Abstract
FOOLS (1998) has the distinction of being the first postapartheid film to be directed by a black South African, Ramadan Suleman. This fact alone links it, somewhat nebulously, to the celebration of things “first,” that gripped South Africa’s public imagination from the early to mid-1990s: first black president, first racially inclusive cabinet, first black Miss South Africa, and so forth. These achievements are necessarily suffused with significance due to the historically overdetermining denial of opportunities to black South Africans. Its claim to fame, as a film that virtually inaugurated black filmmakers’ assumption of principal roles in cinema production post-1994, aligns Fools with the greater realization of the unconditional reentry of blacks into South Africa’s public life. Even so, as an adaptation of the Noma awardwinning novella of the same name, the film realizes its pioneering status not through a celebration of the democratic moment of 1994, but by intervening, through a retrospective gesture, into the public engagements on gender relations. The novella (1983) by academic, critic, and author Njabulo Ndebele, is set in South Africa in 1966. This chapter discusses how from its inception, production, and extended public life, Fools stimulated critical engagements on gender relations particularly in relation to black identity. Two key concerns inform the chapter’s inquiry. The first concern is about the status of the problematic of gender relations in public debates that are engendered through the film.
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Notes
Scholar and activist, Anthony O’Brien, also finds the choice of the period in the screenplay interesting because “there is no hint of the ANC or the 198 Notes transition—which thus avoids any direct theorizing or evaluation of the transition.” O’Brien, Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 270.
See Suleman’s original comments—also quoted in the course of this chapter— in Nwachuku F. Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 293.
For an extended discussion about gender in the ANC, see Natasha Erlank, “ANC Positions on Gender”, 1994–2004, Politikon 32: 2 (November 2005): 195–215.
See also Hassim and Gouws, “Redefining the Public Space: Women’s Organizations, Gender Consciousness and Civil Society in South Africa,” Politikon 25: 2 (1998): 53–76.
See also Christophe Botteon, Interview with Ramadan Suleman, Cinéma no. 590 (1997): 21–22.
Ibid. Note the resonances with Ndebele. Ndebele bemoaned the entrapment of South African literature in political stereotypes that could not go beyond black and white oppositionality. Accordingly, mere acceptance of political alliances or enmity as the last word in appreciating society is a ground for oversimplifications. For Ndebele, such inadequacies emanate from “anthropological approaches that see township society as debased society. Under such conditions, it is easy for sloganeering, defined as superficial thinking, to develop. The psychology of the slogan, in these circumstances, is the psychology of intellectual powerlessness.” See Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (Johannesburg: COSAW, 1991). See also Stefan Helgesson, Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2000). The argument for the influence of Ndebele’s critical work in the film is most explicit in O’Brien’s work. See O’Brien, Against Normalization, 267.
Note the consistency with Edward Said’s argument, namely that “intellectuals belong on the same side with the weak … the small people, small states”. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage Press, 1994) 17.
See also Magogodi, “Sexuality, Power and the Black Body in ‘Mapantsula’ and ‘Fools’”, in Balseiro and Masilela, To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa (Michigan, NJ: Wayne State University Press, 2003) 193.
See also Lindiwe Dovey, “African Film Adaptation of Literature: Mimesis and the Critique of Violence”( PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2005c), 128.
See also Barlet, African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze (trans. Chris Turner), (London, New York: Zed Books, 2000), 251.
Dovey draws on the concept of “devocalization” from Gerard Genette, by which he means roughly the loss of powers of speech, or being rendered mute. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation Trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 290.
This is perhaps an autocritique since Magogodi has also studied the film in light of its representation of black identity. In this work, Magogodi argues that Fools transcends homogenizing strategies and instead reveals and incisive study of black or African identities. For him, Fools contested the colonial and apartheid imaginary of black identity, by imagining the black body differently. For this work, see Magogodi, “Refiguring the Body,” Theatre Research International 27, (2002), 243–258.
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© 2013 Litheko Modisane
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Modisane, L. (2013). Gender in the New Nation: Fools (1998). In: South Africa’s Renegade Reels. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027030_5
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