Fractured Lives

Toni Strasburg

Description

Fractured Lives is a memoir of one woman’s experiences as a documentary filmmaker covering the wars in southern Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. Part autobiography, part history, part social commentary and part war story, it offers a female perspective on a traditionally male subject. Growing up in South Africa in a politically active family, Toni went to Britain as an exile in 1965 in the wake of the famous Rivonia Trial, and in the years to follow, became a filmmaker. Despite constant difficulties fighting for funding and commissions from television broadcasters, and the prejudices of working in a male-dominated industry, Toni made several remarkable films in Mozambique and Angola. These bear witness to the silent victims of war, particularly the women and children. Fractured Lives paints the changing landscape of southern Africa: Namibian independence and the end of the war in Mozambique bring hope – but also despondency. Yet there is also the possibility of redemption, of building new lives for the victims of war. In its final chapters, Fractured Lives traces the power of survival and the opportunities for new beginnings. Fractured Lives concludes with Toni’s return to South Africa after nearly three decades in exile. However, the joy following the demise of apartheid is tempered by the poignancy of returning to a place that for so long had existed in her dreams alone and the realization that home will forever lie somewhere else.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography

Informations

• Publié par: Modjaji Books
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781920590390
• Langue: English

Extrait

FRACTURED
LIVES
FRACTURED
LIVES
TONI STRASBURG
Publication Modjaji Books 2013
Copyright Toni Strasburg 2013 P O Box 385, Athlone, 7760, South Africa modjaji.books gmail.com http://modjaji.book.co.za www.modjajibooks.co.za ISBN 978-1-920590-09-3 Cover design: Life is Awesome Design Studio Book design: Life is Awesome Design Studio Printed and bound by Mega Digital, Cape Town Set in Garamond 11pt
Extracts from: Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski, Picador, 1987.
Copyright Ryszard Kapuscinski 1987
Extract from: Reflections on Exile by Edward W. Said Copright 2000, Edward W. Said Used by permisson of the Wylie Agency (UK) Limited
For my mother who believed in all of her children .
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1981 THE BEGINNING
1. Refugees and Exiles
2. Bearing Witness
PART TWO
1986 DESTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT
1. The Hidden Enemy
2. Corridors of Power
3. Confus o
4. Harare-Mozambique
PART THREE
1988 CHAIN OF TEARS
1. Children of War
2. Zimbabwe-Tanzania
3. Angola
4. The End of the Earth
5. Falling Apart
PART FOUR
1990-1992 MARKING TIME
1. Namibia
2. Angola (Going Nowhere)
3. Going Home
4. Meeting the Enemy 1
5. Free to Move
PART FIVE
1992 SPOILS OF WAR
1. Meeting the Enemy 2
2. No Dead Elephants
PART SIX
1995 CHAIN OF HOPE
1. Finding Franisse
2. Rosita s Return
3. The Lost Generation
4. Lariam Days
5. Heroes of Kuito
Glossary of Acronyms
References
PREFACE
I have tried to describe my experiences while making documentaryfilms about the wars in southern Africa. Over the years I made manyfilms in many countries, but the ones described here are about aspecific time in the history of the region. They portray, in particular, theeffect of war on people s lives, especially those of women and children.My recollections are placed in the context of what was happening insouthern Africa during those years, for if we are to understand wherewe are now, then we need to know what has brought us here.
The stories are also about the people I met while making thefilms - people who remain mostly nameless, but whose lives weredestroyed beyond any comprehension.
Memory is always imperfect, however; thoughts blur and crumbleover the years.


Author and crew arriving at refugee camp, Mozambique 1986 Photograph by: Ivan Strasburg
PART ONE
1981 THE BEGINNING
Seeing the entire world as a foreign land makes possibleoriginality of vision. Most people are principally awareof one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are awareof at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to anawareness o f simultaneous dimensions, an awareness thatis contrapuntal.
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile , 1984
1. REFUGEES AND EXILES
The crowd milling and pushing in the dust were barely recognisable as human beings. Dressed in colourless rags, or wraps made from bark, they stared at us with blank and desperate eyes, anxious to receive anything that would help them to survive.
A man standing on a pile of sacks was shouting out names from a page torn from an exercise book. At each name, someone would surge forward to collect the family s share of the pathetic amount of aid we had brought in by tractor from the landing strip.
A ragged scrap of photograph was lying in the dust. Before it disappeared underfoot, I caught a glimpse of a family gazing at the camera wearing their best clothes. They bore no resemblance to any of these half-naked, starving and desperate people, pushing and shoving around me.
It was March 1991 and I was in Mozambique once more, making a film for the United Nations about their aid effort. For days we had struggled to reach this place. Everything possible had gone wrong: from the serious illness of the person in charge of the United Nations Disaster Relief Organisation (UNDRO) operation in Maputo, to an engine falling off the aid plane, almost forcing us to land in the sea. The heat and humidity made every movement an effort of will. All I wanted was to get out of there, go home to London, and sleep. It was as much as I could do to remain standing and try to direct my crew. I had been doing this for too long and felt only weary; the adrenalin kick was no longer there.
Tomas, who worked in the UNDRO warehouse in Maputo, felt he had suffered from the war for years. He lived with his family in one of the teeming barrios on the outskirts of the city; their poverty was worsened by food shortages and other deprivations. But in Maputo they had never experienced the real effects of the war that was fought in the countryside. Now he was shocked and distraught.
Please, I have to do something for these people. Tell me what I can do, he said. I tried to see the scene through Tomas s eyes. Sometimes, seeing too much poverty and suffering ceases to shock, and one s own discomfort begins to take precedence.
My own eyes saw what was going on, but I couldn t process it all. My brain was too busy trying to deal with practical matters like how to film this scene, or whether we d ever get a plane out of here. Sometimes days or months - or even years - passed before I understood what had been going on in front of me.
I had filmed countless similar scenes over the years while covering the wars in southern Africa, but suddenly, seeing that pathetic photograph and then Tomas s real distress, and knowing there was nothing that I, or any film crew, could really do to help these people, I could bear it no longer. In all reality, I was no more than a voyeur. I felt that I could never again film a crowd of refugees and then simply walk away, having taken their images of misery and brought them nothing. Telling the world about these things didn t bring change; in the end it made no difference. It was enough. For me at least, the war was over. But as things turned out, I was wrong. There are some things that you cannot leave behind. I went back to Africa for the first time in 1981. I had been away nearly seventeen years, and it had felt like a long time.
Until I was no longer there, I hadn t known how much Africa defined me. Growing up, I wasn t aware that the people, the light, the sounds and smells of the continent had entered me so deeply that I would never feel complete living away from it.
My political education began at a very early age. When I was only a few months old my mother, Hilda Bernstein, who was a rousing public speaker, stood as the Communist Party candidate for the Johannesburg city council. This was during the Second World War, when communism was still more or less acceptable in South Africa. She took me with her to public meetings and picked me up in mid-speech whenever I cried. This led to her being accused once of trying to get the sympathy of the voters by underhand means.
Her father - my grandfather, Simeon Schwartz - had been one of Lenin s original Bolsheviks. He had emigrated to England from Odessa in 1901, and became deeply involved in radical politics. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, he worked for the Soviets in England and was later their representative there. In 1926 he was recalled to the Soviet Union. He believed that he would be returning to his family within a year. However, the Soviets were suspicious of people who had been living in the capitalist west, and circumstances conspired against him. His family back in England were perceived as bourgeois, and although he held official positions, he was not always able to make the right contacts. In the end, despite various promises that were made to him over the years, he was unable to return to England and never saw his family again.
My grandmother, despairing of ever seeing him again, went to South Africa in the 1930s to join a sister who had gone to live there. My mother, who had grown up in London with her two sisters, went with her mother to South Africa, where she met and married my father, Rusty Bernstein, in Johannesburg. Not long after I was born, my father went to fight with the allies in Italy.
Politics was central to my parents lives. They were well-known members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC), actively involved in opposing the apartheid government. They lived a privileged, white South African existence in Johannesburg, bringing up four children, but their anti-apartheid work took place under increasingly restrictive circumstances. From the time I went to school, I was aware that my family were different from other white South Africans. We lived in white society, but our parents beliefs and unconventional ways meant that we were also on the outside of it. My parents were unconventional in other ways too. They were atheists, though both were of Jewish origin. They were also intellectuals: my father was an architect, and my mother a talented writer and artist. Our house was full of books, pictures, music and conversations about places far away, as interesting people came and went.
I was the oldest of four children. My brother, Patrick, was born when I was five, and he was followed by my sister, Frances, and much later by our younger brother, Keith, who was born in 1956. In many ways we had a charmed childhood. Our comfortable house in a leafy suburb was a clich of white suburbia, with its swimming pool, and large garden filled with fruit trees. We had two servants, two cars, two dogs and various other pets. After school, we were free to ride our bikes and roam the neighbourhood streets, visiting friends or swimming with a gang of children of all ages. Every Christmas we holidayed at the coast, and in the winter went camping or to the game reserve.
Gro