The Strictly star returns to the township near Pretoria where he grew up, bringing a kind, positive touch to the issues of racial injustice that leave a chill in the air.
Celebrity travelogue: We’ve all noticed too much, so we know the shape. Cute drone shots and adorable animated maps give us a number of places where other attractive people are greeted and welcomed, while the places and their stories are also summarized shortly and frivolous conclusions are drawn about entire countries with a smile. Oti Mabuse: My South Africa (BBC One) has many ticks and gender clichés but, because of where we are and who we are with, their comfort is misleading.
Mabuse is a professional ballroom dancer who won Strictly Come Dancing in 2019 with Kelvin Fletcher and went on to be part of one of the show’s greatest glories by repeating the feat with Bill Bailey the following year. So my South Africa is what you might call an “it’s there” documentary, in which an elite athlete or artist – either at the same time, in Mabuse’s case – returns to his origins. There he was born, there he discovered that he can do whatever you want. They know what they do, that’s where they won their first trophy.
Then, we poke our heads into the small space where Mabuse and her older sisters lived when they were children, and we see the big door he passed through to sneak out and see his friends. We are at the stall where he sold flowers to earn money for dance contests; Her godmother still runs her, just as her mother still runs a local nursery. Now we are in the theater where some first dance awards have been claimed, where Mabuse looks at old video images with a pill, another widely used motif of reminiscence shows. .
As she searches for herself as a child artist, Mabuse realizes that she and her husband are the only young black men on the dance floor. The fact that this did not happen to her at that time indicates the very fast era in which she grew up. was born in 1990, the year South Africa took significant steps to end apartheid, and the film becomes a meditation on the lives of black South Africans of this generation: the first to be raised through a new hope, like closed doors. open. But getting older means adapting fiercely to the awareness of the injustices suffered by their parents and grandparents, especially since many old inequalities persist.
As the film expands to make South Africa its subject throughout Mabuse itself, the superficial blurring of the celebrity’s travelogue format produces bizarre results. There, while her parents were afraid to get out of the car, she visits an ostrich farm crisscrossed by a large white couple. “These are the most giant flightless birds in the world; they can run up to 80 kilometers per hour,” the wife explains, informatively, before the husband provides Mabuse with a chick to pet. Mabuse then mentions the crusade to mitigate the inequality of a small white minority that owns a large majority of South African land, by returning assets stolen during apartheid. Because the moment is fleeting and the funny smiles of the documentary are maintained, the sudden bleeding in the air is slightly noticeable. But there it is.
When a series of celebrations in which Mabuse warmly joins the madness of the Apopian dance on social media is followed minutes later by a solemn holiday to see Nelson Mandela’s mobile phone on Robben Island, My South Africa begins to include how television, with its ability to stumble, and low. Opposite front to each other, and their ability to present one thing disguised as another, can teach like no other medium. With the utmost respect for Strictly Come Dancing’s audience, such a large fan base can engage the strange user who wouldn’t do it regularly. They are looking for a documentary about the enduring trauma and deep political legacies of apartheid, but who will pay attention to what they think is a lighthearted film through this dancer they love?By the end of My South Africa, you will have an understanding of the nation’s painful racial disorders that does not go into detail, but ensures that all major issues are firmly emphasized.
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The film’s toughest scenes involve Mabuse learning more about what his older parents went through: his grandparents were forcibly displaced by the government in the 1960s; his mother, Dudu, participated in the Soweto student uprising in 1976 before having children and embarking on the long task of maximizing their talents to give them a better life. When Dudu’s youngest daughter was nevertheless holding a glitter ball thousands of miles away, it was the result of great work, sacrifice, bravery, and terribly delayed political change. Oti Mabuse’s ability to remain gentle has been hard-won.