Neil Sonnekus
review OFTHEWEEK
They were seven young men whose heads were filled with ganga and idealism. They wanted to build the new South Africa and their navety cost them their lives. They became the victims of one of the most cynical police operations in the mid-Eighties and they became known as The Guguletu Seven.
Lindy Wilson’s documentary (to be screened in two parts on SABC3 on June 16 and 17 at 9.30pm) is streets ahead of most other local political documentaries. The main reason is that its maker tried to find some kind of poetic truth in it all and succeeded in quite a remarkable manner.
The documentary starts with then TV1’s David Hall-Green reporting the death of seven “terrorists” on March 3 1986, followed by a police video doing a post-mortem of the massacre. From there we switch sides and start seeing and hearing what was then very much the unofficial version.
One of the main victims, Christopher Piet’s mother, Cynthia Ngewu, had this bitter bit of poetry to relate: “We were born in vinegar times and fed with lemons.”
She is really the main player of this work, which also serves to contextualise those numbing snippets of new South African TV news that simply showed mothers of victims getting hysterical during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. In fact, Wilson’s choice of her is clear and brave, because Ngewu does that one thing that is easier to reason about than to do. She forgives.
Technically The Guguletu Seven is seamless. The camerawork by Clifford Bestall and Dewald Aukema is world class, and the score by Philip Miller is subtle and carries especially the first part extremely well. Another strength is that there is no voice-over and the contrivances to impart information are highly original and stylistically integrated.
Wilson is acutely aware of the language, codes and maps of oppression and turns them against themselves in ways that often render this work a kind of thriller; feature films such as Z and Missing by the Greek exile Costa Gavras instantly spring to mind.
If the premise of this slightly over long film is that the truth will out, then its message is that forgiveness is wiser (though more painful) than bitterness. The image we are left with to drive this message home is one of that cold, Cape winter drizzle on a windscreen in a township, constantly being wiped away, like tears.
But they are the tears of maternal courage, which makes The Guguletu Seven rise far above the propaganda potential of its subject matter.