Season 1
The Glow of White Women is a South African documentary film written by Yunus Vally and produced by Little Bird which looks at white women in the Dark Continent and focuses on the forbidden sexual desires of blacks and whites under Apartheid.
The documentary originally aired at the Tri-Continental Film Festival on 13 September, 2007. It is 78 minutes long.
The Glow of White Women aired for the first time on South African television on SABC1 on Tuesday 22 April 2008, at 21h00.
Synopsis
Born and raised in Nelspruit, a deeply racist town in provincial South Africa, Yunus Vally was raised in a Muslim family, attending mosque five times daily and hoping to reach paradise one day.
Raised under a system which proclaimed that white is beautiful, Yunus was convinced that the promised virgins of paradise would all be white.
The film is put together using images from vintage magazines, the covers of pulp novels, anatomical drawings and family photographs, as well as archive news footage, South African tourism promotional films and commercials for skin whitening creams.
This fast-paced succession of images is matched by a sound track incorporating everything from Cole Porter to a reinterpreted version of the Marie Osmond hit Paper Roses.
Vally traces a path through his life which leads from his early fantasies about the lure of white women pictured in magazines to his obsession with Anneline Kriel, Miss South Africa and Miss World in 1974.
A decade later, in 1984, the year South Africa repealed the Immorality Act (which forbade sexual relations between the races) Yunus Vally got himself to Yeoville, Johannesburg – a place of sexual and political freethinkers and declared himself a Trotskyite.
"You had to be clever, radical, brilliant and the white girls would come running", he says.
Interviewees include Evita Bezuidenhout, the radical drag queen who will be running for president of South Africa in 2009; Charlene Smith, the South African journalist who entered into a public debate with President Mbeki over black male sexuality after she was raped at knifepoint in her own home and – most illuminatingly – Yunus Vally’s former white lovers.
Although it’s a highly personal take Yunus Vally’s story provides a snapshot of how a whole generation of South Africans – both black and white – have been shaped by the past and the pull it still has on their present.
Background
In the world of Nelspruit, with its rigid Afrikaans rule, white women were equally unattainable in the flesh.
To encounter white beauty was to do so furtively and voyeuristically: stolen glances on the street while being sure to keep one’s distance; the well-thumbed pages of magazines printed for white consumption; or the billboards and advertisements for corsetry and bridal dresses that lined shop windows in the more affluent parts of town.
"The only time we could even get close to a white woman was in the foyer of the Plaza, during the interval, when we would crowd together, buying Simba chips, and hope to rub up against those girls," says Vally.
The film also explores the period after 1984, marking the repeal of the notorious Immorality Act, the law that forbade sexual relations between the races.
The same year Yunus left Nelspruit and boyhood behind and traveled to Johannesburg – to Yeoville more specifically – a hotbed of political activism, promiscuity, radical thought, and above all, mixed-race relationships.
Yeoville in the 80’s was an exciting and dangerous place to be. It marked Yunus’s transformation as a Trotskyite, and his first taste of relationships with white women.
"By the mid-Eighties many young South African activists were getting involved in politics in order to get a good lay. You had to be clever, radical, brilliant, well read – what was most important was who you quoted – and the white girls would come running.
"Of course this meant that I had to leave Nelspruit because my sexual liberation certainly wasn’t going to happen there. A short time later I landed up in the heyday of multi-cultural Yeoville, an island of racial integration in the heart of Johannesburg.
"I became a Trotskyite because that seemed the sexiest thing to be. I was a Trotskyite who worshipped Anneline Kriel. Anneline had been crowned Miss South Africa in 1974 and Miss World the same year. She had also been on the cover of Fair Lady magazine seventeen times.
"She was blonde, blue-eyed, and the Broederbond (an exclusively white organization that promoted the cultural and business interests of Afrikanerdom) adored her.
"She was the 'Volksmeisie' who put South Africa on the map for reasons other than race riots."
In the context of South Africa’s states of emergency and political deadlock, Yeoville represented an idyllic example of racial integration. However, these halcyon days were cut short in 1990 when a succession of white women were brutally attacked and raped by a black perpetrator.
Very quickly, the racial and sexual equality that Yeoville represented was undermined by these crimes that brought to the fore all of white South Africa’s latent paranoia about black men.
Afrikaners crowed that the Yeoville rapist "proved that sex between the races was no good thing" and in an ironic, though some said deliberately intentioned twist of fate, Teddy Mattera, the son of one of South Africa’s foremost and revered poets of the Struggle, was wrongly accused before the real perpetrator was arrested.
With Mattera’s detention it really was as if Apartheid South Africa was desperate to prove that "no matter how well educated, blacks simply could not be trusted".
The rapes prompted white women to seek out support groups where they discussed the state of Yeoville - as well as their vexing relationships with black men like Yunus Vally.
Finally in 1994, as South Africa celebrated its first truly democratic election, Archbishop Desmond Tutu hailed the rainbow nation and Nelson Mandela spoke of the "miracle country". In 1995 South Africa won the Rugby World Cup and in 1996 the Africa Cup of Nations.
The pariah turned darling, South Africa was feted on the world stage as an example to every other nation besieged by civil unrest of what could be achieved by peaceful negotiation.
The country was buoyed along by a spirit of extraordinary optimism and for a while, at least, it felt as though everything really was going to be all right.
However, in 2006, as one in three people in the province of Gauteng now carry the HIV virus, Yunus Vally finds himself grappling with relationships that feel considerably less liberal and more fraught than ever before.
"Before, it didn’t matter if you weren’t rich. You just had to quote Foucault and some white girl would fuck you. Now, all the women who are anything to look at are running after Black Economic Empowerment guys in their BMWs. These days, if you don’t have money you never get laid."
When journalist Charlene Smith was raped one Wednesday evening by a black intruder in her home her candid account of her ordeal in the Mail and Guardian newspaper the following Friday provoked the ire of president Thabo Mbeki.
The president took exception to what he perceived as Smith’s characterization of black men as unable to control their sexual impulses. The Smith-Mbeki war of words made national headlines and were the subject of numerous missives on the ANC’s website.
This is the context in which Yunus Vally now finds himself.
So, how does he negotiate a past that has failed to deliver on the promise of equitable racial and sexual relationships? In his quest to make sense of his life, from Nelspruit to Yeoville to the leafy suburbs of ‘white Johannesburg’, Yunus seeks the counsel of a succession of people who might be able to throw light on his past.
He spent hours researching through archive material at the National Archives and through a number of candid, one-on-one conversations Yunus meets white women who are now living very different lives to those of his youth: Glenda Gray (a medical doctor and South Africa’s foremost AIDS specialist), ‘Mrs South Africa’, the pretty traditional Afrikaans housewife who typified the old South Africa with deeply philanthropic ambitions to make South Africa a better place for all and Evita Bezuidenhout, former ambassador to the imaginary homeland of Bapetikosweti and alter-ego of satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys.
No less enlightened and still somewhat confused, this film concludes with Yunus dissecting his own history as he attempts to fathom the glow of white women, and their maddening allure that has dogged his life.
People in the Film
Dianne Nielson
Runs a referral marketing website
Prof. J van Rooyen
1975-1990: Member & Chairman of Publications Appeal Board of South Africa
1993-Today: Chairperson of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa
Charlene Smith
Journalist and author specialising in human rights and issues around HIV and AIDS
Evita Bezuidenhout
Running for President in 2009
Matthew Krouse
Journalist
Prof Glenda Grey
Co-founder and co-director of the Perinatal HIV Research Unit, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital
Andrea Meeson
Freelance writer and editor
Linzi Rabinowitz
Works for HIV/AIDS education project called You, Me & HIV
Annette Kasselman
Mrs. South Africa 2006
Mrs. Worldwide 2006
Mrs. World 2006
Catherine Muller
Documentary Filmmaker
Credits
Director
Yunus Vally
Producer
James Mitchell
James Mitchell is the CEO of one of Europe’s leading independent film and television production companies, Little Bird, which was established in 1982. James has been responsible for a number of documentary productions including:
Undressed, a themed history of fashion in the twentieth century for Canal Plus; Waiting For Harvey, tracking the ups and downs of four first-time filmmakers attending the Cannes Film Festival; Sophiatown, celebrating popular jazz in South Africa’s ‘Harlem’ in the 1950’s (Best Documentary 2003 Cape Town World Cinema Festival); and King of Communism (winner Grierson Award Best Historical Documentary in
Britain 2002), a disturbing and entertaining view of Ceausescu’s Romania.
Producer/Editor
Catherine Meyburgh
Catherine’s recent work includes several projects created by major South African artist William Kentridge, the productions What Will Come (2007), Black Box (2005) and The Magic Flute (2005).
As an editor, Catherine’s work has included Sophiatown, directed by Pascale Lamche and Bushman’s Secret, directed by Rehad Desai.
Director of Photography
Lance Gewer
Lance is an award-winning cinematographer working on feature films, drama, documentary and commercials. He was Director of Photography for films such as Tsosti, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006; and Beat the Drum.
Recent Documentaries include Ochberg’s Orphans - a business tycoon rescues over 200 orphans from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the brutal Russian Revolution and takes them to South Africa in the 1920’s (Director: John Blair); and Murder In South Africa, authored by Sir Anthony Sher for Channel Four, an investigation of the murders of actor Brett Goldin and designer Richard Bloom.
Composer
Philip Miller
Philip Miller is a South Afrcan composer, who works predominantly in film, video and live performance. Miller completed the soundtrack to the film Catch a Fire starring Tim Robbins and directed by the acclaimed film director, Philip Noyce.
He also completed Teboho Mahlatsi’s short film, Meokgo and The Stickfighter, commissioned for the Venice Film Festival.
Miller has collaborated with a wide range of video artists in South Africa. He has worked with William Kentridge composing soundtracks to many of his animation films, which have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Serpentine Gallery and Tate Modern.