Black & White Tale

Dingaka may mark a trend of sorts. Most made-in-Africa melodramas use throbbing tom-toms and tribal dances merely as an exotic backdrop for the doings of great white hunters, drunken missionaries, or dissatisfied colonial wives. In Dingaka, South African Writer-Director Jamie Uys does not stint on music and dance, which are an absorbing show in themselves. But the details of native life always remain relevant to this earnest, primitive drama about a proud tribesman (Ken Gampu) whose thirst for vengeance hurls him against the apparatus of white justice in Johannesburg.

Gampu leaves his native village, pursuing a man he believes to be his young daughter's killer--a defeated warrior who was told by a conniving witch doctor that he could regain power by eating the heart of a child. Before the witch doctor is brought down from his clifftop retreat and exposed as a fraud, Gampu has been clapped into a Johannesburg jail, charged with attempted murder. His friend in need, sent over by Legal Aid, is Stanley Baker, whose wife (Juliet Prowse) keeps prodding him to "care about people." Notwithstanding its bizarre and colorful appeal, Dingaka ends on a cautious old-fashioned note of praise for the white South African who leads the simple blacks from ignorance into light. Audiences elsewhere may not fully appreciate the victory, for in a land ruled by apartheid the light seems dark enough.

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