24 Hours: Assassination in South Africa's Parliament of Hendrik Verwoerd
I'm not intending to start another series of posts on documentaries, but I've watched several excellent ones recently so this may well end up becoming another documentary series.
24 hours was a BBC news commentary programme which ran from 1965 to 1972. It was an extended programme focussing on investigative journalism and extended documentary segments rather than a short news programme. It was always broadcast in the later evening, although apparently its time kept changing as it was juggled with other shows. I have to say I love this idea because I just don't think you could do this with a show nowadays, and it must have required people to pay attention and actually look at the Radio Times in the sixties. I have not seen any other episode of it and as far as I can see there are none online; I would expect it's unlikely to have survived in any numbers, but this one is available on YouTube.
Long time readers of this blog will be aware that I have a long term interest in apartheid. As a young theology student in the absolutely dying days of apartheid we had to write an essay on a particular conjunction between culture and religion and I chose apartheid. Most of the current history tends completely to miss the fact that apartheid wasn't just underpinned by Nazi pseudo-scientific theories of eugenics but that there was also a distinct Calvinist theology which underpinned it. It was heavily associated with the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in South Africa, which for this got expelled from the parent Dutch Reformed Church in Holland.
However my interest in this documentary is slightly different because I'm going to have to say that this documentary (notionally about the assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, which took place on 6th September 1966, although it's also about his life and position naturally) is an absolute masterpiece.
Don't get the wrong idea when I say that the keynote here is that it is even handed. I'm not talking about 'two-sidesing' evil, what I'm talking about is a remarkable documentary which consists entirely of flat statements of fact and letting the subjects speak for themselves, and as a result it is absolutely devastating. For this reason at the beginning it feels as if it is happily supporting apartheid, but this is a slow burning genius documentary which lets the subject implode itself. There is nothing dramatic about it, but it achieves the remarkable feat of taking some of the most odious people at the time on this planet, putting them on the telly to express themselves, and letting them put this own foot in their own mouth before shooting themselves in the foot.
It also achieves the remarkable feat of expressing the full ridiculousness of the theory of apartheid. By 1966 the political resistance was well up and running but the full impossibility of claiming you want to separate races completely while also keeping Black servants in white areas hadn't yet quite hit them. It's really difficult to express how impossible and ridiculous this actually is: for example the way a person could find himself legally in different racial groups on different sides of the street, the woman who famously was legally three different races in a year and was described in the papers as 'confused', or the way bus journeys would be interrupted so that the segregated seats would be rearranged and you would all get back on and sit somewhere different. The specific example it uses is in the Black bantustan of Transkei: The capital is a white area so the Africans live in a Black area outside the white capital of their Black homeland but inside the capital is a Black parliament. This statement of the ridiculousness of apartheid is quite a journalistic achievement.
Then in the middle of the show it platforms Mrs Helen Suzman, the sole MP of the 'Progressive' Party who starts off by saying that the party recognises South Africa as a multiracial country and accepts all that that would mean. Perhaps I sould say that for years Mrs Suzman was the only anti-apartheid representative in the South African parliament, took abuse of all sorts, and in fact won the Nobel Peace Prize twice. So she was clearly highly praised for her work for humanity at the time however that makes this segment all the more devastating. Given her credentials it comes across as all the more shocking when she says that apartheid is wrong but goes on to stress the Progressive Party's position of a limited franchise: no way would they advocate votes for everyone but voting would be limited on the basis of education and/or income. It's like being hit by a sledgehammer when you realise the Progressive Party in the country didn't want only whites to vote but would still limit it to the educated and the rich. This is exactly the sort of limited franchise that was the last to fall in the UK for universal suffrage and it's shocking to hear this opinion from someone lauded for her work for peace.
Both Mrs Suzman and the apartheid politicians are very clear that they expect the rest of the world to be reasonable towards South Africa's apartheid regime and not do anything horrid to them. The sheer unreasonableness of these people comes across loud and clear. The show also contains extended interviews with Black anti-apartheid activists, both in South Africa and in exile.
By letting the different interviewees just speak with limited commentary the show is honestly the best indictment of apartheid you could ever wish. However this technique also allows it to achieve the remarkable feat of delineating the complex situation and number of views in the country: always a difficult feat and something which tends to become dreary if it's just narrated.
I am a bit sad that I can't find any other episodes of this show because watching this is a wonderful experience of intelligent evening news documentary in the sixties, and an indictment of our present TV stations' inability to report objectively.
My only possible criticism is that it's probably got the wrong title: even though Verwoerd's assassination was what was in the news and what prompted the documentary it's not mainly about Verwoerd or his stabbing, but about the situation in which he had left South Africa.
Meanwhile in the UK we have this thing of beauty taking us closer to an actually elected government
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