Sing a Song of Struggle

WORKING on a building: Dancing on a Johannesburg

rooftop in <i>Amandla!</i>

WORKING on a building: Dancing on a Johannesburg rooftop in Amandla!

Lee Hirsch talks about his 10 years documenting African freedom songs.

by Sam Adams

³Music is like the yeast that makes the cake rise," says Lee Hirsch. Talking energetically about Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, his first documentary, Hirsch could be mistaken for an excitable graduate student. But the Hampshire college graduate, who sports purple Converse one-stars and uses the word "comrade" without hesitation, is talking about the 11 years it's taken him to make the movie.

"The first time I went to South Africa, I took a Hi-8 camera," he recalls. "I think I was 19." That was in 1992. He spent much of the next 10 years living in South Africa, criss-crossing the country and directing music videos, constantly researching and eventually seeking out funding for a documentary on "freedom songs," the grassroots anthems that became the bedrock of the struggle against apartheid. "It's so funny now, because I can't even remember what I did for those 10 years," Hirsch says. "But I know for a fact, this [movie] is all I did."

Hirsch was introduced to African song when he heard "Nkosi Sikel'i Africa," better known as "the African national anthem," in the movie Cry Freedom when he was 15. Though he now disdains the movie, it stirred something in him: "It was probably the first socially conscious film I'd ever seen. Just seeing the struggle, how people were suffering, was powerful." Even at that point, the music was central, and remained so when, a few years later, he took his first flight to South Africa, the idea for Amandla! (meaning "power") already in his mind.

The movie traces the developments of phenomena like the toyi-toyi, a form of calisthenics set to music that became a staple of rebel armies in the 1970s. (A white police officer interviewed in the film recalls how it used to "frighten" him.) The songs, which often sprung up collectively, with no clear authorship, could convey information, like "Meadowlands," which warns blacks about relocating to the government-created shantytowns, or serve as code, like "Beware, Verwoerd," addressed to South Africa's then-president, which could be sung in front of white police officers as a sign of covert defiance (much the same way African slaves communicated).

The songs would often begin with a familiar melody, acquiring new lyrics and rhythms to fit changing situations. The process, Hirsch says, continues. "With labor, with trade unionism, with people protesting [for] HIV/AIDS [treatment], they're using the songs. They're taking the old songs, giving them a new spin, giving them new energy. The old songs are fading, and that's only natural, because the principal part of the struggle has been victorious. But those who are political will always use the music."

Which brings Hirsch to our own country, and the protest songs currently not burning up the airwaves. "It's amazing to me that we're not singing right now," he says. "[In South Africa] you have songs that started out as a wedding song or a funeral song, that went on to be a song about Mandela, that are now a song about unions. We could do that here, whether it's a hip-hop song or a rock song. We would have had a much better time at the last few marches [if we were singing], for heat reasons alone."

Amandla! opens Friday at Ritz Bourse.