Songs of struggle in the film Sarafina!

Abstract

Sarafina! (1992) started in the 1980s as an inspirational resistance theatre production called Sarafina, The Music of Liberation. After the stage production’s big success on Broadway in the USA, film director Darrell James Roodt adapted Sarafina! as a musical film which was released in cinemas in 1992. Sarafina!, identified as a combination of township theatre and theatre of resistance, also employs songs of struggle. Sarafina! depicts the context in which the socio-political resistance of the youth during the 1980s is articulated, as well as the internal battle of a young black girl who is searching for her place in the struggle. The purpose of the study is to understand how songs of struggle contribute to the construction of context in the film Sarafina!. By understanding the nature and meanings of the songs in Sarafina!, as well as identifying the contexts depicted in the film, we can understand how the songs contribute to the construction of the contexts in the film. This mini-dissertation is a qualitative, hermeneutic research study, conducted against a social constructivist paradigm. A traditional literature review was used to collect data on the concepts relevant to this study and a systematic literature review was applied to sort through this literature in order to find the most suitable and relevant sources. The data was analysed using strategies of textual analysis in order to interpret the text and to identify the relationship between the text and the multiple contexts reflected in the text. The findings of this study indicate that not all the songs in Sarafina! are songs of struggle, but they do articulate some form of struggle. The songs in Sarafina! appear in various types of resistance music, namely songs of struggle, protest songs, as well as freedom songs. The findings of this study also indicate that the songs in Sarafina! articulate contexts depicting socio-political circumstances or a personal human experience. Sarafina! articulates multi-layered contexts which depict temporal and spatial contexts. Ultimately, we can conclude that the songs of struggle in Sarafina! contribute to the construction of these multi-layered contexts in which socio-political and personal human experiences are articulated. Each song has its own unique focus, but ultimately contributes to our understanding of how the youth was affected within these contexts.