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Set in Soweto at the height of the white atrocities on the blacks, Sarafina is the story of a spunky black girl of the same name who is in school while her mother works as a maid in a white household in Johannesburg. Sarafina (Leleti Khumalo) battles her feelings of abandonment with a passionate hero-worship of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, whose photograph she is always talking to. These feelings are further fuelled by her rebellious teacher Mary Masombuka (Whoopi Goldberg). So the seeds of black pride find fertile soil in Sarafina and her friends. Soweto is described as "a gas station stop for the Europeans on their way." But then some of them decided to stay on and call it their own land at the expense of the blacks. The year is 1976 and apartheid is at its peak. "If you want to find a way out, you must know where you want to go," the children are told. A school project spirals into a riot and the police force, mostly white, makes it a personal agenda. Director Darrell James Roodt’s establishing shots are strong. With apt black music and dance he sets in the mood for a major confrontation. There are black stool pigeons who are used to get at them. And one sees the conditions they live in, five children sleeping on one bed, it is not difficult to understand why. Then it happens, the flash riot and the steps the authorities take to quell it. It is revenge pure and simple and it keeps simmering and spreading. Violence and torture follow and it is now war. Sarafina goes to her mother to apologise for being involved in killing a cop. But where does she go from there? What’s the next stop? The action shots are
graphically shot by the cinematographer but an imaginative screenplay
by Mbnogeni Ngema and William Vincente equally matches them and the
characters are well fleshed out. Sarafina breathes life and fire
mingled with an element of doubt brilliantly put across by Leleti
Khumalo. Whoopi Goldberg, too, provides apt support though for
starters she, with her comic reputation, seems miscast. There are also
other good cameos in this devastating picture of man’s inhumanity to
his fellow men.
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