‘We didn’t change anything, we just added blacks’
ITELL everyone who’ll listen that they should seek out Angus Gibson’s 7-Up documentary series, which has chronicled the lives of a cohort of South African kids every seven years since 1992. One of the kids happened to grow up to become rugby player Willem Alberts, which worked out nicely for the filmmakers. The children are drawn from as wide a range of social backgrounds as you could hope for, and the documentaries make for unforgettable viewing.
But they also make for pretty devastating viewing, because they expose the myth of social mobility for most South Africans. The kids who started off poor as seven-year-olds in 1992 were generally still poor as 28-year-olds in 2013, finish and klaar. I was thinking about Gibson’s films this week while watching The People versus The Rainbow Nation, a new documentary which has been airing on MTV.
As in the 7-Up series, The People versus The Rainbow Nation takes as its focus a number of young people from vastly different environments. One lives with her grandparents in Soweto and must travel for hours each morning to reach her university campus. A white girl inhabits one of the University of Cape Town’s most prestigious women’s residences, which she openly admits is “kind of a bastion of white supremacy”.
The young people featured are all students, and the documentary was filmed in the wake of last year’s student protests. But it isn’t merely a documentary about the protests; it is a wider look at the social and economic realities for South African youth. Inevitably, race is a central preoccupation, though not its sole issue. “We didn’t change anything really,” broadcaster Gugulethu Mhlungu says of South Africa post-1994. “We just . . . added blacks.”
The documentary has two aspects: it switches between tracing the lives of its young protagonists, and interviewing a group of extremely clever people for their views on South Africa’s social problems. This twoheaded approach is perhaps not as seamless as it could be, but it helps that the interview subjects were so well chosen. I appreciated, too, the film’s focus on gender as well as race — particularly in light of recent protests at Rhodes University.
Conservative white people are the least likely demographic to watch this film, which is unfortunate because they are the people who need to watch it the most. But it also carries a potent message to the powerful of all races: young South Africans are fed up with the slow pace of change, and the student protests proved that they are capable of making their voices heard. As Shaeera Kalla, a student leader at the University of the Witwatersrand, tells the camera: “A mobilised and united youth can shake the core of an unjust system.”