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REVIEWS

Apartheid’s horror shown in human terms

WITNESS TO APARTHEID. WINNIE
AND NELSON MANDELA. At the
Ridge Theatre, Sept. 12 to 18 at 7:30 p.m.
and 9:45 p.m.

Relentlessly, the statistics pile up: in the
last year, hundreds of people — mainly
blacks — have died in the racial conflict
that constitutes the struggle for liberation
in South Africa.

The problem with such statistics is that
they become numbing. Fewer and fewer
readers bother to check the daily media
accounts of South Africa’s violence, par-
ticularly since the stories provide mainly

superficial accounts of the tragedy result- -

ing from the system of racial segregation
known as apartheid.

And all too often, the accounts them-
selves are misleading by their very superfi-
ciality, as the western news-gathering
agencies in the field concentrate on the
sensational aspects of the violence. The
process lends itself to the cause of racism,
since no logic can be gleaned from the
violence —sometimes involving black
against black — that is recounted without
analysis or background.

Countering this are two very recent
films on the South African liberation
struggle. Winnie and Nelson Mandela,
and Witness to Apartheid, are coming to
Vancouver this Friday, and they deserve
the widest possible support.

The two films, shot clandestinely in
South Africa last year, give us the human
face and the tragedy of that struggle.
They'll be shown at the Ridge Theatre for
one week’s run beginning Sept. 12.

Not since Last Grave at Dimbaza
shocked audiences around the world in the
latter 70s has there been such a powerful
indictment of the white-ruled nation’s
legalized racism and the Nazi-like methods

used to prop it up.

Each film offers a distinct view of the
decades-long struggle. Mandela, through
a moving account of the lives of two major
leaders of the banned African National
Congress, provides the viewer with a
cogent history of that fight. Witness shows
us the present, in all its brutality.

Mandela presents biographical sketches

of Winnie Mandela, who has in recent
months became an international figure,
and, mainly through personal interviews,
of her husband, jailed ANC leader Nelson
Mandela. The latter, as much of the world

now knows, has been incarcerated for the

last two decades.

Through interviews, Winnie gives us a
glimpse of the pain of being separated
from a loved one for more than 20 years.
But the former social worker and nurse
also provides chilling first-hand accounts
of the ruthlessness of the apartheid regime
when detailing her own countless incar-
cerations and interrogations. She relates
how she was held in a cell so small she
could touch both walls with outstretched
arms and kept in solitary confinement for
so long “that if a fly or a bug entered my
cell, I considered that I had company for
the day.”

But the days of distress are countered by
the small triumphs, as Mandela recalls
how Winnie, when forced out of her home
in the black township of Soweto near
Johannesburg and exiled to Brandfort in
‘the ultra-conservative Orange Free State,
began life anew andwon the respect of her
neighbors. Her triumph was to organize,
in an area where black militancy had been
non-existent, a chapter of the ANC
Women’s League. :

Because of her husband’s clandestine
existence, Winnie never attended any of
the events where he spoke. She arrived at
her militancy through her own observa-
tions and the persecution of South Africa’s
authorities. She remarks: “The Security
Branch has made me what I am today.”

Producer-director Sharon Sopher
worked for the U.S. television network,
NBC, for 12 years before she formed her
“own film company. She made, after

entreaties from South African leader
Bishop Desmond Tutu and others, Wit-
ness to Apartheid. She explains that “in
spite of the presence of nearly 200 journal-
ists in South Africa, this was a story that
was not being told.”

It’s hard to avoid using the term “gut-
wrenching” in describing the montage of
scenes depicting the violence of South
Africa’s security forces in their raids on

Witness to Apartheid.

black neighborhoods and schools. Seeing
an armed trooper fire repeatedly and
indiscriminately 4 high-powered shotgun
in neighborhood streets filled with fleeing
women, men and children brings to life the
words of Tutu comparing his country to
Nazi Germany.

Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner
recently appointed as Archbishop of Cape
Town, is frank is discussing the decline of
the politics of passive resistance in South —
Africa: “I have delivered absolutely
nothing. I’ve said to them, ‘Let’s try and
see if we can change the system peacefully.”
And I’ve not delivered the goods.”

In giving a humanistic backgrounder
— the film’s greatest service — to the
South African liberation fight, Witness
interviews personalities such as Tutu,
white and black South Africans involved
in the struggle, and South Africans on the
streets of a prosperous downtown district
and affluent white neighborhoods.
Throughout are interviews with the vic-
tims of police and security branch interro-
gations, and these are often hard to sit

through.

Film producer Sharon Sopher interviews Bishop Desmond Tutu in her fi

The reality of South Africa is forceful
brought home when the filmmakers the®
selves are shown being arrested by se ho }
forces, in the middle of an interview W" 5 |
man and son who tell of the elder $09”
death at the hands of the authorities.
series of graphically rendered P4
sketches, the story of the crew’s detentiO™
interrogation and subsequent release” |
with a warning not to continue filming ~ |
are depicted. fa |

Neither film offers much in the way ° 15 |
political background to South Af
conflict. There is no mention of ™ |
worldwide call for sanctions, or how ie 4
tries such as the United State and Can
keep the racist state alive. cl

What both Mandela and Witness of@ J
is a close-up of the suffering and triumP™” |
that mark the deterioration of the aP4™ |
theid state. th |

The films run nightly until Sept. 18, W
showings at 7:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. a
they premiere Friday night, howe¥” |
there will be only one showing, wit Ja
discussion period featuring Mande

director Peter Davis.

— Dan Keel

Jimmy Pattison — his not so flattering past

PATTISON: Portrait of a Capitalist

Superstar. By Russell Kelly. New Star
Publishers, 1986. Paper, $5.95. Available
at People’s Co-op Books. :

Even New Star Publishers probably
couldn’t have expected that people would
be buying copies of Russell Kelly’s book
Pattison: Portrait of a Capitalist Superstar
off the best seller rack at the local
supermarket — especially since the book
doesn’t exactly conform to the standard,
rags-to-riches idealization of the chairman
of Expo 86.

Then again, there’s no question that the
public fascination with Jimmy Pattison, the
man who epitomizes Social Credit free
enterprise, has never been greater. Pres-
ented variously in media reports as the

entrepreneur who sold Expo to the world.
and the man who hardly missed a phrase

when he was hit on the face with an egg -
during a meeting on Expo evictions, he has”
achieved a public relations aura of nearly ..

cosmic proportions. Even those for whom

_ his name evokes nothing but hostility would -

probably admit to wanting to know more
about this man whose huge business empire
dominates the province’s economic life.
Kelly was obviously able to cash in on
that public fascination but he makes it clear
that he has another purpose — as he puts
it, to “take the mystery out of how he (Patti-
son) got to the top and to shed light on how

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 10, 1986

anyone accumulates wealth and power in
this society.” x
Certainly there is much light shed on
Pattison’s ascent to his present position as
the owner of the largest locally-owned busi-
ness conglomerate in British Columbia, as
well as some intriguing biographical data
about Pattison’s beginnings in the unlikely
place of Luseland, Saskatchewan. Kelly, a
former CBC broadcaster, has culled exten-
sive newspaper files, court proceedings and
Combines investigation records and con-
ducted his own interviews to put together a
detailed — and revealing — record of Pat-
tison’s corporate acquisitions and the poli-

~ cies that helped put him at the top.

In 1967, having already parlayed his
salesman’s skills into a substantial Van-
couver auto dealership, Pattison moved up,
using his business skills and New York
financial backing to aquire his flagship —
company, Neon Products. From there, it
was an upward course, with only the occa-
sional slip, to sole ownership of the Jim
Pattison Group which now occupies such
heights in Canadian business that Pattison
was this year ushered into the financial
establishment as a director of the Toronto-
Dominion Bank.

The rise from Luseland, Saskatchewan to
the T-D boardroom has, of course, been the
stuff of endless magazine and newspaper
profiles. But the unflattering details about
the process have always been left out and it

is on those details that Kelly focusses in his
book. And they are numerous: the con-
trived share deals used to acquire compan-
ies without paying cash; the companies, like
Acme Novelty, sacrificed to corporate greed

with the resulting loss of jobs; the anti-union -

tactics used to wrest concessions from
organized employees and to keep other
operations union-free; the systematic avoid-
ance of taxation through mergers; and the
public relations manipulation used to cover
up the company’s continued sale of porno-
graphy. :

Kelly sums up -Pattison’s corporate
acquisition practice this way: “This man,
who frequently said his contribution to
society was providing 6,000 jobs, had found
a way to take over the profits produced by
those workers, lay off one in six of them,
siphon a lot of money away from Canada
and the Revenue Department, multiply his
money without generating a single job and
leave the government to pick up the tab for
the mortgages, rents and food bills of the
people he’d laid off.” :

A revealing chapter on Expo also notes
that, despite the media praise for his so-
called public philanthropy — chairing Expo
86 Corporation for $1 a year — Pattison
will be more than recompensed in Expo
contracts for various of his companies
including Neon Products and Trans-Ad.
And the international exposure he has
obtained is something that even his money

_ well-researched material and to pres

- popular market is something to be

couldn’t have bought. :

Kelly’s book still leaves a lot to be W
about Pattison and the unbridl
enterprise that he represents, howev

The last few years have seen the “pi
gence of a new group of western-based ait
inessmen, including Pattison and wf)
Pocklington, with close ties to U.S. le
and right wing ideology. Their ee |
influencing the ecoonmic and ei)
agenda and the governments which @ "—
out has yet to be studied. r

Kelly’s. own analysis is occas!
superficial, notably when he attribute
current prevalence of neo-conserva'
the “values and aspirations of thé
Generation” — which ignores the role
Pattison and corporate owners like bh!
have to play in influencing gover |
and shaping public opinion. Also i
from the book, (although arguab uF
would have been a difficult task) ® 4
detail or analysis of the close relat!
between Pattison and the Social
government. Pe ‘0

What Kelly has successfully don® :
challenge*the Pattison myth with a
a breezy, highly readable form. That 2? jy
with those credentials has reached inl? 7

GS

comed in itself.

SD. goad G if