This is Sarafina now and then in the movie, "Sarafina" (1992), among the youth uprising in Soweto against the apartheid system by minority Whites in leadership. If you know, you know! This was a top sensational movie in the very early beginnings of the 90s in the heat of the tussle led by Nelson Mandela and the Black South Africans for freedom and independence. I cannot tell the numbers in terms of nominations and awards this particular movie garnered due to the powerful, dazzling content that exactly reflected the times, but it was certainly wowing to struggle with the heavy crowd watching Sarafina in the box TV sets in our homes.
South Africa's independence was what the entire continent badly craved and was attained by wisely modernising the approach as learnt from most earlier struggles. With peace domineering, taking the centre stage in the approach during and after independence, many lives were painfully lost with the apartheid movement by the white government. The numbers were insane, and I sincerely believe the count could be lost at some point with families still in search of loved ones to date. Because they simply lost trace of these persons, whether alive or dead. The numbers could have been referred to as a massacre if smartness had not been exuded in the struggle. What could have been the point of fighting for better living standards for your kin and ending up losing them all? It doesn't make any figurative sense to win a fight and turn back to see the very people you were fighting for all feared dead. Mandela and the like, being conscious of the goal of the struggle, could not have trekked on further to lose more than doing what was tenable in achieving their goal then and today.
One cannot exclusively and categorically state the struggle was devoid of fierceness, aggressiveness, and perseverance, which made it an uprising. But the tacit interplay of peace and diplomacy in the mix made the difference in the road to victory. This was excellently captured by artworks in the captivating movie, "Sarafina", messaging positivism as in 'Freedom is coming tomorrow.' However, Sarafina, as the main character, has adulterated her skin pigmentation today to completely defeat the very core message carried by the movie in its portrayal of Africans' independent struggles.
The perverse situation is that the Black race has never valued and cherished what it's made of. Sarafina's taste in terms of her complexion as a white race tells us that the African fight for freedom and independence is one of the many confirmatory tests of a mission in futility. It is a white elephant, a farce, and a self-mockery, and there are no two ways about that. There is one thing to be in a movie and another in real life, or one thing to be an adolescent without appreciating your fundamental rights and another to be an adult and be fully abreast with your fundamental rights. The struggle by any African for independence is a continuum, and Dr Nkrumah never minced words after Ghana gained independence in 1957, the first in sub-Saharan Africa. The awareness he created sought to have highlighted looming dangerous forms of colonialism, such as neocolonialism and imperialism.
On this backdrop and for our collective goal for the total liberation of Africans on African soil, Sarafina ought to have been guided by the fact that the rest of her life after the staged movie, "Sarafina", is the real-life movie in a struggle for freedom and complete recognition at heights of self-esteem unabated. Indeed, the natural and dazzling beauty of Sarafina in the staged movie could let me watch it over and over, with the storyline getting lost at times. Because I could not afford to sacrifice the gazing pleasure of my eyes on her African angelic beauty for the storyline.
Today, I am left afar to wonder how she could not have been continually directed and mentored in her lifelong movie by the Pan-African community not to tamper with her complexion in order not to traverse the storyline of our struggles and to believe in ourselves. A character like her, and to alter her dermis pigmentation from dark to white, is precipitous of the age-long cancerous attitude that we ourselves have been the enablers of our long-standing enslavement to the whites. We have never liked anything of our own. We forget that our unconscionable taste for goods produced by these colonialists in turn creates lucrative job opportunities for their local economies while we continue to wallow in joblessness and abject poverty. No wonder we are worshipping a white God instead of a black God.
Why the African can never believe in herself is answered by our own retrogressive attitudes and character. What kind of creatures are we at all? For some of us to be filling the vase with the best of wines while some of our own are emptying the contents before the time is a sign that there won't be any celebration as planned? I am scandalised to note that my efforts to let us believe in ourselves are in vain. Truly, the Black can never be free from the claws of the colonial masters. Not at all!
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