The Cradock Four, a film about the murder of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli, is finally out. It will be shown on June 27, the 25th anniversary of the day the four men were abducted.
One feels compelled to enthuse about the premiere of the movie in South Africa. The filmmaker, David Forbes, says that making it was long and laborious, and involved court battles and endless correspondence with bureaucrats. Forbes, who is the film’s co-producer and director, has been battling cancer on top of it.
“I have worked very hard to make it happen,” he says in a soft voice suffused with triumph about what he has accomplished with work partner Michel Noll.
The film is principally about teachers: Goniwe, Calata and their fellow activists, Mkhonto and Mhlauli. The iconic foursome was active in the small Eastern Cape town of Cradock, where the men organised strikes and demonstrations, attracting the attention of the security police.
On the night of June 27 1985, they were abducted by the security police and were never seen alive again. Their charred remains were later discovered near Bluewater Bay, a suburb of Port Elizabeth. The revelatory movie contains interviews with their widows and with people who knew the slain activists, archival footage of interviews Goniwe did and re-enactments of the gruesome murders.
Forbes was attracted to the project because of his “long connections with the Eastern Cape”. He went to primary school in King William’s Town and later studied at Rhodes University, where he says he was “highly politicised”. He says, with familiarity, that “all these men were my contemporaries. Fort was only eight months older than me”.
Making the film wasn’t easy. When Forbes got down to it, he faced opposition — there was no support from the SABC, the government or apartheid apparatchiks. In fact, when he broached the project to a commissioning editor at the SABC, he was cryptically told that the corporation had “authorship issues” with his film. Initially he couldn’t understand what this meant, but a friend schooled in bureaucracy cipher decoded it thus: “What is a white man doing making a black film?”
Around 2003, when the idea of making the film had fully crystallised, “I started researching and I met with the widows. I asked for their blessing in the making of the film. They all said: ‘We’ll support you’.”
Although the families were keen on preserving the memories of their loved ones, there were official obstacles: the department of justice wouldn’t allow him access to records of the inquest, even though the case had been conducted in an open court. “We started court proceedings to give us access to these records. We fought an ANC government to get the case records,” he says.
In 2006 the court ruled in their favour, a moment he describes as “a great victory for freedom of speech”. But this high was soon followed by a low: he found he had a malignant form of skin cancer. Unlike his conflict with the government, this was a battle for life. A few years later, and after many chemotherapy sessions, Forbes can boldly declare: “I beat cancer.”
After seven long years, Forbes can look back at the footsteps of his journey. “There’s little reconciliation that has taken place,” he says, referring to the difficulties he faced in making the film. In collating the evidence he began to appreciate the broader meaning of civic-minded people such as Goniwe, whose contributions are less lauded than those of other struggle heroes.
“It was only then I that I understood the significance of what Goniwe did. He hasn’t been properly recognised for that,” he says, and tells me of a monument that, for years, has been under construction.
The experience has enriched him immensely: the struggle, he says, wasn’t won by the separate exertions of the ANC, the unions or the South African Communist Party. “It was a massive effort by people both inside and outside the country.”
We now have the means and technology to preserve the memory of those struggles, and that’s what Forbes has done beautifully with The Cradock Four.
The Cradock Four shows at 11am at Museum Africa on June 27