Beat the Drum puts a new spin on the old South African Jim Comes to Jo’burg story: most of the family of nine-year-old Musa (Junior Singo) having died Aids-related deaths, he heads for the big city to find his missing uncle and earn some money, and there he learns some lessons about Aids.
This sounds like an archetypal South African tale, or what, sadly, could become one. As in the late 1970s and 1980s, the poorest children in the land are having to take responsibility for things they should not have to bear. Then, it was rising up against the apartheid state; now, it’s keeping body and soul together in the face of the epidemic’s ravages.
So there’s some potential here for telling one of those stories that, we are constantly being informed, have to be told — South African stories, told by South Africans. Unfortunately, though, as a story, Beat the Drum doesn’t work terribly well at all. It’s beautifully shot (by Lance Gewer, who shot Tsotsi), and Singo in particular gives a lovely performance, but much of the storyline feels like it’s just there to get us to the next sermon.
Musa gets a lift to Jo’burg with a truck driver, Nobe (Owen Sejake), and when he gets there encounters Nobe’s boss, a Mr Botha (Clive Scott), who yells at Musa, causing him to run off into the mean streets. In the meantime, Mr Botha has been berating his son, Stefan (Tom Fairfoot) for spending too much time doing good works (like helping a friend set up an orphanage) and not helping out at the truck garage.
Next we see Stefan, he’s got a cough. Cough, cough — and within minutes he’s in hospital, dying of Aids. This gives Scott the opportunity to arrange his features in an even more mournful manner than hitherto, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that Mr Botha asks Stefan, as he lies in his hospital bed, how he got infected. And, in what is practically his last gasp, Stefan croaks, “Doesn’t matter.”
Now, you can imagine (American) scriptwriter W David McBrayer and (South African) director David Hickson deciding that there was no point in going on a tangent at this stage to explain precisely how Stefan got infected; it would distract us from the main storyline, as well as perhaps introduce awkward questions about sexuality and sexual behaviour.
But that’s a problem, because the longer Beat the Drum goes on the clearer it becomes that it’s a message-movie, and the message is all about HIV/Aids. So it most certainly is germane how Stefan got it, and surely it’s an important part of the film’s message to communicate such things? Just how he contracted the virus matters very much indeed.
Fudging like this has a negative effect on the rest of the film, too. Condoms are brandished at one point, and male resistance to them recorded, and there’s a terrifying speech from one man about to go off with some prostitutes: he says that if he’s infected by one of those “bitches” he will go on to infect as many women as possible before he dies. This is the one moment in Beat the Drum when a sense of harsh reality intrudes — and this is supposed to be a film about a harsh reality.
The rest of it is lamentably vague. Nobe and Musa bang the relevant drum to call people to a midnight meeting in the township church, and, rather improbably, they turn up in droves. Nobe urges them to at least be open and to speak up about the virus and the epidemic. Okay; but when we speak about these issues, what do we say? One of the people gathered at the church cries that they don’t have medicines, so how are they supposed to fight the virus? The reply, from the church’s minister, delivered with earnest righteousness: “We’ll fight it with the truth.”
Well, yes, but which truth would that be? Could we have some detail? The truth about wearing condoms, how ever many people you have sex with, or the truth about keeping your sex life within the boundaries of a faithful marriage? Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s truth or Zackie Achmat’s truth? The truth about poverty’s contribution to the spread of the epidemic, or the truth about the role played by the wholesale and continuing oppression of women?
For such a heavily message-driven movie, the actual message of Beat the Drum is pitifully short of content.