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A Revolution Through Music
Jewish filmmaker chronicles South African anti-apartheid
movement through song.
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SABC Choir sings "Thina Sizive."
NAOMI PFEFFERNIAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
CI n a December day in 1993, an anxious Lee
Hirsch sat on a 747 bound for riot-torn South
Africa with $600 and a small video camera.
The 20-year-old filmmaker didn't know a soul
in Johannesburg, but he had two telephone numbers and a
mission: to make a documentary about the protest music
that had spurred the anti-apartheid movement.
To buy his ticket, he had sold his car and ignored the
State Department official who had called about the travel
advisory. "It was months after [American student] Amy
Biehl had been murdered in Cape Town, and the plane was
empty," said Hirsch, a politically progressive Jew from Long
Island. "I was very scared, and I was prepared to turn
around and go home the next day."
Instead, he struggled for nine years to make Amandla! A
Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which won the Audience
and Freedom of Expression awards at the 2002 Sundance
Film Festival. It is scheduled to open next Friday in Detroit
and will air on HBO sometime this spring.
Named for the Xhosa word for power, the exuberant
movie explores the history of apartheid and the music that
helped overturn it.
While some of the songs have previously been featured
on the soundtracks of fictional films such as Cry Freedom,
the documentary is the first to explore the phenomenon of
protest music itself.
For the energetic Hirsch, who punctuates conversation
with youthful invectives such as "awesome," one inspiration
was the Jewish mandate of tikkun olam, repairing the
world.
"I learned about it in a college class on the early
Chasidim, the Jewish radicals of their day," said Hirsch,
whose previous film profiled his godfather, a Holocaust sur-
vivor.
"Coming out of the Jewish history of oppression, I feel
we have the responsibility to stand up and make the world
a better place. In Amandla!, I wanted to show the power of
music to affect this kind of social and political change."
Making The Documentary
Hirsch has been preoccupied with anti-apartheid music
since successfully lobbying his Vermont boarding school to
divest its South African holdings in the 1980s.
"I'd watch a news broadcast about unrest in a township
and realize that people were singing, because I could hear it
under the newscaster's voice," he said.
"I started becoming obsessed with the music, and I
vowed to learn more."
Easier said than done. No studies or books existed on the
songs, which were largely undocumented. And the white,
Jewish filmmaker didn't know any of the black activists or
performers.
His first break came when he called one of his telephone
contacts two days after arriving in Johannesburg and
reached a Zulu family whose son was prominent in the
MK, the military wing of the African National Congress.
Before long, he was tagging along to underground meet-
ings in the townships, which he describes as "row after row
of unpaved streets and garbage burning in overstuffed
receptacles."
"Suddenly, I was in the middle of things," he said.
By the mid-1990s, Hirsch had partnered with Amandla!
producer Sherry Simpson, an African-American TV music
producer based in Los Angeles, and had relocated to
Johannesburg to develop the film.
Over the next five years, he crisscrossed the country with
his video camera, filling 12 notebooks with research and
persuading activists to appear in his film.
Parliament member Thandi Modise described how she
sang to comfort herself when her water broke during a