A Walk in the Night

A Walk in the Night is a landmark feature from the generation of talented young Black South African filmmakers who have became active following the overthrow of apartheid in 1994. Mickey Madoda Dube's debut feature adapts Alex La Guma's celebrated 1962 novella of the same name into a fast-paced crime thriller set in post-apartheid Johannesburg. The fact that this story could be so convincingly updated to a contemporary setting indicates how deeply entrenched  racial power dynamics remained in South Africa’s transition. The fact that this program was produced and broadcast by the government owned South African Broadcasting Corporation shows how much things had begun to shift .

Alex La Guma (1925-1986), the son of a leading early anti-apartheid activist, was himself imprisoned twice for his political activities - in 1956 as part of the Treason Trials and in 1962 for progressive journalism. He wrote A Walk in the Night while banned under house arrest, and it was originally published outside the country in Nigeria. In 1967, he fled South Africa for Britain, dying in exile in 1986 while the ANC's representative in Cuba. The filmmaker, Mickey Madoda Dube, was born in Soweto in 1960, studied drama at the University of Witswatersrand, and film on a Fulbright at the University of Southern California. After returning to South Africa, he has collaborated in a series of short story adaptations as well as produced eight dramas and a five-part series on the Truth and Justice Commission for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Dube's film adaptation shifts the emphasis of La Guma's story in several significant ways. For example, by moving the location from Cape Town's vibrant District 6 in the 1950s to a drab, working-class Johannesburg neighborhood, the original story's focus on South Africa's specific Coloured community widens to encompass a more generalized experience of non-white South Africans under systemic oppression. In fact, the milieu of police brutality, frustrated young men, and omnipresent crime which Dube so powerfully evokes will be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with urban economic segregation globally. Dube's script also tightens the personal ties between the major characters, condensing the drama and heightening the ultimate sense of tragedy. In so doing, he suggests that the fates of all South Africans have become more closely intertwined than ever before.

Dube frames his film with references to the ghost-walking scene in Act 1 of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In La Guma's original, the Bard is quoted only once, although, significantly, the novella takes its title from this passage: "I am thy father's spirit doomed for a certain term to walk the night." The central character, Mikey, is clearly intended to parallel Hamlet. His patrimony has also been unjustly usurped - in this case, by South Africa's white supremacist regime. Mikey's "Uncle" Doughty, like Hamlet's uncle Claudius, has had an affair with his mother, and Mikey ends up killing him, though this brings further tragedy rather than resolution. The sordid nightscape of Johannesburg and the flashing sparks of the steel mill where Mikey worked evoke the hell from which the ghost seeks release through his son's revenge.

A Walk in the Night recounts a single terrible night when the fragile world of Mikey Adonis, a young Coloured steel worker, disintegrates. As the pressures on Mikey build, we see a decent man driven to an act of brutality by a racist society that humiliates him at every turn. The parallels with Richard Wright's seminal portrait of Black rage in Native Son are unavoidable. Mikey has just been fired from his job because he objected when his foreman used a degrading racial slurs. Coming out of the factory, he runs into his girlfriend's brother Joey, a vulnerable youth navigating survival through the underground economy in response to South Africa's staggering Black unemployment rate. Mikey, a respected elder figure for the boy, tries to steer him away from a life of crime but realizes that his own recent work experience doesn't offer a very promising alternative. Next, his girlfriend, Zelda, tells him she is pregnant on the exact day he has lost the job he needs to support a family. Finally, on his way home, a racist cop harasses him for no other reason than to force Mikey to address him with subservient terms, stripping away whatever dignity Mikey has left.

Mikey begins a drinking binge with his Uncle Doughty, a broken-down Irish actor and neighborhood drunk who was close to his mother and him as a child. As the evening wears on, Mikey becomes increasingly offended by Uncle Doughty's presumptions of intimacy, telling him he doesn't have a white uncle. Like many well-meaning white people, Uncle Doughty fails to recognize the radical gap between his own experience and the disrespect a Black man encounters every day. When Uncle Doughty persists in calling him "Mikey, my boy," dismissing it as "just a manner of speech," Mikey explodes and in a rage kills him. The film shows how words can build up incrementally with an almost physical force until a casual social encounter encapsulates an entire oppressive social system with devastating consequences.

Joey visits Mikey soon after Uncle Doughty's murder and is mistakenly accused of the crime; he flees into the night pursued by the police. Mikey chases after him, appalled at what he has done to Uncle Doughty and Joey. But he is too late to prevent the same rogue cop who harassed him earlier from shooting Joey at point-blank range. The policeman then turns his gun on Mikey but, in a radical departure from the original novella, he is shot by his white partner before he can fire. However improbable this resolution might seem, it suggests that, although racism remained rampant in post-apartheid South Africa, it was becoming possible for some to see things in terms of basic human rights instead of strictly ethnic loyalty. An angry crowd gathers around the scene of Joey's shooting and, in the film's last scene, they march into the dawn out of the long night of apartheid with somber determination.

Mikey is no Hamlet; rather than a dead tragic hero, he is a man living with his deeply flawed actions. In the last scenes, there is little sense of vindication yet a catharsis of sorts has occurred, at least for the viewer, a resolution to stop this tragedy from repeating itself. By updating an apartheid era story into the post-apartheid period, Mickey Dube squarely confronts the central issue facing South Africa and its cinema: how both to reveal the pentimento of the past persistent in the present, and at the same time show that new, non-racialist scenarios are available for the future.