PG | 2h 37min | Drama | 1987
Producer-director Richard Attenborough’s biopic is about two South African men, one black, one white, who together resisted the 1970s apartheid.
Editor of The Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) seeks out black campaigner against apartheid Steve Biko (Denzel Washington). Does Biko hate whites, as state propaganda and Woods’s editorials have suggested? Woods figures he knows the truth. Alongside Biko, he learns that it’s more nuanced than he imagines.
A New South Africa
Biko does have white friends and fans. He’s building “a South Africa for equals, black or white.” He reassures fearful white authorities, “We’re just as weak and human as you are.” But he won’t tolerate condescension. Equally, he acknowledges inhumanity among his consistently deprived people, “So desperate … they’ll beat a kid bloody if he had five rand.”
Biko’s friendship with Woods matures into allyship, amplified through Woods’s gutsy journalism that renders both men enemies of the state. When 30-year-old Biko is arrested, tortured (offscreen) and dies in custody, Woods doubles down, enduring imprisonment and severe restrictions on his movements. At great further risk to his wife Wendy (Penelope Wilton) and their children, he writes a book on Biko. Then, cornered by state oppression, he tries to smuggle his manuscript, himself, and his family out of the country so the world can learn of Biko’s legacy and support it.
Flashbacks depict Biko’s wit and wisdom, navigating an oppressive police, legal, and judicial system, and the price he and his people pay for peaceful civil disobedience. The charismatic Washington’s disappearance from the screen about the halfway mark robs the film of much of its draw, but Attenborough wants to also foreground how crucial brave, enlightened whites were, to Biko’s impact.
The film argues, convincingly, that Biko wouldn’t have had half the impact he did if it weren’t for the heroism and sacrifice of several whites who helped get Biko’s story out. If oppression had something to do with whiteness, not inhumanity in some humans, whites within and outside South Africa wouldn’t have come to loathe and fight apartheid as they did.
Shared Humanity
Biko explains the ignominy of a minority unjustly, cruelly lording it over the majority. For perspective, consider this: South Africa’s whites, comprising 8 percent of their population, are a slightly smaller minority than America’s blacks, comprising 14 percent of the U.S. population.
World war horrors saw totalitarian states weaponizing tanks and trucks against citizens. But they were still wartime symbols of state terror. Here, the bulldozer is unique: a peacetime symbol of state terror. Attenborough’s first scene provides vital context, depicting a state police bulldozer razing a black slum in Cape Town; a raid allegedly in the interest of public health that is actually a sign of totalitarianism.
