Word: mandela
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...know how many South Africans feel about the arrival in Cape Town of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon to shoot a Clint Eastwood movie about South Africa's 1995 Rugby World Cup victory over the New Zealand All Blacks. It's not that Freeman (playing President Nelson Mandela) or Damon (who stars as Springbok captain Francois Pienaar) will do a bad job. South African actors Vosloo (The Mummy) and Chweneyagae (the Oscar-winning Tsotsi) wouldn't either. It's just a little strange that South Africa's most important stories are so often told by foreigners. "Imagine how the Americans...
...Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in the mid- to late '90s, and Hilary Swank starred as an attorney representing a black South African political activist seeking amnesty in Red Dust. Then came Catch a Fire (terrorism during apartheid) with Tim Robbins in 2006 and Goodbye Bafana (the friendship between Mandela and his white prison guard) with Joseph Fiennes in 2007. This year brings Endgame, a thriller about the secret talks to end apartheid starring William Hurt and Jonny Lee Miller. In February, as Ving Rhames was wrapping Master Harold . . .and the Boys - a film about the relationship between a white...
...school for fear of robbery, or worse. The South African Medical Journal noted Mthatha's murder rate was 133 per 100,000 in 2005, twice as high as that in Colombia, and nearly three times the South African average. Walls and streetlights in the town's main drag, Nelson Mandela Drive, are plastered with posters offering "Safe Abortion, Same Day," "Quick and Safe Abortion, 3 Hours," even a free lottery ticket with every "100% guarantee, 2-hour" procedure. Nobu Sipoka, director of the Mthatha Child Abuse Resource Center, says there is no precise data on the incidence of child rape...
South Africa can take comfort from the knowledge that even its greatest leader had trouble making the transition from revolutionary to democrat. In office, Mandela expressed admiration for autocrats like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and in his farewell speech to the ANC party conference in 1997 claimed South Africa's violent crime was part of a "counter-revolution" engineered by pro-apartheid whites "to render the country ungovernable." But in retirement, Mandela rediscovered his inner democrat, speaking out against tyranny, wherever he found it - even in his own party. In March 2007, at the funeral of Adelaide Tambo, wife...
...Mandela's successors would do well to remember that it was the democrat in him, not the revolutionary, which made him the greatest among them...