Accused#2 back in the dock
A virtual reality film about the Rivonia Trial points to the loss of our historical records
The voice that came to life was familiar, but different. It was Walter Sisulu speaking from the dock as a 52-year-old, not the grandfather who walked back into the world after 25 years in prison.
Sisulu’s words from the trial have become the focus of a celebrated French-made animation film.
The 16-minute film, Accused #2: Walter Sisulu, was made last year and has won a clutch of international awards already. It’s now being run at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg for the Reality Check exhibition this month and will continue to be shown until March.
“When I watched the VR film for the first time, I realised I had never heard Bram Fischer’s voice before and I was listening to Walter Sisulu as a much younger man for the first time, too,” says Apartheid Museum curator of exhibitions and education Emilia Potenza. The VR installation is a brilliant new technological hook for a younger generation especially, and makes real “an almost forgotten voice of the struggle”, she says.
“Sisulu didn’t have the charisma or the dashing good looks of Mandela. He was definitely more of the behind-the-scenes person, who left school at the age of 15 but was incredibly intelligent. He was the man George Bizos described as the ‘wise man of the struggle’,” says Potenza. The exhibition is about the “almost forgotten” person that Sisulu became as the world’s focus locked in on Nelson Mandela. Potenza says it was the way Sisulu (who died aged 90 in 2003) would have wanted it, understanding the importance of the different roles each person had to play in an evolving ANC. But she says a current-day gaze is fixated on looking for tension of egos and tugs of war over hierarchy in the party.
Reality Check is meant to be a pause, stopping long enough to ensure that remarkable individuals around Mandela, such as Sisulu, are not pushed to the margins. At the same time it’s a celebration of the museum’s first VR exhibition.
Accused #2 also holds the related story of how a piece of crucial South African history was saved from becoming part of our collective forgotten files.
In October 1963, as the Rivonia
Trial started, only audio recordings of the proceedings inside the Palace of Justice in Pretoria were permitted. The recordings were done on dictabelts, a soft vinyl recording format, considered at the time as having a superior advantage for being tamper-proof as it couldn’t be cut and spliced. There are about 256 hours of recordings on about 600 dictabelt tapes. They survived in the custodianship of the national archives, but over the decades the tapes became increasingly inaccessible.
The machines to play back dictabelts fell into obsolescence, until eventually not a single one existed in South Africa. Only in 2012, through a partnership between the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA), did the process begin to adapt technology to make the recordings accessible.
It was the archeophone, an invention by French engineer Henri Chamoux, that made it possible to once again play the dictabelt tapes and, from this, for the recordings to be restored and digitised.
From this digitised archive, a team of French filmmakers imagined a feature-length film and went on to make The State Against Mandela and the Others last year. They followed this up with their virtual reality film about Sisulu.
Nicolas Champeux co-directed the films with Gilles Porte and also curated Reality Check. For three years, between 2007 and 2010, Champeux was bureau chief for Radio France International based in South Africa. He was the man who Chamoux contacted after listening to the recordings he was restoring.
Accused #2: Walter Sisulu prison sentence harsher, maybe even bring him death.
“Maybe it makes us braver, even if it’s just to go to a protest march, sign a petition or to speak out”.