One performance at the Robben Island Museum and
the two Midwestern trips are still the only times the men have performed
together in public. But they have vowed to bring their music to a
wider audience, ideally performing their songs and sharing their stories
in other U.S. cities, other countries and, most importantly, withinSouth Africa.
“Youth has a way of moving on, moving fast and ignoring
their parents,” says Spitz, co-founder of Groundswell Educational
Films. “Kids in South Africa are big on MTV and American music and
their own hip hop culture. Like kids anywhere, they’re not real keen
to look back.”
Shezi, 50, lives in the cottage on Robben Island that
was once home to a prison guard. He works for the Robben Island Museum,
tracking down and filming former prisoners for the museum archives.
Sithole, 50, who previously worked as a museum guide, is now unemployed
and lives in a poor township outside Durban. Nxumalo, 49, who was
imprisoned for 13 years, lives in an upscale, formerly white-onlyDurban suburb. He works for a company that builds roads in rural areas.
Spitz
sees the men’s current situations as a microcosm of the way life has
played out in post-apartheid South Africa, where most blacks still
live in poverty and isolation. “Ordinary people in South Africa still
live under economic apartheid,” Spitz says. “Of these three guys who
fought and sacrificed years of their lives for freedom and the chance
to participate in their own country’s economy, one is a rich man,
one is unemployed and one is a cameraman.”
Spitz and Dube hope their
documentary will help educate U.S. youth about one of the world’s
more recent legendary struggles against racism and oppression. At
Chicago Academy High School, a student asks, “What did y’all do to
get put in jail,” seemingly baffled by their stories of covert military
training in neighboring African countries and charges of treason.
“We
could no longer fight with guns and spears. We had to form modern
organizations to fight white people as equals,” says Sithole. “The
tribes, which used to all be separate, united against a common enemy,
since we knew we couldn’t defeat the white people on our own.”
The
group’s recent three-week midwestern tour included visits to a handful
of elementary schools, high schools and cultural centers in Chicago
and East St. Louis, Ill., along with performances at the University
of Illinois at Chicago and St. Sabina Catholic Church on the south
side of Chicago, known for its social activism.
Asked whether Chicago,
one of the country’s most segregated cities, reminds him of the apartheid
era, Shezi declines to pass judgment. “To make a big comment like
that is difficult, because it’s like looking through a window without
seeing the other parts of the room inside,” he says.
But in regard
to East St. Louis, a 97 percent black city where 35 percent of the
population lives below the poverty line, Shezi couldn’t help but draw
a comparison. “That’s a real problem of infrastructure,” he says of
the city, where the singers visited an elementary school named after
Mandela. “It has some similarities to our situation.”
Shezi hopes
that stories about the struggle against apartheid can help inspire
young people in East St. Louis, Chicago’s west side and other disenfranchised
areas to stand up for their own rights.
“Struggle is like a flower:
If you don’t cultivate the soil, it will not bloom,” he says. “We
need to go to the schools, we need to continue this infinite process
where we educate each new generation.”