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20th January 2005
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  Pascale Lamche  printable version

DIRECTOR INTERVIEW

PASCALE LAMCHE

Friday 26 March 2004

 
 

BBC Four: What made you want to tell the story of the
Rivonia trial?
Pascale Lamche: It really came from Nick Fraser [Storyville Series Editor]. He was spending a lot of time working in South Africa and said it would be interesting to make a film about the Rivonia trial because nobody had really looked into that story before. People knew about Nelson Mandela and that he was incarcerated on Robben Island for 27 years but nobody knew in-depth how and why he'd got there. Also, this year is the 10th anniversary of democracy in South Africa so for it to be shown now is very important. It shows what a multicultural movement of resistance it was.

BBC Four: That was something that surprised me. I suspect many people don't realise how many whites were involved in the civil rights movement in South Africa.
PL: It was a total revelation to me too. I knew it had been a multicultural movement but not that there were so many white militants in the higher echelons of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which was the armed, military wing of the ANC. That kind of answers the astonishing question as to why Nelson Mandela was able to create this "rainbow nation". To make a peaceful transition in South Africa and to share democracy without any bloodshed was a fantastic feat - one of the greatest historical achievements of the 20th Century.

BBC Four: It also becomes apparent in the film how this all played into the Cold War...
PL: Ethics were put to the wind; especially as far as Britain and America were concerned, but others too. It was strategically critical that South Africa remained in the 'Western' camp during the 1960s, even if they were oppressing the majority of their population. If the Soviet Union had been successful and this domino effect happened throughout Africa with the burgeoning independence movements, then South Africa would be the last bastion against communism.

BBC Four: Which is why the government was so eager to portray the ANC as communists...
PL: Absolutely. Winnie Mandela makes the point perfectly in the film. She says that on the whole they were not communists. They allied themselves with anyone who felt injustice in their country and that happened to be the white Communist Party. But it obviously made sense for the opposition to scream "Red Menace" and get the backing from other Western powers, who poured in money and expertise, to crush the black independence movement.

BBC Four: What was the extent of CIA involvement?
PL: That is what's astonishing. Gerard Ludi, the former secret service intelligence officer who infiltrated the Communist Party at that time, explains quite clearly in the film that it was the CIA that handed over Mandela to the South African special branch and secret services. What he says is a complete scoop and hasn't been told before, although some people have worked out that there was CIA involvement. When the 90-day detention law came into effect they arrested an Indian guy in Durban who was actually a CIA operative. A huge row erupted with the CIA over this guy. The South African police refused to release him and in the end the CIA had to make a bargain: they traded their information, which led to Nelson Mandela's arrest, for their CIA operative. It really is astonishing.

BBC Four: Did you sense that the interviewees felt they were shedding light on a piece of 'lost history'?
PL: Totally. The original interviews are very long and are going into South Africa's national archive because they are exceptionally important pieces of history. Many of the interviewees, the Jewish militants especially, are just fantastic storytellers. Not only do they have a capacity to analyse, but many of them spent more than 20 years in jail, so they had plenty of time to pore over the details of all this. By the time we had finished the interview with Dennis Goldberg I could have made a very bold statement to Nick Fraser and said, this film needs to be just one man talking against black and that's it - he was so powerfully evocative. I knew I wouldn't do that but I think Dennis Goldberg could probably tour through South Africa just giving this extraordinary monologue.

What this story also shows is that they were a bunch of bungling intellectuals. They didn't really know how to do this. The fact that they kept hundreds of incriminating documents is ludicrous. I'm sure that no other underground guerrilla movement, in basically a police state, kept documents that could send them away for eternity. But they did because they realised they were making history and needed to keep all this stuff.

BBC Four: Did you get any impression that anyone in the movement thought it was an odd alliance?
PL: Not at all. It was a very symbiotic, close relationship. Someone like Rusty Bernstein, who was a communist, was the most rigorously aware that security lapses were being made and the one who tried most significantly to stop it. In many ways, if Liliesleaf Farm had remained just a headquarters for the Communist Party, and not a place where top ANC leaders hid, it probably would have maintained more stringent security procedures.

The Communist Party had been banned since 1950 so by this stage they'd already had 14 years as an underground movement. The ANC was only banned in 1960 so it very young in the underground movement. It was a coming together in extreme circumstances of one group of people who had been underground for a long time and another who hadn't. The comradeship and sense of combined struggle is very strong in all of them. It's not divided along any racial lines at all and I think that's what created the roots of South Africa today.

 NELSON MANDELA: ACCUSED #1 HOMEPAGE

Previous Storyvilles

 
 
ACCUSED #1
Read more about the documentary
  Nelson Mandela
STORYVILLE NEWSLETTER
Sign up for monthly news on upcoming films
Storyville Newsletter

 SOPHIATOWN
Pascale Lamche's 'docu-musical' about the lost Harlem of Soth Africa

 STORYVILLE HOMEPAGE

Further links

Nelson Mandela: Profile
BBC News looks at some key events in Mandela's life

"I Am Prepared to Die"
Full text of Mandela's 1964 speech from the dock

The Rivonia Trial
Background on the trial from The Observer

Liliesleaf Farm
Article on the fateful last meeting there and profiles of the accused

A History of the African National Congress
Potted history from the ANC website

Manifesto of Umkhonto we Sizwe
The ANC militant wing's stance in 1961

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external links



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