/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CINEMA: US Documentary Examines Non-Violent Resistance

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ihsan Bouabid

NEW YORK, Nov 30 1999 (IPS) - Conflict mars the outlook for many regions of the world in the countdown to the new millennium so a new documentary movie is particularly timely in showing how, earlier this century, ordinary people used non-violent methods against occupying armies, tyrants and discriminatory rulers.

“A Force More Powerful: a Century of Non-Violent Conflict” traces the history of Mohandas Gandhi’s peaceful revolt against the British in South Africa and India; the integration of the Nashville lunch counters in the United States and the protests against apartheid in South Africa.

Gandhi first organised non-violent action to fight for the rights of Indians in South Africa in 1905 and later honed these skills when he took the leadeship of the independence movement in his home country, India. He created a strategy of political engagement that crossed all language and ethnic barriers.

This strategy was used successfully by the US civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid fight in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland and against the military rulers of Burma and others around the world.

A gala premiere of “A Force more Powerful…” was held in New York last week.

Hosted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in cooperation with the Asia Society, it was attended by some of the latter-day heroes of non-violent movements.

The educational purpose of the movie is supported by UNESCO within the framework of the International Year of a Culture of Peace (2000) and the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010).

The documentary, narrated by actor Ben Kingsley the star Gandhi in the 1982 Academy Award winning movie about the life of the father of non-violent resistance, also opened in Los Angeles last week will be released in Chicago and Washington D.C on Dec.17.

Produced and Directed by Steve York and Peter Ackerman, the film starts with the historic salt tax protest march and civil disobedience leaded by Gandhi. “As England lost America over tea, so it lost India over salt,” the movie notes.

The film uses archives images and interviews with protagonists and witnesses of the events, completed by comments from scholars.

Those interviewed included Diane Nash, the student whose line of inquiry compelled then-governor of Tennessee Buford Ellington to admit that segregation was wrong; Narayan Desai, the son of Gandhi’s Secretary and the Archbishop of Johannesburg, Desmond Tutu.

The Rev. James Lawson Jr, one of the principal architects of the American Civil Rights Movement and an associate of Martin Luther King Jr. is featured in the Nashville segment of a ” Force More Powerful….”

He spent 14 months in prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces during the Korean War. On his parole in 1953, he travelled to Nagpur, India as a Methodist missionary and there, studied Gandhi’s techniques of non-violent resistance.

When he returned to the United States, Lawson conducted workshops on non-violence and organized students in the Nashville sit-in movement to force an end to discriminatory city and state legislation against black people.

The movie takes the viewer to the heart of the movement, showing how students learned in the workshops how to control themselves and not react to violence by violence, even when they were insulted, beaten and arrested.

Martin King Jr. referred to the Nashville action as “the model of the movement to-date” calling Lawson the “leading non-violence theorist in the world.”

The third and last segment of the documentary follows the actions lead by Mkhuseli Jack, raised in the farm country of South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

Back in the 1970’s he had never heard of Nelson Mandela or the African National Congress (ANC) until he turned 17 and moved to the industrial city of Port Elizabeth. From the moment he realized that the country’s apartheid “pass” laws prevented him from enrolling in a city high school, he began to fight back.

He became a founding member of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), which quickly spread to other cities. Three years later, he founded and became president of the Port Elizabeth Youth Congress.

Convinced that apartheid would not be defeated through armed revolution and that organizational strength would be a critical weapon in the conflict, he became deeply involved in the emerging civic movement and played a key role in organizing strikes, boycotts and other grassroots actions against the white regime.

The documentary shows in particular the highly successful black consumer boycotts in Port Elizabeth that began in the mid 1980s when the black majority came to realize that its economic clout could be used to enlist South African business support in the fight against apartheid.

“Our buying power is going to be the thing that is going to decide the future of our country,” said Mkhuseli before his final arrest in August 1986 after which he spent three and half years in jail without trial or charges.

“Apartheid confronted me head on,” commented Mkhuseli who attended the documentary’s New York premiere. He added that the choice of non-violence is a tough one but that, at the end of the road, that’s the one that has the most lasting effects on people.

“Being in the presence of powerful people was the best part of making the film. I’m not talking about the kind of power we associate with presidents or prime ministers. And I don’t think it has much to do with charisma,” stressed Steve York at the premiere.

York, who won numerous awards for different television documentaries he produced in the 90s, said that he was amazed at what James Lawson at the age of 30, and Mkhuseli at the age of 27 were able to accomplish.

“No one thought they were powerful. Even today, they are not considered powerful. But they understood the power of ideas. They’re thoughtful people who stepped forward when they believed they had ideas that could make a difference,” underlined York.

Archbishop Tutu, whose own fight against apartheid won him the Nobel Peace Prize, noted in one interview in the documentary that some people believed an armed struggle was the thing most feared by a dictator or a tyrant.

But in fact, this is not the case, Tutu said. “It is when people decide they want to be free, when they have made up their minds to that, there is nothing that can stop them.”