The Bang Bang Club

Yesterday I saw The Bang Bang Club.  I had heard only bits and pieces about the movie—I knew it was about a group of photojournalist friends, and they spent some time filming in South Africa.  Turns out it is based on a true story of 4 white South African photojournalists who worked together during the last years of Apartheid, documenting the violent uprisings that preceded the transition to a democratic government.  I definitely recommend the movie, especially to get a different perspective on the ending of Apartheid. 

I didn’t realize the history, but there were not only two sides in the Apartheid fight.  It wasn’t just blacks vs. whites, but ended up being much black vs. black fighting.  It was really eye-opening to me to see how latent frustrations among blacks were stoked by the pro-Apartheid forces to create intra-racial conflict.  I guess if they kept them from having one common enemy, they felt their resistance would be weakened.  I will admit that I struggled at times to focus on the story of the main characters and their photojournalist lives because I was so disturbed by some of the images they were capturing (and I was seeing) of the intense fighting between black South Africans in the townships.  Not only did my heart break to see the terrible and true recent history of this country, but my heart also broke for the way these journalists had to basically become desensitized in order to continue working.   I certainly agree that people need to see these images, and thus there need to be photographers to capture them.  But I can’t imagine how they must learn to cope as witnesses to so much suffering.  You can see the shift in the main character in the beginning, as the internal conflict plays out—care for these people I’m photographing or just move on to get the next shot?  This dissonance continued throughout the film.

Another thing that stuck in my mind is how so many people here in Soshanguve will ask me “Is South Africa nice?” or “Do you think Soshanguve is nice?” (People here like to use the adjective “nice” as a general catch-all affirmative term.)  And of course, they want me to say yes, and I do say yes because I do think that there is good in this place.  But it’s an interesting question, and this movie reminded me it’s much more loaded than just considering anywhere a “nice” place to live.  It’s different than calling Deerfield, IL “nice” because not even 20 years ago, these townships were not “nice.”  Most of the movie took place in various townships, mostly around Johannesburg.  And those townships honestly looked much the same as Soshanguve does today…except nearly every scene was filled with mobs, or burning tires, or dead bodies, or gunfire.  So for someone who has grown up here, especially the older generation, to be able to ask me, a naïve white American, if I find this place to be “nice” is quite remarkable.  The history is not that ancient—this movie took place while I was in junior high school!   There’s just so much more baggage than I even realize behind the peace and relative calm of this place now.  And frankly I think I forget about that a lot of the time.  So the movie was a good, if disturbing, reminder.    

One of the photojournalists ends up traveling to the Sudan to cover a story of a famine.  We see shots of people in a UN feeding station and then we see the character wandering off into the desert.  With his camera, he captures the scene of a starving girl, crouching on the sand, and a vulture just a few feet behind, seemingly waiting for the girl to die.  It’s a captivating image (link?) and, as his friends commend him later, it was a great shot.  In fact, the photographer won a Pulitzer Prize for it.  But the thing that haunted him after was how everyone wanted to know what happened to the girl.  Didn’t he intervene? Didn’t he help her?  Wasn’t it his responsibility, as a witness to the crisis, to step in and respond?  As he put it later in a radio interview, photojournalists capture these images that the world needs to see.  Often the images show some real evil.  And then, people want to shoot the messenger.  And I have had that feeling—in fact had that feeling a lot during the movie.   How can we diminish someone’s life and death to just “a great shot?”  How can they stand there and take pictures of these terrible things and then just walk away, expecting to get paid for documenting someone else’s misery?  But the truth is, the goal of the pictures is to prod us, the viewers, into asking those questions of ourselves.  If we are willing to ask why they didn’t do something shouldn’t we also be willing to ask why we don’t do something? If I see the picture, do I have as much responsibility to respond as the one who witnessed the act in person?  

But I am just like the photographers.  It was eerie watching this group of white guys just drive in and out of the townships, amidst the fighting and burning and chaos, and just go along with their lives.  And I sometimes feel like them.  I don’t see the pain just below the surface.  Like the photographers, I have the privilege of leaving the township whenever I feel like it.  The juxtaposition of scenes between township and the neighborhoods where the photographers lived wasn’t lost on me.  It was so easy to just drive a few kilometers away and forget about all the suffering you witnessed just an hour earlier.   At one point, the main character nearly explodes with this internal conflict as he is driven to despise all sides in the conflict.  His girlfriend calms him down by telling him “it’s okay,” which doesn’t really do it justice, though there was not much else she could have said. I don’t want to be insensitive.  I don’t want to find ways to rationalize or de-humanize the people I live among in order to feel less pain at their pain.  This is not just a movie for my neighbors here—this was their real life.  

Towards the end of the movie, we see long lines of black South Africans, waiting to vote in the first democratic election in 1994.  And we see people side by side who, just days and weeks before, had been running from or at each other, wielding guns and knives.  How does that happen?  Does that mean there is real peace and forgiveness?  It made me wonder if that is still the case today—do my neighbors, some of whom were perhaps involved in such fighting and riots just a few years ago, still harbor animosity and resentment toward each other?  How do those feelings just go away overnight because someone says the fighting is over?  It seems people here want to just move on and forget about it, but that won’t heal deep wounds.  I want to understand and I long to see real healing come.      

Perhaps for viewers of this movie who don’t live in a South African township, the experience will be different.  Maybe they will find the storyline of the Bang Bang Club and their camaraderie to be more compelling than the “background” story happening all around them.  But for me it was the other way around—the photojournalists were just a vehicle to show recent history in a new light.