Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Saw a Masterpiece theatre movie last night: Endgame. The beginning of the end of apartheid. Michael Young, head of communications for Consolidated Goldfields, was the unlikely and successful convenor of talks between the African National Congress and the South African elite. You could read a bit about him here. His role was crucial and yet he managed, as one of the delegates to the talks said, “To keep himself invisible.”
This was a movie with little overt action, a modest movie for the most part, but it moved me. There is something deep in my soul that gets touched when people struggle in an authentic way for justice. It is not easy. It has many traps. But the results are so powerful.
The main characters, the ANC representative in the talks, Thabo Mbeki, (top) and an Afrikaner Professor of Philosophy, Willie Esterhuyser, (bottom) were played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and William Hurt. Their understated acting made the change they wrought in their country, and in themselves, more poignant. Mbeki replaced Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa and Esterhuyser became one of his principal advisers.
A squib at the end of the movie noted that a similar process used in these talks had been pushed forward in Irish-British talks about the troubles and in the instance of Hammas and Israel.
