The Soweto Uprisings

This week, I listened to the documentaries of the Mandela Diaries and ABC Ulwazi’s 1976 June 16. As I mentioned last week, there are various documentary modes. I believe these documentaries to be situated in the participatory mode. According to Nichols (2001), this is primarily revolved around the encounter between film-maker and subject, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting whilst being heavily reliant on the honesty of witnesses.

The Soweto Uprisings was a result of an originally intended peaceful march to represent the students dislike for the bantu education system.  The system requires 50% of their education to be taught in Afrikaans. 23 people were killed and it led to more riots for the rest of the year of 1976.

The two accounts of the uprisings, the Mandela diaries and June 16, are very different in their approach to representing this moment in history. This difference results I believe, from the fact that Mandela Diaries are clearly intended for an international audience, while June 16’s version is aimed at a South African audience. 

The Mandela Diaries makes use of a diversity of sound sources, including both interviews and archival material. Some of this is represented by BBC news reports, a universally recognised audio medium, which again signals that this was intended for a worldwide audience. It also provides more basic background explanation about South African history, as if to an outsider - for example by introducing the concept of bantu education, and spelling out why this system led to protests. The intention is clearly that this allows an easier understanding of the storytelling accounts of the people who were there. 

The Ulwazi production, in contrast, relies primarily on narrative accounts, in the form of interview material.  There is some very sparse use of other sounds, such as music and sound clips such as a man shouting ‘Amandla!’ The assumption also seems to be that the audience is already familiar with the events of the day. The fact that there was a revised version with fresh interviews brought out after for the BBC world service, further suggests that the original version was made for a South African audience.

As well as the modes of production that I have focused on as part of my course, I’ve been learning about paradigms- in context of the different ways social researchers approach the idea of producing knowledge about society. It strikes me that this notion of paradigm provides a valuable way of making sense of the difference between these two documentaries. One could for example, see the ABC Ulwazi as an interpretivist approach. The purpose of this approach is to explore and question phenomena in a more investigative manner. I would propose that this is because it focused on the internal reality of subjective experiences. It gives a clear account of how the phenomena developed in a social context, The Mandela diaries was interpretive for the same reason.

I personally preferred the Mandela Diaries. This is mainly because of what I have stated before in my personal philosophy (which you can view on my home page), i.e. that although the aim of the documentaries are to be informative to the public, they must also be entertaining. The Ulwazi production has an intense and interesting beginning, which didn’t really suit what was to come next. The accounts were very well described and informed, but if I were to listen to that for an hour, I would probably get quite bored. The first sound bite only came at 06.56, and as mentioned above, it was a rather aberrant ‘Amandla’. A song only comes in after 10 minutes. On the other hand, the Mandela Diaries had a great variation of sources and sound clips, and background sounds such as the prisoners working allowed for a greater feeling of ‘being there’ for the audience. A real sound clip of gun shots from the day’s event also allowed this.

In summary, the mode of documentary that was used was quite different in its approach compared to Ghetto Life 101, but its delivery was appropriate, as it is the ‘honesty of witnesses’ that Nichols mentions, that forms the bulk of the documentaries. Next week I will blogging on the documentaries of ‘witness to an execution’ and ‘view from a bridge’.