Bruce Lee, my father and
A year before Soweto was engulfed in the student uprisings of 1976, my father saw Bruce Lee’s film, Enter the Dragon, at the San Souci Bioscope in Kliptown.
The cinema, which served as both a musical and political hangout in the 1950s, provided a form of escapism for young black boys trying to survive the bleakness of apartheid. Although my father was a staunch fan of the nihilistic heroism of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, it was Lee who provided a reprieve from the police raids, teargas and gunshots that would mark his generation’s lives.
Lee was also the first to use film as a way of selling kung fu as both an art form and a philosophy. The image of a marginalised man taking pride in his culture and tradition was enough to convince a generation of black men to see the beauty in themselves through martial arts. After watching Enter the Dragon, my father enrolled in martial arts lessons while developing a political consciousness in response to the world around him.
I first watched Enter the Dragon in late 2003 on a local television station. Like many children who spent part of their childhood without the gluttonous variety of DStv, I’d grown accustomed to watching intense soapie marathons, romcoms set in Manhattan, and action movies starring legends like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
Along with my brother and my cousin, I developed a love for movies focused on the lives of the underdog or the good guy. These men, because they were always men, were filled with enormous potential, which remained unexplored and untapped because of the relentlessness of life.
These films held my interest and attention despite local television’s affection for inserting adverts at cliff-hanging moments. But as thrilling as it was to see Schwarzenegger blast a group of “terrorist” guerrillas in Predator or to watch Stallone train hard enough to take on the heavyweight champion Apollo Creed in Rocky, I yearned for something more.
Perhaps it was a desire to see the women in these films play a bigger role than the supportive girlfriend or the concerned mother? Maybe I wasn’t sold on their bravery, having spent evenings listening to my grandparents recount the turbulent years of underground activism in Soweto during the 1980s.
In hindsight, I realise that, like my father, I needed stories that aligned with the new ways in which I was beginning to relate to the world. The United State’s invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003 made a distinct impression on me as an 11-yearold. Before then, I had considered the so-called “land of the free and home of the brave” as the only place that would accommodate my active imagination and curiosity. From the films and television I’d watched, the US seemed fair to all of those who lived under it. Conversely, South Africa, with its stark inequality and