus, is never fully fleshed out and in truth it was an obscure 19th century poem written by a 12 year old who’d lost his leg to TB. While understandably awkward as a poem it ends with these two resounding lines:
“I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
In fact, Mandela never sent that poem to Pienaar. He had been inspired by it in jail but he actually sent the rugby captain a version of Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech to inspire him.
Regardless of the actual poem, what matters is that Mandela reached out to a third place – a non-African heritage - to bring these former warring Africans of different races together. How do you explain that to Americans? They see these great aerial shots of Cape Town, the sophisticated cities contrasted with the black shantytowns (although you never go into any of these “informal” houses) and they must wonder: What Africa is this?
That is not say this isn’t a very good movie. It is not “Biko”, “Gandhi” or even “Chariots of Fire” though it is at least at the very front of the second tier. There is an academy award nomination or two in this and Clint deserves kudos for taking on something so far afield from his usual fare: Dirty Harry reincarnated as a couple of near-saints. As a feel-good movie it does indeed score: almost everyone wins – the whites, the blacks (he did forget the Jewish guy, Joel Stransky, a kind of South African Sandy Koufax who actually won the game with the drop kick.) The New Zealanders - ironically called the “All Blacks” on account of their uniforms - get to be the losers here even though they were a much more racially integrated team.
Not only that, but the All Blacks began each game with a fearsome Maori wardance called a Hakka which seemed to be lead by the blondest player. All the Bokke could do was glare back. But any South African knows they have their own ceremonial weapon, which is just as formidable: the Zulu War Dance. Yet no one mentions it – perhaps because Afrikaner rugby players don’t dance like that – ever - and Mandela was Xhosa as were most of the ruling ANC party and they were feuding with the Zulus. The New Zealanders even had rugby’s first true superstar, Jonah Loma, a terrifying figure who could simply plough through the opposing team with legs as thick and as unstoppable as tree trunks rolling down a cliff.
Nevertheless, Mandela’s support, Afrikaner determination and a little Hebrew footwork won the day and put the country on the track toward unity. In the end, this movie wins the cup but you get the idea there is more to be drunk from it along with a few more visits to the well.
© Alan Brody
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Book Review: The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers
by Alan Brody
You might want to wait for Robert Mugabe and his henchman to exit Zimbabwe before you visit this resort, but you won’t be able to put down this riveting book about a spunky senior couple and their story of survival. Set at the edge of a country that has descended into economic disaster and official thuggery, this is about people who just want to hang on – and they do!
Part adventure tale, part family memoir and trip into the mind of post-colonial Africa, this amiable but gripping story is a also compelling business case study of sorts – a bush version of Who Moved My Cheese? The Rogers family, a white Zimbabwean couple with roots going back several generations, retire to a craggy estate near Mutare in the East which they turn into a backpacker lodge with chalets, a swimming pool and al fresco bar.
They thrive for several years during the early benevolent period of the Mugabe regime when whites were welcome and the struggle against the old supremacist Rhodesian government forgotten. White emigrants even returned, many encouraged to buy and build in the new majority African-ruled Zimbabwe. That all began to change around 2000 when Mugabe saw his lifetime presidency challenged and he turned to sacking white farms as a way to maintain support.
This took the life out of the economy and with it, the tourist business. Luckily for the Rogers, their craggy estate had little farm value - especially after poachers took out their modest game stock - so the shambling estate avoided the expropriation list. But that still didn’t pay the bills, so the author’s Dad, Lyn Rogers kept coming up with one survival scheme after another in a way that could make for a third-world-dictator version of the Harvard Business School case study. These included: subletting the premises to a brothel manager, running a marijuana operation and then, most famously, the resort becoming a hang-out for illegal diamond dealers. All along, as their food options dwindle, his mother Ros, punctuates these chapters with a scheme of her own: improvised meal ideas for her proposed cooking book, Recipes for Disaster.
Written as a kind of family journal by our affable traveler, Douglas Rogers, we get drawn into many adventures in this troubled place. With a gentle inquisitiveness, he drinks and tokes with the locals who quickly recede from typical African stock characters into real people with their own unique drives, personality and logic. From the amusingly over-articulate John Agoneka to the savvy diamond dealer Fatso and his sidekick No Matter, this is the real Africa you don’t find in a tourist package or your typical bwana book where the white explore and the blacks carry. Likewise, his portraits of the diehard whites who somehow adjusted from white domination to African majority rule and then suffer their disillusionment is matter-of fact yet compelling. When the whites go native such as when the matronly Miss Moneypenny, their “private banker” dances naked at the instruction of a witch doctor to settle a score, it seems perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.
While less lyrical perhaps than Peter Godwin’s White Boy in Africa or Alexandra Fuller’s Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and the near hypnotic Scribbling the Cat, it more than makes up for it as a page-turner, eye-opener and to the pin-striped set, an entrepreneurial cliff-hanger. This is an African journey by way of a survival plan B, C & D where good doses of bribery and connivance fill in for Drucker and Due Diligence. All along, you feel like you’re one of them, talking to these folks and listening to their stories in one of their own African languages.
Considering how dark the situation in Zimbabwe became with over 10,000% inflation, the book is almost optimistic. Compared to Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun it makes you feel like keeping an eye out for Mugabe’s one-way ticket out of there so you can visit this unsinkable lodge and its irrepressible owners and staff. In the meantime, you could just read the book and breathe in a sigh of democratic relief.
The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers - published by Harmony Books
Friday, September 25, 2009
South African Review of District 9 - The Sci-Fi Hit
You've probably heard about this fascinating new Sci-Fi movie set in Johannesburg. But you've probably been waiting for a review by a South African.
So here it is - and whatever you do - you will have to go to the movies to catch this one!
Aliens in Africa Make the Worlds Come Together
A Review of the Sci-Fi movie by Alan Brody
Who'd have thought the no. 1 box office movie started as a "mockumentary" from 2005 and posted on YouTube, of a UFO landing in Johannesburg, South Africa - circa 1982 - at the height of apartheid. In many ways this is a wild movie - like nothing you've seen before. Real, uncomfortable and deeply interesting. This is today's Blair Witch Project but only bigger, better and more exotic. More technology too.
Neill Blomkamp is the director and co-creator and it is produced by the man who brought us The Ring.
For South Africans this is having déjà vu but this time as a kind of weird comedy verite. You're seeing what apartheid really looked like back in the day - but instead of the Africans being treated like animals, the mostly white strike force of the movie - who look a whole lot like South African Police from the apartheid days are treating aliens that way. Only here, the aliens look like giant shrimp with legs.
In much the same way Art Spiegelman's Maus made the Nazis and Jews of the holocaust seem more real as rats and mice respectively, this makes the once oppressive world of apartheid seem more vivid.
This time, the chief enforcer is no Schwartzenegger, instead, he is an efficient, mild-mannered bureaucrat from like Steve Carrol mold in The Office.
For some reason he is the only one videotaping his mission to displace the aliens to a new camp. Unlike your typical higher civilization though, these aliens are a mixed bag. A million of them washed up in a dilapidated spacecraft above the country's largest city -poor, destitute. Forget E.T. meet galaxy trash. They speak something that sounds like Xhosa played through a vacuum cleaner. They have a madness for cat food and are willing to sell whatever technology they have. But we can't use it for reasons of interplanetary DNA.
Watching all this UFO stuff go on with heavy South African is a riot. When Wilkus tells an alien to "Voetsek" any South African in the audience has to laugh convulsively.
So is this an allegory? Do we have a subtext here? Could these aliens represent a new kind of force, like say, the Chinese who are becoming highly influential in Africa?
To Americans - this is just strange stuff . A new, gritty kind of sci-fi flick. Something like Mad Max meets Office Max.
But somewhere along the way you are getting a cultural lesson. The whites are venal and somewhat bumbling but they get along with the local Africans. You could say aliens unite everyone against them. Except that is, for the Nigerians - they run the show when it comes to dealing with aliens - and they given to extreme violence and primitivism.
Life gets more interesting when the various races merge with the aliens. That is no mere sci-fi for South Africans; this is a headscratcher within a sci-fi flick because miscegenism was a very big deal back in those days. Since all reproduction here is by way of pathogenesis, this is arguably a family film. However, it is not a chick flick, so check with the girls first. They might just prefer to spend the afternoon with Lindsey Lohan. From a tourism point of view, it cements Johannesburg's image, begun with Tsotse, as the township capital of the universe - even though the city itself looks crudely interesting with its blockish skyscrapers etched against a dry, sun-drenched sky.
There are a number of loose ends in the story, but the experience of Johannesburg set to this strange world with a giant space ship hovering over downtown (somehow this missed the world news at the time, but Wilkus, the hero gets to make it his personal videotape) is just too exquisite for the ex-pats to not want to see..
I'd have to say the experience could make you want to reach out for some African music and a cool one - but that antidote will have wait for a different kind of South African movie. In the meantime sit back and watch a not-distant place and time of Africa become box office interest no. 1. In this galaxy, that is.
Alan is the author of White Shaka Boy
__________________________________________________________________
Volume 2 of White Shaka Boy launched at Brooklyn Book Fair - Sep. 13.
Vote for the soundtrack songs on the Fame Game
Episode 2 of the award-winning online visual book, White Shaka Boy goes online today.
The soundtrack, the English and Zulu song "Umile" reached no. 2 on the R&B charts of the international independent music site Overplay.
So here it is - and whatever you do - you will have to go to the movies to catch this one!
Aliens in Africa Make the Worlds Come Together
A Review of the Sci-Fi movie by Alan Brody
Who'd have thought the no. 1 box office movie started as a "mockumentary" from 2005 and posted on YouTube, of a UFO landing in Johannesburg, South Africa - circa 1982 - at the height of apartheid. In many ways this is a wild movie - like nothing you've seen before. Real, uncomfortable and deeply interesting. This is today's Blair Witch Project but only bigger, better and more exotic. More technology too.
Neill Blomkamp is the director and co-creator and it is produced by the man who brought us The Ring.
For South Africans this is having déjà vu but this time as a kind of weird comedy verite. You're seeing what apartheid really looked like back in the day - but instead of the Africans being treated like animals, the mostly white strike force of the movie - who look a whole lot like South African Police from the apartheid days are treating aliens that way. Only here, the aliens look like giant shrimp with legs.
In much the same way Art Spiegelman's Maus made the Nazis and Jews of the holocaust seem more real as rats and mice respectively, this makes the once oppressive world of apartheid seem more vivid.
This time, the chief enforcer is no Schwartzenegger, instead, he is an efficient, mild-mannered bureaucrat from like Steve Carrol mold in The Office.
For some reason he is the only one videotaping his mission to displace the aliens to a new camp. Unlike your typical higher civilization though, these aliens are a mixed bag. A million of them washed up in a dilapidated spacecraft above the country's largest city -poor, destitute. Forget E.T. meet galaxy trash. They speak something that sounds like Xhosa played through a vacuum cleaner. They have a madness for cat food and are willing to sell whatever technology they have. But we can't use it for reasons of interplanetary DNA.
Watching all this UFO stuff go on with heavy South African is a riot. When Wilkus tells an alien to "Voetsek" any South African in the audience has to laugh convulsively.
So is this an allegory? Do we have a subtext here? Could these aliens represent a new kind of force, like say, the Chinese who are becoming highly influential in Africa?
To Americans - this is just strange stuff . A new, gritty kind of sci-fi flick. Something like Mad Max meets Office Max.
But somewhere along the way you are getting a cultural lesson. The whites are venal and somewhat bumbling but they get along with the local Africans. You could say aliens unite everyone against them. Except that is, for the Nigerians - they run the show when it comes to dealing with aliens - and they given to extreme violence and primitivism.
Life gets more interesting when the various races merge with the aliens. That is no mere sci-fi for South Africans; this is a headscratcher within a sci-fi flick because miscegenism was a very big deal back in those days. Since all reproduction here is by way of pathogenesis, this is arguably a family film. However, it is not a chick flick, so check with the girls first. They might just prefer to spend the afternoon with Lindsey Lohan. From a tourism point of view, it cements Johannesburg's image, begun with Tsotse, as the township capital of the universe - even though the city itself looks crudely interesting with its blockish skyscrapers etched against a dry, sun-drenched sky.
There are a number of loose ends in the story, but the experience of Johannesburg set to this strange world with a giant space ship hovering over downtown (somehow this missed the world news at the time, but Wilkus, the hero gets to make it his personal videotape) is just too exquisite for the ex-pats to not want to see..
I'd have to say the experience could make you want to reach out for some African music and a cool one - but that antidote will have wait for a different kind of South African movie. In the meantime sit back and watch a not-distant place and time of Africa become box office interest no. 1. In this galaxy, that is.
Alan is the author of White Shaka Boy
__________________________________________________________________
Volume 2 of White Shaka Boy launched at Brooklyn Book Fair - Sep. 13.
Vote for the soundtrack songs on the Fame Game
Episode 2 of the award-winning online visual book, White Shaka Boy goes online today.
The soundtrack, the English and Zulu song "Umile" reached no. 2 on the R&B charts of the international independent music site Overplay.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
White Shaka Music Goes to Top of the Charts
White Shaka is going online and now the theme music from Episode 2 - Umile - went to no. 2 on the Rhythm and Blues charts of overplay.com
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