GOODBYE BAFANA

PARAMOUNT

RELEASED 11 May 2007

Was it really in 1990 that Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, on that poetically named ‘long walk home’?

It’s 1968 in South Africa and James Gregory (Joseph Fiennes) is a typical white Afrikaner racist, which seems a bit odd as he grew up on a farm speaking Xhosa and playing with black children. His language skills makes him the ideal choice to become the warder in charge of Mandela and his comrades on Robben Island. Gregory spends the next twenty-two years in Mandela’s company until his eventual release. 

While ‘Goodbye Bafana’ quite competently handles it’s material concerning Gregory and his family (realising over many years that it’s ‘bad to be racist’), you don’t find much out about Mandela himself, or more importantly what South Africa was really like in those years of confinement. It’s only in the last half an hour of the film that you see any real conversation between Gregory and Mandela. I realise that perhaps there wasn’t much ‘chit-chat’ due to the strict prison regime, so therefore the first 90 minutes seemed like a golden opportunity to me to get onto the mainland and see what the Apartheid struggle was about. The massacre in Soweto of ‘76 was mentioned but not shown. Anything of importance between ‘68-‘90 certainly wasn’t taking place on Robben Island.

Joseph Fiennes was good as Gregory, displaying a suitably convincing accent, but I just couldn’t look at Dennis Haysbert and see him as Mandela. His performance was fine but I kept asking myself why is the American President in jail, and where is Jack Bauer? Who is this big imposing man and where is the slight, twinkly-eyed Mandela we all know? I think the film-makers really made a mistake not casting an unknown.

TWO OUT OF FIVE