History is what happened before we were born. At least that’s what I thought in elementary school. One of the weird things about getting older is watching the events that have occurred during my lifetime morph into subsequent generations’ history. Nothing brings that home quite like Have You Heard From Johannesburg: Apartheid and the Club of the West, which revisits the U.S. anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and ’80s. Didn’t that just happen? Isn’t it way too soon, and those events too fresh, to be the subject of a historical film? Or might we discern, by some stretch of the imagination, a kernel of relevance to the present?
It is this last question that seems to be fueling veteran East Bay filmmaker Connie Field’s fire. Have You Heard From Johannesburg: Apartheid and the Club of the West is the fourth episode (and the first to be finished and publicly screened) in her stupendously bold six-part series recounting the international campaign to demolish and abolish South Africa’s racist apartheid system. Field clearly views the anti-apartheid movement as a milestone in citizen democracy, relations among nations and human morality — and one whose lessons have already been forgotten or whitewashed.
Let’s take a moment first to look at the little picture. Field’s major challenge in Have You Heard From Johannesburg: Apartheid and the Club of the West
, given the number of people who were involved in the issue, their range of activities and the countless campuses and other points of conflict across the U.S., is developing momentum without sacrificing depth and context. Alas, it takes the film several minutes to draw us in, and the familiar strategy of blending archival television news footage and current interviews with the key participants is neither fresh nor exciting. We feel as if we’re watching history, not living it, and that makes all the difference.
Although our sympathies for the good guys are never in question, the doc fails to thrust us into the middle of the fight, which burst into the national consciousness when the Congressional Black Caucus and other groups took to the streets outside the South African embassy with the successful goal of being regularly arrested. (Part of the problem is that Field feels compelled to cut periodically to police riots and protest marches in Fredonia, so we don’t lose sight of the cause and who’s enduring the real suffering.) The torch was picked up by dozens of student groups, demanding that colleges divest their portfolios of investments in companies who did business with the apartheid regime. It is only when the battle comes to a head in Congress that Apartheid and the Club of the West achieves high drama, with Ronald Reagan vetoing a bipartisan bill approving economic sanctions.