Into the Fire

Incendiary figure: Derek Luke plays South African freedom fighter Patrick Chamusso in the Phillip Noyce film Catch a Fire. (Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis)

South Africa’s Secunda Oil Refinery was, during the apartheid years, the regime’s dark, smoking heart. The massive plant stood in the middle of the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga), spewing clouds of stinking pollutants into the air. Secunda’s towering central smokestack was the government’s middle finger, held up to apartheid’s opponents at home and abroad. It said: “We don’t need you.” The plant was a paragon of industrial efficiency, turning coal into gasoline in the years when international sanctions severely curtailed oil (and other) imports into the country. For the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies, to strike Secunda was to strike at the very soul of the regime.

Phillip Noyce’s new thriller, Catch a Fire, depicts the story of real-life ANC freedom fighter Patrick Chamusso (played by American actor Derek Luke) and his attempt to single-handedly blow up this vital cog in the apartheid machinery. Chamusso was pushed in the mid-’80s to join the ANC’s armed wing, Unkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) — “MK” for short — after he was falsely accused of attempting to sabotage the plant. (He was a foreman at Secunda, and completely apolitical up to that point.) Chamusso was viciously tortured, his wife was badly beaten, his career destroyed and his life left in tatters. Chamusso felt he had no choice: he had to fight.

I met the principals behind Catch a Fire during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Noyce is a towering, shambling man. A competent Hollywood action filmmaker — he directed Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger — Noyce has recently turned to more political subject matter. Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) was an indictment of the Australian government’s aboriginal assimilation programs, while The Quiet American (also 2002) was a harsh critique of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam and beyond.

Noyce’s latest picture was written and produced by South African-born, U.K.-based sisters Shawn and Robyn Slovo. To white South Africans during apartheid, the name “Slovo” was as notorious as “Mandela.” Joe Slovo was the white firebrand leader of the South African Communist Party, as well as a co-founder of MK. “Uncle Joe,” as he was known, could have lived a life of white, middle-class privilege. Instead, he chose exile, deprivation and danger. The murder of his first wife, Ruth First, by the South African regime’s Special Branch was depicted in the film A World Apart (1988), which was scripted by his daughter, Shawn Slovo.

Shawn Slovo’s script for Catch a Fire was sparked by Joe himself. “In the early ’90s, Joe said that if you’re going to tell a story [of the struggle], you must tell the story of Chamusso,” says Shawn. “He was an ordinary working man. You don’t tell the story of Mandela or [current South African president Thabo] Mbeki, you tell the story of the basis of support for these people — men like Chamusso.”

Director Phillip Noyce. (Steve Carty/CBC)

“I read [the script] and I realized that this was a story of an unlikely hero,” says Noyce. “His life story was also the life story of 390 years of colonial South Africa — with 10 years of a glorious ending. In fact, the body of the film is an excuse for a glorious ending.” In this respect, the film mirrors the historical narrative of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the series of post-apartheid hearings in South Africa that gathered testimony from both the victims and the perpetrators of atrocities. The commission had the authority to grant amnesty to the guilty in exchange for truth. Led by Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, these hearings were a massive act of national forgiveness. Not everyone agrees with their outcome, but as Shawn Slovo puts it, “the country never descended into all-out war — a war we were promised.”

“South Africans worked out conflict resolution more successfully than any nation in history,” says Noyce. “Today, I think, we really need a story like [Chamusso’s]. Let’s face it: our leaders are only leading us toward division, retribution and conflict — all those things South Africans have left behind.”

There are many divisions emerging in post-apartheid South Africa — white and black the least among them. Catch a Fire occasionally reflects Noyce’s rose-coloured viewpoint. There is a current streak of historical revisionism that positions MK as a vaunted fighting force, when it was little more than a rag-tag hobby army loosely supplied by the Soviets and the Cubans. Although it doesn’t depict the exiled ANC as a military machine, Catch a Fire reinterprets MK as a cozy brotherhood, the frontline in the battle against the regime.

When I ask the filmmakers about this, Shawn Slovo says, “Well, I think [MK] was one of the arms in the fight against apartheid — an incredibly important one. It destabilized — in that way it was of paramount importance. But there was never a war.”

“They were a symbol of resistance,” says Robyn. “They did more than that, too — they infiltrated the townships, and showed people how to infiltrate at the grass roots.”

Noyce claims that he did not try to glorify the MK. “This is the story of a man who is an utter failure in his mission — he does not blow up anything but a water pipe. So, we just tried to tell it how it was.”

Chamusso’s act of desperate courage came half a decade before the apartheid regime ended. In the years that followed, years characterized by stunning acts of forgiveness and an outburst of violent crime, Chamusso was released from political incarceration and men like Joe Slovo returned to the country from exile. In 1995, after so many years on the run and many stretches of ill health, Uncle Joe died. Nelson Mandela’s famous eulogy at his funeral was a moving tribute to an unrelenting revolutionary.

Catch a Fire ends in the present day, with handicam footage of Chamusso playing soccer with the kids at the foster home he now runs, enjoying the freedoms that he and people like Slovo fought so hard to establish. As for Secunda, it still burns day and night, now a symbol of Africa’s most powerful industrial economy, making billionaires out of blacks and whites alike.

Catch a Fire opens Oct. 27 across Canada.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer. His first book, Ja, No, Man!: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa, will be published by Penguin in 2007.

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