BuzzFlash Reviews

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This glorious testament to how music can literally be a liberating force is a documentary that is fascinating, informative, bittersweet and uplifting at the same time.

While "Amandla" provides the viewer with a succinct history of the barbaric Boer Apartheid regime, it's focus is on how songs of resistance, dance and non-violence provided the heady mix that eventually led to the downfall of a regime that was the American Confederacy of Africa with a slightly sanitized look to it ("repopulating" the de facto slaves in "townships").

It is a marvel how Apartheid came to an end when there was so little armed resistance to the ruling racists (although there were a smattering of guerilla forces); Nelson Mandela, jailed for decades for advocating freedom, urged the path of Gandhi -- and the people of the townships generally heeded him.

The apartheid government killed, tortured and hung blacks who sought majority rule and the end of the economic, educational and criminal justice subjugation of "non-whites." (There were whites who joined the struggle for equality, largely of British, not Dutch Calvinist, descent.) So the freedom fighters turned to poetry and most of all to music.

Music became a simultaneous act of defiance, assertion of a united community, and voice for justice. The Boer government could kill leaders and those who sought equality, but they couldn't stop people from singing.

This is an extraordinary documentary on so many levels. Its focus on music is unique and powerful.

But it also teaches us that the no one is free until we are all free; that the oppressor is a slave to his need to suppress.

And it teaches us of the nobility of the struggle to ensure that the freedom of the individual guarantees the freedom of the many.

On a side note, we were thinking, after watching this spectacular documentary, how important songs and music were to the civil rights movement in America and to the anti-Vietnam War movement. And now, the pro-Bush radio media conglomerates have largely banned songs of freedom and peace from the airwaves. We are left with 12 variations of Britney Spears.

As "Amandla" proves, never let them take away your music.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS