KalahariLog

Last night we watched "Amandla: A Revolution in Four Part Harmony" at Maru a Pula again. (By the way, "maru a pula" means "promise of rain" in Setswana.) It is a 2002 documentary about the role of music in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Apart from beautiful music, a little bit of history, and archival footage, there is even some humor as when Hugh Masekela says "We lost the country in the first place, to an extent, because before we fight, we sing. The Zulus would sing before they went into battle, so the British and Boers knew where they were and when they were coming."

Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun movie critic has a different than usual review, where he reveals that he was a graduate student at Cape Town during the apartheid years. He wrote that the movie and soundtrack might become popular like "Buena Vista Social Club" did a few years before that. He was wrong on both accounts. The movie was rated by only 240 people on IMDB compared to the 4629 for Buena Vista Social Club, although the score for Amadla is a little higher. The Buena Vista sound-track is #509 in Music at Amazon while Amandla is 17471.

Wim Wenders is probably a better director than Lee Hirsch, but the music in Amandla is more powerful. The movie is also more difficult to watch and a good half of the audience was crying by the end when Nelson Mandela emerges from jail, thin and frail but with a big smile on his face. I was surprised by some of the omissions: there were no songs from what is arguably the best African rock album, "Somewhere In Africa", by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. The movie showed a few white activists who were part of the ANC and fought against the South African regime. However, there were no examples of "white" music. "Somewhere in Africa" has the best blend of Zulu harmonies with rock that I've heard, in open defiance to the government, in the middle of the most troublesome times in the early 1980's. Moreover, most of the members of Manfred Mann's Earth Band were white South Africans!

I am probably a little biased here as this has been one of my favorite albums for the last 20 years. I don't know how or why I knew about a fairly obscure South African group in the 1980's in Bulgaria, but I did. I was probably following up on the Beatles-sound-alike music of the early Manfred Mann records in the UK. "Somewhere in Africa" also predates the use of South African music in western popular music (think "diamonds on the soles of her shoes" by Paul Simon) by a good 3-4 years. Incidentally, Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo are not mentioned in the movie either. After all, Nelson Mandela took Lasysmith with him to Norway for the Nobel Prize ceremony! OK, so the movie may not have covered everything I would have liked to see and hear, but it was very good and with beautiful music too.