SARAFINA!
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You would be hard-pressed to glean from Sarafina! even a few meager historical facts–for example, that the vast majority of the demonstrators were schoolchildren protesting the government’s attempt to use Afrikaans as the exclusive means of instructing black children, an attempt seen by many as a way of limiting the employment opportunities of South Africa’s blacks to low-paying servant work. Nor would you know that over 360 people, mostly teenagers, were killed in the clashes between street demonstrators and overzealous police during that bloody summer. You wouldn’t even find out that the famed South African student leader, Steve Biko, helped organize the demonstrations and later died under mysterious circumstances while in detention during the uprising.
There is a song in the first act, “Yes, Mistress It’s a Pity,” that evokes, if only for a few minutes, the horror and indiscriminate bloodshed of that summer. In the song, a policeman patrolling a school in search of agitators interrupts a class studying “the oil-producing nations” and, in a moment of hysteria, becomes convinced that they are all “fucking communists,” and mows them all down with his machine gun. In a few horrifying seconds we watch all of the characters we have come to know in the first half of the act, including Sarafina, twitch and fall in time to the pulsing sprays of lead. The scene is at once horrible and fascinating, incredibly beautiful and incredibly macabre.
Similarly, the school scenes before the uprising–the horsing around before and during class, the exercises that show so painfully well who has and has not prepared his lessons–are such stock classroom scenes that they do little to inform us what makes school in Soweto different from, say, Tom Brown’s school days or Theodore Cleaver’s.
