By Ryan Fortune
A Rastaman is riding the London Tube one day, minding his own business, when one of his dreadlocks appears to come loose and falls onto his shoulder. A white lady seated next to him notices the dislodged dread, assumes it’s an item of litter, and in one swift, oblivious motion, grabs it and tosses it out the train window. The Rastaman, stunned, turns to her and says in a low but commanding voice, “Put it back… Put it BACK.” Her face freezes in horror, realising her faux pas, but it's too late. The dread is gone with the wind.
At first glance, this story might seem comical — a bizarre interaction made for viral fodder. But beneath the humour lies a poignant allegory about cultural theft, privilege, and audacity. The image of a white person carelessly discarding what belongs to a Black person without understanding its value is not just an isolated incident. It’s emblematic of a long history of appropriation and erasure— a phenomenon so pervasive that I wish to give it a name: The Audacity of Caucasity.
This pattern manifests across continents and industries, but nowhere is it more glaring than in South Africa’s film industry. For decades, European-descended filmmakers have inserted themselves into the narrative of Black South Africans, co-opting their stories and presenting them through a Eurocentric lens. The result is a cinematic tradition that commodifies Black pain and resilience while conveniently avoiding any real introspection into the filmmakers’ own histories of privilege and complicity.
Take, for instance, Boesman and Lena (2000), directed by John Berry, a white American filmmaker. Based on Athol Fugard’s play, the film stars Angela Bassett and Danny Glover as two homeless characters navigating apartheid-era South Africa. While the performances are powerful and the source material compelling, the lens through which the story is told strips it of its authenticity.
Berry’s direction centres a detached, almost anthropological view of Black suffering, failing to capture the deeply personal and communal nuances of the struggle. The result feels more like a spectacle for external consumption than a genuine portrayal of lived experiences.
The list continues. Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (2005), Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema (2008), Donovan Marsh’s iNumber Number (2013), and John Barker’s recent The Umbrella Men series all exemplify the trend of Black South African stories being mediated through white filmmakers. Darrell Roodt’s extensive body of work, including Cry, the Beloved Country and Sarafina!, further underscores this imbalance.
These films, while often lauded for their artistry and storytelling, raise uncomfortable questions about authorship, power, and representation. Why are white filmmakers so often the ones to mediate Black South Africans’ stories for global audiences? Why is the lens not turned inward, exploring their own complicity in systems of oppression?
In my view, this phenomenon is a form of cinematic neo-colonization, where the tools of storytelling are wielded not to liberate, but to control narratives. It echoes the colonial impulse to extract resources from African soil — only now, the resources are stories, cultures, and lived experiences. The extraction is sanitised for international consumption, often stripped of its complexity, nuance, and radical potential.
In a postmodern context, this appropriation takes on an insidious form. Postmodernism often celebrates hybridity, fluidity, and the deconstruction of boundaries. While this can be liberating, it also provides a convenient smokescreen for appropriation. Under the guise of collaboration and shared humanity, dominant groups appropriate the stories of the marginalised, presenting them as universal truths while erasing the specificities of the oppressed. This creates a veneer of inclusivity while perpetuating structural inequalities.
The South African film industry’s reliance on white directors and producers to tell Black stories reflects a reluctance to relinquish control over the narrative. It’s a way of maintaining dominance in a space that should rightfully belong to Black storytellers.
This is not to say that white filmmakers cannot or should not engage with stories of Black South Africans. The issue lies in the disproportionate access, resources, and platforms granted to them compared to Black filmmakers. It’s about the power dynamics that allow some voices to be amplified while others are silenced.
Stories are not just entertainment; they are a means of shaping reality. Who tells a story determines whose perspective is validated, whose experiences are deemed important, and whose histories are remembered. In the context of South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid looms large, storytelling is a battleground for cultural and political power.
When white filmmakers dominate the narrative landscape, they often perpetuate a distorted view of Black life. Even well-intentioned projects can fall into the trap of poverty porn, reducing complex human beings to symbols of suffering and resilience. This framing not only dehumanizes Black subjects but also reinforces the saviour complex of white audiences, who are invited to empathise without confronting their own roles in perpetuating systemic injustice.
Moreover, these films often fail to challenge the structural conditions that give rise to the stories they depict. By focusing on individual struggles and redemptive arcs, they divert attention from the broader systems of oppression that sustain inequality. This allows white filmmakers and audiences to pat themselves on the back for their awareness while avoiding any meaningful engagement with the root causes of the issues at hand.
To address this imbalance, the South African film industry must prioritise Black voices in storytelling. This means providing resources, training, and platforms for Black filmmakers to tell their own stories, on their own terms. It also means challenging the gatekeepers of the industry who perpetuate the status quo, whether through funding decisions, distribution networks, or critical acclaim.
White filmmakers, for their part, must reckon with their own positionality. Rather than always appropriating the stories of Black South Africans, they should turn the camera on themselves, to explore their own histories, privileges, and complicities. Instead of exoticised portrayals of the Other, let's see what granny and grandpa were doing back in the good old bad old days.
In this way, we might begin to have more honest conversations about the realities of South Africa today.
Fortune is a techno-realist who helps businesses adapt to new digital innovations. He can be contacted at https://topmate.io/ ryan_fortune