The truth is out. If you are white and find the yoke of affirmative action too heavy, don’t pack for Perth. Go to the United States, the land of the free and home of the brave.
It has already worked wonders for Charlize Theron, who last week joined the likes of Afronaut Mark Shuttleworth by being ”the first African” to score big on some world stage or other.
Charlize is the first Afrikaner-American ever to take home Tinseltown’s most coveted statuette. It has surely been a good year for those who can trace some of their roots to the so-called ”dark continent”.
Her triumph follows closely on the success of another young (white) South African, Trevor Richards, who was honoured by his school colleagues in Omaha, Nebraska, with the school’s Distinguished African American Student Award in January.
The media thinks Charlize is the first South African to win an Oscar (she’s not — see Krisjan Lemmer), she is certainly the second ”African American” woman to win best actress: Halle Berry won it two years ago.
But, beyond showing what African Americans can do, there are other similarities between the two movies that have propelled our heroines into cinematic superstardom.
For it is the dark side of life that has seen the two — here we go again — African American women win big.
For starters, both movies feature the word ”monster”.
Halle won the award for playing a woman in an unconventional sexual relationship — with the racist head of the prison where her husband is incarcerated and eventually executed. Charlize plays a hard-drinking prostitute who, along the way, discovers her true sexual identity — that she is a lesbian.
As with Halle’s husband in Monster’s Ball, Charlize is executed — for murdering seven of her clients. Her movie then starts to read semi-biographically. Charlize was born in Benoni, on the East Rand, on August 7 1975. Her father, Charles, worked on the family’s road- construction business, which mother Gerda took over after his death in 1990. Charlize’s mother shot her husband after he attacked her in a drunken state. She was never charged, as the killing was deemed to have been in self-defence.
In a classic art-imitating-life scenario, Charlize’s moment this week came courtesy of her portrayal of a woman who shows little tolerance for men who do not treat women as they should: she guns them down.
Charlize has often spoken about how she could not completely recover from the wounds caused by the years of abuse her father inflicted on her and her mother. In recent years, the star from Benoni has appeared in anti-women-abuse television adverts, telling us that half of South African men rape women. ”Have you ever raped a woman?” she challenged — much to the chagrin of men in general and those who saw her as exporting Afro-pessimism.
Not until she started collecting awards as she has over the past year, did she get as much media coverage.
Early in the movie, the character she portrays, Aileen Wuornos, speaks about how, for as long as she could remember, she wanted to be a star. The real Charlize has told those who want to know that while growing up on ”a farm in South Africa” (by which we assume she means a plot in Benoni), she wanted her name to be covered in glitter.
In the movie she shows her breasts to a group of boys, hoping she’ll be accepted. In this instance, flashing her vital assets fail to make the desired impact on her chosen audience. In real life, and if Independent News Network managing editor Jeremy Gordin is to be believed, flashing her ”golden globes” (as Gordin called her boobs) worked wonders for Charlize — though clearly for Gordin, too.
In a chest-thumping revelation, Gordin wrote in several Independent Newspaper titles that in 1994, while he was editor of skin magazine Playboy, Charlize and her mother Gerda walked into his office to present her — Charlize’s, not her mother’s — portfolio with a view to securing a spot as the magazine’s first ”playmate”.
Gordin said he was about to break the news that the publisher had rejected her as ”clearly not well- endowed enough when she whipped off her T-shirt, under which she wore no bra”.
”Theron got the job with immediate effect. The determined young model was clearly destined for other things,” Gordin concluded.
Some say her glory should put the South African movie industry on the world map. I disagree: Leon Schuster and Anant Singh are doing that. But I bet that after her stunning performance the koeksister is destined for the same iconic reverence as American apple-pie.