White Men Can’t Toyi-Toyi!
March 30, 2008
French Cuisine Prod is developing Aldo Lee’s new documentary film. “White Men Can’t Toyi-Toyi!” will be an irreverent portrait of today’s South Africa.
While the black majority were engaged in a violent struggle against the brutal Apartheid regime, the majority of whites did nothing. Perhaps it is simply easier to ignore the injustice that surrounds us than to put our thoughts into action ? Coming back to South-Africa to meet again with the white boys of his school and his black peers from University 15 years after the end of the Apartheid regime, Aldo aims at bringing answers to this question.
Note of Intent
March 30, 2008
I grew up in a ‘whites only’ neighbourhood and attended a school reserved exclusively for white men. The elitist school of my adolescence was based on an antiquated English public school system: military style discipline with constant humiliation and punishment that compelled us to be part of a group, and not to question authority. In fact, our school was preparing us for a future that was exclusively white.
Thankfully that future never came about. Apartheid is no longer in place and the privileges accorded to the white boys of my school are gone. But how do my white peers feel about the changes that have taken place around them and their loss of privilege? Most of them seem to have all accepted the changes (do they have any choice?), yet they still hold a certain nostalgia for the past. Many of them meet regularly at the old boys bar of the school: a “whites-only” enclave that has not changed with the times.
During the Apartheid regime, my high school peers did little to resist the Apartheid regime, which they knew was fundamentally wrong. Were we merely victims of propaganda or did we prefer not to face up to reality?
At school we were taught the story of the white man in Africa but the word apartheid did not appear in our history textbooks. National television was controlled by the state, and members of the African National Congress, who now govern the country, were called ‘terrorists’. The writings of Karl Marx were banned and it was illegal to possess a photograph of Nelson Mandela.University was a liberation from the indoctrination of my whites-only school. At university, I found myself in a class with black students who spoke of revolution and invited me to clandestine political meetings. I read ‘das kapital’, saw my first photo of Nelson Mandela, participated in political rallies and learnt how to toyi toyi. Everything my high school had taught me, was revealed to be a lie and the society that had been built on that lie was crumbling.
Today South Africa is portrayed as the rainbow nation, where white and black South Africans live together in total harmony. Can black South Africans really forget the crimes of the past? Can white South Africans transform themselves from the racists that they were taught to be? As grown men, do my peers still have the same values and passions that they had when they were young?
Director’s bio
March 30, 2008
A multi-talented director with a typical south african energy, Aldo Lee has received awards and accolades all along his career. His debut feature length film, “The Double Life of Dona Ermelinda” won best documentary at Vues d’Afriques in Montreal as well as other prizes around the globe. He then went on to further explore questions of race and cultural identities with “White Farmers Black Land” which followed a group of South African farmers, still traumatised with the changes taking place in their country and emigrating to Mozambique to participate in an agricultural development project.
His other work both as a cameraman and a director include many collaborations with TV shows such as Striptease, Tracks as well as with various artists and choreographers such as Rachid Ouramdane or creating a four screen installation called Cinderella from Head to Toe.
With White Men Can’t Toyi-Toyi!, he aims to complete the trilogy of his South African saga and finally lay to rest his identity crisis caused by being born in Africa to a British father and a Portuguese mother; growing up in an Indian neighborhood and marrying a French woman who wants to live in Japan.
Filmography
Sacrifice (1993)
The Double Life of Dona Ermelinda (1995)
White Farmers Black Land (2000)
Trailer
March 30, 2008
Trailer
March 30, 2008
French cuisine at “Cinéma du réel”
March 28, 2008
Beginning of March 08, French cuisine Attended Paris’ Cinéma du Réel Documentary Film Festival.
Synopsis
March 27, 2008
When I tell people that I grew up in South Africa, they inevitably ask me how I could have supported living under the apartheid regime?
Looking back, it is hard to believe that a white minority managed to impose a political system that institutionalized racism and taught people to hate one another, and I constantly ask myself how it was all possible?
I want to look at the way the apartheid government managed to justify itself to the white population and impose its laws on the black majority. What long-term effects did it have in the minds of individuals.I want to recognize the complex role of myself and my peers as victims, bystanders and accomplices, in order to understand our function as privileged, white South Africans during the apartheid regime. How did we choose to fight back? Where did we just give in?
I do not want to justify or pardon my own conduct, but try and understand the actions of the ’common man’ in extraordinary circumstances and see how personal stories fit into the larger historical context.“Truth and reconciliation” told us to wipe away the horrors of the past and start from scratch, but I want to see if amnesia is possible and if it is really better to forget.
Despite the optimistic vision that is often portrayed of post-Mandela South Africa, it has become one of the most violent countries in the world. It is obvious that this violence is related to our history and I firmly believe that the past cannot be brushed away, but needs to be confronted head on, in order to be exorcised.
By telling personal stories, it is my aim to explore the clichés of race in South Africa and show the complexity of the situation in the country today, that goes beyond ‘black and white’.
Finally, White Men Can’t Toyi-Toyi! is not only about South Africa’s past, but touches on universal themes: Is it simply part of human nature to take care of one’s own comfort at the expense of other’s misery? What motivates certain individuals to risk their lives to help others? In an ever-shrinking globalized world, how many people look on passively as thousands die in Darfour or American troops invade Iraq?
Loin…
March 12, 2008
Aldo Lee, author and director of South Africa mon Amour spent 2 months in Vietnam shooting for dancer and choregrapher Rachid Ouramdane’s new creation, Far Away… (Loin…).
