by Daily News Correspondent
Johannesburg - Blackface and South Africa’s secret border war are exposed and explored in a poignant and troubling new film by Christo Doherty and Aryan Kaganof, showing in Cape Town and Joburg for the first time in June.
For 23 years – from 1967 to 1989 – young white men were conscripted to kill and die for apartheid during a long deadly war on the border of Namibia and Angola.
Doherty and Kaganof’s 18-minute film Lamentation looks at the traumatic memory of an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands of young white South Africans were forced to participate. Generations of men and women on both sides of the conflict were left traumatised.
Its directors call it an “experimental psychic documentary”.
Central to the movie are the white soldiers camouflaged with black-painted faces.
In 2011, Doherty presented his groundbreaking BOS exhibition of constructed miniature models and blackfaced conscript portraits based on the rare photographs leaked from the conflict zone, often at great risk to the photographers.
Lamentation explores one of the significantly unexamined aspects of apartheid’s military misadventures.
The film-makers are not afraid to challenge and to shock, and stress that the film is about memories and understanding for all participants and victims of the border war, not only South African soldiers.
The film includes a musical score by leading South African composer Michael Blake, set against disconcerting and sometimes shocking images from the war.
“We know this is difficult material, but interpreted and constructed images in art are an important way to reflect on a war which we don’t think South Africa has fully dealt with,” said Doherty.
“Many white men, including myself, firmly shut the door on their army days, yet the SADF was a dark formative experience which we need to expose and understand.”
The film-makers’ portrayal of white men in brown army uniforms with black faces may spark controversy in South Africa, but the use of this make-up was a survival mechanism in the war.
The blackface device in the film and in BOS is based on the combat body paint used as camouflage in the Angolan bush by apartheid’s soldiers, a product ironically known to the white troops as “black is beautiful”.
“White faces painted black are currently taboo, but were very much part of a conscripted white soldier’s experience during South Africa’s war in Namibia and Angola,” said Doherty.
The photographs in BOS, and now in Lamentation, use re-enacted representations of this wartime practice, together with miniature reconstructions of battle scenes, to probe the psychological and ethical transformation of young men who joined in involuntary battle against a hidden enemy.
The film emerged through Doherty and film-maker Kaganof’s mutual involvement with music by Blake, set to cinematography by Eran Tahor.
Doherty is an associate professor of digital arts at Wits University.
He is a photographer and artist with a keen interest in the visual representation of conflict and trauma. He was conscripted into the apartheid army at the age of 17.
Kaganof is a South African film-maker, novelist, poet and fine artist. His extensive filmography includes Threnody for the Victims of Marikana, Decolonising Wits, Western 4.33, and Nicola’s First Orgasm.
Aryan left South Africa aged 19 to avoid conscription into the apartheid army.
Blake studied in South Africa and the UK, and left South Africa in 1977 to avoid conscription. He returned in 1998 to teach composition at Rhodes University.
He established the New Music Indaba and the Growing Composers project to empower young black composers.
Tahor teaches cinematography at the Wits School of Arts.The photographs in BOS, examined anew in Lamentation, were intended to challenge a growing public discourse around the memory and implications of South Africa’s border war.
The exhibition was created by Doherty from the few news pictures leaked from the conflict zone, often at great risk to the photographers, among them veteran photographers John Liebenberg and Guy Tillim.
Documentary realism has dominated South African photography for decades, but the photographs in BOS set out to investigate the power of constructed images for exploring the traumatic memory of a largely invisible conflict that still resonates in South African experience.