South Africa: A Dry White Season

I thought the film was quiet and poignant, without guile, pretense, or special effects.  It presented the facts and social norms of South African Aparthied clearly.



Overall, there was a profoundly unequal distribution of wealth, power, and opportunity. The film reveals obvious inequalities between blacks and whites in South Africa. The norms include lack of individual and group power within black populations. The white population considered themselves responsible for the creation and maintenance of anything good and prosperous in the country. The whites seemed entitled to their superiority due their race and European origins. Blacks worked menial low or no skilled jobs while whites were presented as teachers, lawyers, and police officials. Whites perceived blacks as capable of spontaneous and random violence, savage animals with no self-control. They could not understand why blacks were incapable of perceiving themselves as anything but savages and why they could not accept their inferiority as a fundamental truth.  Whites were the decision-makers and power brokers. Blacks had no civil rights or liberties, often arrested and tortured on drummed up charges. Questioning Apartheid almost always meant arrest, imprisonment, torture, and possible death.  Blacks were told where to live and where to go to school.  The film showed the striking contrast been the affluent white neighborhoods versus the poverty stricken environs of the blacks.

Mr. de Toit’s worldview changed dramatically over the course of the film. In the beginning, we see that Mr. De Toit  never second guessed society’s views and institutions He seemed to think the staus quo was right and true. But after experiencing the prevailing injustices of Aparthied close-up, through events unfolding within his own household, he was transformed from a comfortble sense of white entitlement to civil rights advocacy --at the risk of his relationships, his life, and the lives of his loved ones. Not only did his views of segregation change, but his opinion and view of his fellow whites changed as well,  to include his perception of self. Thus, transformations permeated self, society, the nation, and prospects for the future of all South Africans.