Hector Petersen’s name is synonymous with the 1976 riots, but what happened to the man carrying him in that famous picture? Andrew Worsdale reports
Director Feizel Mamdoo’s startling documentary What Happened to Mbuyisa? is the first South African movie to be invited to participate in the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, the most prestigious event dedicated to movies about real life. Mbuyisa Makhubu is a legend mainly because of a photograph by Sam Nzima of him carrying Hector Petersen, the first victim of the 1976 Soweto riots.
The film starts in a post-modernist way with tilted extreme close-ups of people’s faces as they talk about where they last saw him and ponder where he is now. Then the movie settles down into investigating what happened on that fateful day and afterwards.
Evidently Mbuyisa was not an activist. His mother says he wanted to become a priest, but he became political through circumstance – his horror at the death of Petersen. Mamdoo says: “I think he would’ve been involved in the anti- apartheid struggle on a human rights basis.”
Mamdoo himself was actively involved in the congress movement in the Eighties and was even detained for eight months during the first state of emergency. He turned 18 in John Vorster Square. At the end of the decade he felt the pressure of politics and drifted into academia, studying the sociology of development at the University of Essex. That’s when he discovered he had something creative to say and, on his return to South Africa, he worked as a researcher, assistant producer and director of a couple of films and corporate videos. His main strength, he acknowledges, is in “infotainment”.
What is particularly striking about What Happened to Mbuyisa? is that it doesn’t pontificate about politics. As Mamdoo says: “This is not the story of June 16, I didn’t use stock footage for example. Many overseas filmmakers have come to his mother and done inserts on his story but she said to me: `This is the last time I’m telling the story.’ She sees it as contributing to a campaign to try and find him.”
Early on in the documentary there’s an emotionally wrenching scene in which Elizabeth Makhubu, Mbuyisa’s mother, reads a letter from her son and breaks down sobbing. The camera stays on her and some might think it sadistic and exploitative, but I found it devastatingly moving.
Mbuyisa, evidently traumatised by the events of June 16, fled, via Botswana, to Nigeria. There are rumours that he got involved in drugs and that he might have died while swimming in a river.
Mamdoo is hoping to make a sequel to the film in which he plans to take away the question mark. He’s determined to find out what really happened to the iconic legend.
“I think of the film as like: `Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ There are moments in history that are so defined by photographic, celluloid or TV images. The famous photograph of the Saigon girl naked and burning from Napalm. The photo of Mbuyisa, Petersen and Petersen’s sister is similar – an image that marks history, both social and personal.”
The film was financed to the tune of R150 000 by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. (Ironically Mbuyisa sought refuge with the now-deputy minister Brigitte Mabandla and her husband at one time after the incident.) The production company, Endemol, put in the R10 000 balance.
Mamdoo has succeeded in uncovering many fascinating elements to this story, like the fact that Mbuyisa was accused by the security forces of posing for the photograph. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission examines our past it’s great that filmmakers like Mamdoo are doing the same.
Even greater perhaps is the fact that Mamdoo has resisted the temptation to be politically didactic in his investigation. This is a human story, a tragedy and a great mystery.
He is currently in negotiations with SABC2, who hope to screen the movie on June 16 next year. Pity that all those commissioning editors in Amsterdam will probably pick it up and flight it first.