The story Sarafina is about a young girl living in one of the designated black townships of South Africa called Soweto. Set in the midst of the apartheid struggle, the movie is strongly influenced by the powerful teachings of Mary Masumbuka played by American actress Whoopi Goldberg. In the story, Mary teaches government-line history to her students, but interjects it with the real truth about those Great Moments in Afrikaner History. She teaches her students historical truths not found in the government approved texts.
Throughout the movie one would see how Goldberg’s character Mary focuses on uncovering the white lies in her government oriented textbooks and how this influences the lead character Sarafina. She learns of treasuries and one would pick up a few lines in the movie that suggest that the government has informers and puppets that have cruel intentions towards Sarafina all her age mates. In the movie there scenes that suggest how much informers and puppets everywhere including the police are just itching to roll out the German shepherds, tear gas and armored cars.
Sarafina observes her friends, many of them openly rebelling against the government regime, and the opinions of Mary, she tries to come to conclusions about what is right, and what is the best way to try and obtain freedom. The story does not only focus on the struggle of the apartheid regime, some aspects of it capture female audiences specifically because part of the story is based around romantic genre traits. In the movie, Sarafina has a love interest by the name of crocodile. This person is introduced thirty minutes into the movie and the chemistry between Sarafina and this character builds up through the movie. The value of this character to Sarafina is shown so much that audience get emotional and sad in the scene where crocodile is killed by the white soldiers.
This story is a beautiful story based on the real children's resistance movement in Soweto in the mid-1970s, unleashes images of now-archetypal facets of South African political life: the funerals, the stone-throwing youths and so forth. The movie also shows how song-and-dance call to defeat injustice. Imagine an African Doris Day waking up in a police state, singing about it (to mbaqanga music), then learning that even the innocent get their heads bashed in.
Director Darrell James Roodt offers some well-choreographed, if modestly budgeted moments. There's something undeniably stirring about entire groups of black children in preppie school uniform doing "West Side Story" routines against the dusty shantyscape. Khumalo is extremely appealing. When she speaks daily to and deifies a photograph of black leader Nelson Mandela, then in musical fantasy scenes imagines herself as him, the scenes work primarily because of her in-built naivete.
The trouble is, in a movie about South Africa, what possible happy ending could Khumalo's own story conclude with? Musicals end happily after all, and people aren't linking hands across the Transvaal yet. The movie dips into the Doris Day genre again. Battle-weary Khumalo's final revelation is not that resistance is futile, or that Mandela's photograph is actually just a photograph. It's that brutal police massacres may come and go, but Mom is a girl's best friend.
Although criticised by others for not having a definite hard and fast conclusion, the film does a wonderful job of showing the complexities of what is often presented by the media as a simple situation. Sarafina is a girl who, like many of us, cannot come to her own conclusion as to what is right and wrong. Unlike most movies, the writer does not do the job of making our minds up for us.
This movie does contain a great deal of violence, and is not suitable for younger children. However, the violence, in my opinion, is not gratuitous but a portrayal of the realities that took place during the apartheid era.
There is one fatal flaw in the film. At one point a gang of black kids, including Sarafina, is involved in the brutal murder of a black policeman. After setting the live man on fire, they watched him burn to death. Yet they were never directly punished for this murder, and instead were punished for their oppression of the white regime. We know that the soldiers murdering schoolchildren are wrong, but the film seems to justify the actions of the youths murdering because the policeman was an informant to the whites. Murder is murder, and this lack of justice is a tragic decision in the screenplay.
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