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Derek Luke as Patrick Chamusso in Catch a Fire
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Patrick took up arms against a sea of trouble
Freedom fighter Joe Slovo’s daughter Shawn has written an amazing screenplay of South Africa’s struggle, writes Matthew Lewin
HOW quickly it all changed in South Africa. And yet how much there still is that needs to be remembered – the terrible suffering and humiliation of countless people, and the stark heroism of those who took up arms against the powerful apartheid state.
This is the theme of a remarkable new film, Catch a Fire, which goes on general release tomorrow (Friday) starring the Oscar-winning actor, Tim Robbins, and directed by Phillip Noyce, whose previous films include Dead Calm, Patriot Games and The Quiet American.
The visually-stunning film was shot entirely on location in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique, and contains a great deal of stirring singing and African music.
But it was conceived and written by award-winning screenwriter Shawn Slovo, daughter of the late Joe Slovo who was the head of the ANC’s special operations unit operating out of Maputo, Mozambique, during the height of the struggle against apartheid.
Shawn, who lives in Courthope Road, Gospel Oak, says: “This is a story I have had in my mind since the mid-1980s when it was first mentioned to me by my father.
“He told me that if I ever wanted to write a story about the ANC’s armed struggle against apartheid then I should tell the story of one of its heroes, Patrick Chamusso, who carried out a single-handed attack on one of South Africa’s oil refineries.”
And it is a truly remarkable story. Chamusso (played in the film by American actor Derek Luke), was originally from Mozambique, and was working as a foreman at the Secunda refinery in the north east of the country.
He was initially interested in little else but his family and football team, but then he was picked up by the security police, tortured and accused of involvement in an earlier incident of sabotage at the plant.
His terrible experiences in prison politicised him to the extent that when he was finally released he made his way back to Maputo, joined the ANC’s military wing, Mkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and after training there under Joe Slovo, returned to South Africa to carry out, in 1982, his remarkable attack on the refinery where he used to work.
He was captured after a massive manhunt and sentenced to 24 years in prison.
In the film his nemesis is a very complex character, a security policeman, Nic Vos (played by Robbins), who doesn’t conform to the usual brutal stereotype of a racist Afrikaner.
Vos is a far more thoughtful man who, convinced that the ANC would bring chaos to South Africa, was as interested in “turning” his detainees as disorientating them and beating them.
“Chamusso was not a Mandela or Mbeki or Sisulu or Tambo, who were such icons in the struggle” Shawn explains.
“He was just an ordinary man whose concerns were the concerns of most people in the country – making your way in the world, keeping your head down and not getting involved in politics.
“The courage he showed in deciding ultimately not to be a victim or just a statistic and to fight for what he believed in, seemed to me to be a remarkable transformation.”
In the mid-1980s when Shawn heard about him, Chamusso was still in prison on Robben Island. When he was released in the general amnesty of 1991, she spent two weeks with him, hearing his story at first hand, but felt that things in South Africa were not settled enough for the story to be told immediately.
Shawn Slovo is known as a very experienced screenwriter. She was, of course, born in South Africa, but came to England in her early teens when her parents, Joe Slovo and Ruth First, went into exile and came initially to live in Camden Town.
Ruth was later murdered in Maputo by a parcel bomb sent to her by South African security force agents.
After working as a trainee at Pinewood Studios Shawn went to America where she worked for Robert De Niro as his assistant for four years.
But when her mother was assassinated in 1982, an event which she described as among other things a “wake-up call to a sense of mortality”, she decided to respond to her own ambition to be a writer, and she enrolled at the National Film School as a writing student.
She says: “The miracle of transformation in South Africa, together with the forgiveness, the reconciliation, dialogue and acceptance is the opposite of what is happening elsewhere in the world today.
“I thought this was a point that needed to be communicated. That’s what gives this film its contemporary resonance.
“So although I had had the idea since the mid-1980s, it was only after the millennium, when terrorism became so current in our vocabulary that I thought this was the right time to pitch it – which I did to Working Title films, and they commissioned me to write it.
How closely does the film follow the real story? “All the facts are there,” she replies. “We’ve had to change some events time-wise, and we had a mix of real characters and composite characters – that’s the licence you are given when you fictionalise a story for film.
“But we did stick to Phillip Noyce’s approach that there should be nothing in the film that could be challenged as being us trying to manipulate what happened.”
There is one chilling scene in which policeman Nic Vos takes Chamusso, to his own home where the detainee, who had only hours before been lying in a cell, is invited to sit down with Vos’s family for Sunday lunch.
Her next film script project will be on a very different subject – the shenanigans that surrounded the famous world chess championship match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in 1972.
And Patrick Chamusso? He still lives in north-east South Africa with his new wife, three children – and 80 foster children, most of whom are orphans. Have a look at www.twosisters.org.za
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