21 Up South Africa: Mandela’s Children (2006) (review)

In 1963, Granada Television in Britain began what would come to be known as the “Up” series of films directed by Michael Apted. After interviewing a widely varied group of 13 British school children at the age of seven, the producers decided to continue to return and film the children every seven years, creating (depending upon which way you want to think of it) an interestingly provocative longitudinal study of the class system in the U. K. or an emotionally engaging non-fiction soap opera. Many of us have followed the series faithfully for years up through its latest installment, 49 Up (2005).

The original series has led to similar experiments elsewhere, including notably a series called Born in the USSR that has followed the lives of a group of children as they have moved to adulthood in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union. It has also led to a series designed to chronicle the developing lives of children growing up in post-apartheid South Africa.

21 Up South Africa: Mandela’s Children was directed by a native South African, Angus Gibson, also for Granada Television. Like the original series, Gibson’s appears to work from a premise. Each of Apted’s British installments ends with the provocative (and now seemingly sexist) pronouncement—“give me a child at the age of 7 and I will show you the man.” Gibson’s film on his 21 years olds ends with the suggestion that the young people it has portrayed, unlike generations before them, “can choose where to live and work, what to study and to save for…even where to dance.”

The evidence that emerges in both films is more problematic. Certainly there is more economic mobility for some of the children in Apted’s series than one might have expected at the outset. In Gibson’s film, it is not so clear that his young people can indeed “choose where to live and work,” even though obviously significant and important change has come during their lifetimes.

This quibble, however, is less an indictment of either series than evidence of their continuing fascination. Clearly this approach to filmmaking—the consciously contrived, decision to re-enter a group of lives every seven years with a set of questions about what has transpired since the last visit—does not catch life unawares. Indeed one sees much evidence in both series that the participants have anticipated each visit and have, like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, put on faces to meet the filmmakers’ cameras. Yet beyond the evidence of preparation and arrangement, there is abundant evidence of a larger trajectory of life that cannot be completely constructed for or concealed from the cameras.

Significantly too, as we come to know a little of the different subjects of the films, we begin to realize the power of certain kinds of difference in different lives. Clearly life is not reducible solely to class, as the structure of Apted’s film might suggest, though the film reveals much about the enormous power that class exerts. Just as clearly, life is not reducible to race, as one might first imagine in Gibson’s film, though its power, particularly in connection with class, is also everywhere apparent. Perhaps some of the most poignant moments in Gibson’s film come when he is interviewing black subjects in the townships whose lives are still severely constricted by the lack of employment opportunities for them. In more than one case, we can see the high-rise skyline of Johannesburg behind them, so near and yet so far away.

What keeps people coming back to these series is the intriguing combination of predictably structured social pattern and the surprising intrusion of individual resilience and vulnerability. In Apted’s series, one important wild card is psychological stability; in Gibson’s film, the important wild card is HIV infection. By 21 Up, three of Gibson’s original 14 children have died of AIDS...