Black Film Center/Archive

Apartheid officially ended five years ago. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has released its Final Report, and the amnesty hearings are drawing to a close. It is now perhaps possible to reevaluate the history of apartheid with some sense of closure and retrospective wisdom, so this is an opportune time for the reissue of several of Peter Davis' anti-apartheid documentary films from the 1970s and 1980s.

The title of the first film in the series, White Laager, refers to the image of Afrikaner Voortrekker's closing their wagon trains to defend against the "Black Peril" of spear-wielding "savages," an image often used to symbolize the siege mentality of many modern Afrikaners. Davis uses the "laager" as a framing metaphor for several important moments in Afrikaner history, including the circled fences in the first Dutch colony in the Cape in 1652, the literal laager at the Battle of Blood River in 1868, the Boer War against the British at the turn of the century, and of course the apartheid laws passed after the election of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party in 1948. This first part of White Laager presents the right-wing nationalists in South Africa as they see themselves, without either demonizing or apologizing for them. The rest of the film then systematically picks apart the inconsistencies, contradictions, and implications of their racist and fascist beliefs.

In Generations of Resistance, Davis chooses to skip over the long history of African resistance to white invasion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and begins with the "Generation of 1912," especially the founders of the African National Congress. The following sections are structured around standard landmark historical events: the "Generation of 1949" who protested against the new apartheid laws; the "Generation of 1960," including the protestors at the Sharpeville massacre; and the "Generation of 1976," including the school children in the Soweto uprisings.

These films are not without their gaps. White Laager, for instance, never reveals the identity of the Afrikaner officials and civil servants interviewed, leaving the impression of anonymous talking heads spouting right-wing rhetoric. But these documentaries succeed at characterizing both sides of the struggle concisely and coherently. At just under an hour each, these documentaries are well-suited for classroom use, giving students who may have been in the fourth grade when Mandela was released from prison a clear idea of what apartheid South Africa looked like in the late 1970s.

Shane D. Graham is a doctoral candidate in English and African Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.