Dear Mandela, a work-in-progress, is a feature length documentary that follows four teenagers – children of the New South Africa – as they join their communities in trying to get the houses they were promised by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president.
During Apartheid, many people around the world supported Mandela and the African National Congress in their fight to end minority rule. In 1994, the world watched as Africa’s newest democracy was born. President Mandela said in his inaugural speech, “Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.”
Thirteen years later, as the world’s attention shifted elsewhere, the ANC’s revolutionary dream has been deferred. Since 1994, the number of South Africans living on less than $1 a day has doubled from 2 million to 4 million. One in four South Africans live in shacks, most without access to electricity, water or sanitation. Yet economic growth is at an all-time high, and former ANC freedom fighters now drive luxury cars, prompting Nobel prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu to accuse Mandela and his team of stopping the gravy train ‘just long enough to get on it’.
Dear Mandela (working title) follows these young shack dwellers as they challenge a police state bent on forcibly removing the poor from the spaces their predecessors claimed in the cities during the struggles in the 1980s. State-sponsored demolitions and forced evictions are a daily threat, and deadly shack fires can destroy all a family has in moments. In the midst of this, the shack dwellers have united to form a group called Abahlali baseMjondolo. Abahlali baseMjondolo translates into English as the Shackdwellers’ Movement. In the words of Abahlali Chairman S’bu Zikode, “The time has come for the poor to show themselves that we can be poor in life but not in mind.”
The characters in Dear Mandela feel the effects of Apartheid, but have only ever read about it in books. Mazwi, 14, lives with his family in a shack in the Joe Slovo settlement. He says, “At that time there was Apartheid between certain people and certain people. Now, there’s a new Apartheid that’s existing in South Africa, which is between the rich and the poor.
Seen through the eyes of teenagers, Dear Mandela follows the Shack Dwellers Movement as they go to the Constitutional Court to issue a demand for change and an honoring of the rights guaranteed in the nation’s landmark Constitution.
A six-minute short version of Dear Mandela can be viewed here:
