Nelson Mandela: The Power of a Man, the Power of Film

Nelson Mandela died this week at the age of 95. Opponent of Apartheid, prisoner, president of South America. Throughout his life, he downplayed the idea that he was any kind of saint, and, at his death, journalists who covered him, surprisingly, given the occasion, agreed with him. But his courage, his ability to peaceably work with those who had put him in prison to turn South Africa in to what his opponents feared most, a multiracially-united country, cannot be denied.

I only know of one Nelson Mandela story. I heard it when I was covering a conference on film and intellectual property at the Motion Picture Association of America. The actor Will Smith was a featured speaker, and he spoke on the power of film. He said that he had met Mandela, and, knowing that Smith was a film actor, Mandela told him this story. During his 27 years in prison, a handful of times, he was allowed to join the other prisoners in seeing a film. He said that one day the film was In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier as a black Philadelphia detective named Virgil Tibbs who is forced to help Gillespie,  a white southern sheriff played by Rod Steiger, solve a murder. At the time, the film was a dozen years old.

In one scene, Tibbs is questioning Eric Endicott, a bigoted white plantation owner, played by Larry Gates. Taking offense at Tibbs' questions, Endicott slaps Tibbs, who immediately slaps him back. Sheriff Gillespie is shocked. Endicott sayts, "There was a time when I could have had you shot."

When the film was shown to Mandela and the other prisoners, the prison officials didn't want to have them see a scene in which a black man slaps a white man, and so they cut the scene out with a scissors. It was clear that something had been cut out. The film jumped abruptly. The prisoners whispered to each other, "What could have been in that scene?" Those who were allowed visitors, asked them, :"Did you see that movie? What was in that scene?" Finally, someone told them, and the word spread throughout the prison. Mandela told Smith that there was such excitement in the prison that somewhere, a movie showing such a scene could be made.

The story says a lot about the horror of apartheid, the power of film, and the power of Mandella who turned the situation in South Africa from that to a more democratic country.

Copyright 2013 by John T. Aquino