Director and producer Bobby Rodwell began to think about making drama out of apartheid atrocities in the Nineties when she investigated perceptions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for the New Nation newspaper.
Later she did a remarkable thing, in 1997, when she produced a play called The Story I Am About to Tell with real survivors who’d been to hell and who now had the T-shirt.
A central figure in the play was death-row survivor Duma Khumalo, who died of natural causes in 2006. Khumalo is also a central figure in a documentary Rodwell has produced for SABC3.
Song for Sharpeville forms part of the series titled When Truth Hurts and it airs this weekend. The documentary draws on the feelings and journeys of the Sharpeville Six, a group of community activists involved in protest who found themselves on death row in Pretoria Central prison at the end of apartheid.
Rodwell made her play with the blessing of the Khulumani Support Group — the organisation tasked with assisting survivors who testified before the TRC. It was through Khulumani that Rodwell met Khumalo and the mother of late activist Bheki Mlangeni.
Mlangeni, who was assassinated when a Walkman he put on exploded in his Soweto family home, is the subject of Rodwell’s second documentary in the series and it airs on February 20.
Grappling with real issues
And so we have two works about real, deceased anti-apartheid subjects. Each documentary follows those who have survived into the new era as they recall the dead and each follows its protagonists as they go on some extraordinary, yet minor journey.
In Song for Sharpeville (directed by poet and playwright Lesego Rampolokeng), Khumalo’s death row comrade Reid Mokoena goes with his priest to see the cells where prisoners were kept before mounting the 50-odd steps to the gallows.
In Ode to Soweto (directed by Rodwell), Mlangeni’s mother, Catherine, walks past a township park named after her late son and she glows as she watches children playing there. Her son may not have seen this freedom but the happy children offer some compensation.
“There is an element of journeys in these works,” Rodwell says, “and at the same time there’s a prison element in each. We move from Robben Island to C-Max and to the Mlangenis’ house.
“I have known these families for so long. Duma wanted so much to visit the graves of those he knew who were executed in 1986. He died before he could go to see their graves in Durban.” In Song for Sharpeville Rampolokeng takes care of this unfinished business.
When Truth Hurts is broadcast on Saturdays at 6.30pm on SABC3