IN MY WORDS | Goodbye Bafana

1. In general, what did you like and what did you dislike about the film?

I'm starting with the disliking first. It was a nice movie, but I couldn't stop thinking about how legitimate it was. Since Mandela's biographer himself said that this narration wasn't as geniune as it claims to be plus the fact that the film was so surreal makes me also doubt the authenticity of the book written by James Gregory in which it is based, this kills a great part of the essence the movie offers.

Now, if I put that legitness drama to the sidelines, I completely enjoyed the story and felt really invested into the plot. 

Also, I liked the characters, how they're portrayed and especially their development. We can  see how Gregory goes from someone that is completely loyal to the brutality of the apartheid regime to someone that knows that things can be better for everybody alongside his family and was really regretful about the things he did (for example, ''sending people to their deaths''). 

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom put things from the point of view of the ANC, but seeing the white people perspective is truly interesting as well, especially from someone like Gregory that grew up being close to black kids and even knew the Xhusa language, which plays a essential role in his life as a prison guard and his growth as a person.


2. Who was the character you liked the most and the character you liked the least in the film? Why?

Even though it might be controversial, I’m trying to put the whole “is this authentic or not” discussion away for this part.

Now that I clarified that, I could say that my favorite character is non other than James Gregory, I repeat, he’s my favorite as a fictional  character, even when he might not be a honest human being with what he wrote on his book.

So what I liked about Gregory is his evolution in ideals and principles. At first, he even thinks the Freedom Charter is a terrorist letter that praises the extermination of the whites, until he reads it (even when it was a forbidden document) and comprehend the initiative of Mandela and his group, to the point of admiring Madiba and ensuring his well-being.

This transformation from an ignorant, brain washed by the apartheid system to somebody with his own reasoning of what’s good for his country. The Freedom Charter practically sets his mind free, which it’s of course helped by his special childhood and the interactions with his family. That’s what got me hooked to the Gregory character.

With that said, I honestly kinda disliked how Winnie Mandela its represented, this mainly because of the contrast with his Long Walk to Freedom character, in this film she’s showed like a weak woman who is not astute  at all, which is totally contrary to what I knew about her.


3. How do the versions of James Gregory, Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela compare between Goodbye Bafana and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom? 

In Mandela: LWF Gregory is barely showed and we only get to look his “good  and polite side” at a minor scale. Obviously he’s not as developed as in Goodbye Bafana, because he was clearly a minor character, which may speak major things about Gregory’s true irrelevant role in Madiba’s life (I couldn’t stop myself for going into the legitimacy discussion again).

Speaking about Nelson Mandela, in Goodbye Bafana he’s showed mostly as a support character, but not as an irrelevant at all. He’s still key to the story, after all the great part of the events that the rest of the character experience trough out the movie are caused by Madiba. He’s different to his Mandela: LWF by the fact we don’t get to observe his emotional side, but he’s still depicted as a man to look up to.

I didn’t like at all the way Winnie, one of my favorite characters from Mandela: LWF, it’s made to look like as a dependent and weak woman , she’s not developed at all or given any peculiarities. The little time she gets in screen she’s showed as an unintelligent person, especially in the segments where she visits Nelson, where she’s not capable of following the simple orders of not speaking politics or Xhusa, orders that she does follows in a clever way.