The Activist Canon: Patu! and the clowns against apartheid

What can we learn from the best film ever made in Aotearoa?

This is the first entry into what I hope will be a series of pieces on films about organising and what lessons they can teach us about activism. I do not claim to have any kind of expertise when it comes to organising but to the extent that I am involved, I want to learn from history.

A ‘warts and all’ approach

Last week, Wellington Film Society screened Patu!, the best film ever made in New Zealand. For anyone who hasn’t seen it (why not?), Patu! is Merata Mita’s 1983 documentary comprising footage of the anti-apartheid protests against the 1981 Springbok Tour. In her introduction for the film, editor Annie Collins foregrounded her positionality as a Pākehā and someone who was overseas during the protests and unable to participate. She emphasised that the film documents a watershed moment for Pākehā activism specifically as the Māori protest movement was a lot more sophisticated at the time. As one of the interviewees says in the film, “the history of Māori protest began the first day that white people set foot on this land.” Mita herself was already experienced when it came to covering the fight for liberation, including via her earlier film Bastion Point: Day 507.

Modern viewers may not know what to make of some of the protest tactics adopted by inexperienced Pākehā activists in the film, especially at the beginning of the film. Mita directed Collins to take a ‘warts and all’ approach to editing, retaining less-savoury elements of the protests to enhance its status as a document of history. For many Pākehā at the time, their opposition to apartheid in South Africa was inherently intangible and disconnected from white supremacy and colonialism in Aotearoa. As a result, you get scenes near the beginning like one where protestors dress up as Afrikaaner cops and act out the brutal beating of another protestor in blackface. There’s a performance involving a group of mostly pākehā high school students acting out a mass shooting of protestors by their peers wielding prop-guns before playing the audio of wailing from a tangi. We later see an activist dressed up as a member of the KKK (but for like anti-racist reasons). In these cases, audience members will probably find themselves thinking “did these guys think they were helping?!”

The evolution of a movement

Before we get to the clowns against apartheid, we need to talk about how Mita and Collins convey the evolution of the protest movement over the course of the film. The anti-apartheid movement is depicted as a ‘broad church’ including not just Māori and Pākehā but Black South Africans, Pasifika and Indigenous Australians. There are Christian and secular protestors, gangs, school children and older folks, various regional organisations and high-profile groups like HART and CARE. Each of these parties has its own levels of sophistication, theories for change and the benefit of hindsight provides us some insight as to which helped the cause.

There are a number of telling moments where Māori activists challenge Pākehā about concepts that they’d taken for granted:

The reason why I smile all the time when people bring up violence is that we’ve been battered down most of our bloody lives by the cops and kicked and nobody seems to be crying about us... And I smile because we’ve never committed violence ever. We go to Bastion Point and get the shit beaten out of us for being on our own land.

What I’m really wanting to say to you is, OK you fight that thing in South Africa, but remember it happens here too… you tell me why I shouldn’t swear at a policeman. You tell me what I haven’t got to fight for because it’s our survival.

The anti-apartheid movement of New Zealand had mobilised itself to fight racism in South Africa. It had now to begin to search its own soul about where had it been, where was it going and what tactics should it use to now face the issue of racism at home.

The lionisation of non-violence in particular comes across as particularly naive when the tour begins in earnest and the police batons start coming down. In his piece on the restoration of Patu!, Dan Taipua describes the way the filmmaking changes at this moment:

From this point forward, across different games in different cities, filming is a kinetic and almost desperate navigation of space; the camera is almost continually in motion, attempting to capture as much as it possibly can. With synchronised audio impossible, wild sound is layered into the mix to orient or disorient the action on screen. The chaos of real life violence becomes chaos on screen.

This violence, directed at protestors by the cops, puts all the previous hand-wringing into perspective. Whether or not protestors believed in the utility of non-violence they were confronted by police who had no qualms whatsoever about using violence for political ends. If they had turned a blind eye to racism in Aotearoa in the past, they were now seeing its true face. The resulting self-awareness was birthed from what Mita called “the mass mobilisation of New Zealand's white middle class”.

For me, this ‘coming of age’ for Pākehā New Zealand is best demonstrated by the final scenes of the film in which a bunch of clowns get the bash. This group showed up for the final test of the tour in Auckland “to join the protesters in a non-violent capacity to bring light-heartedness to the angry and charged environment.” As noble as this intention was, it didn’t protect them from the violence of the state. The juxtaposition between the whimsy of the protest tactics and the bloodiness of the response results results in some of the most potent images in Mita’s film.

Clowns against apartheid in the 21st century

It’s been over four decades since the tour and Patu! but it often feels like we’re still catching up. A good analogue would be the modern protest movement against apartheid in occupied Palestine. Regardless of their positionality, most New Zealanders oppose Israel’s genocidal actions which has resulted in another ‘broad church’ protest movement. This includes Māori and Palestinian and Pākehā and Tauiwi activists, young people and veterans of 1981, comrades who are Christian and Muslim and Jewish and secular. I even know of at least one clown.

Another example can be seen in the current protest movement against attacks on Te Tiriti from the current government. Like the opposition to apartheid South Africa and Israel, this movement has widespread public support. One of the successes of the hīkoi last year was that Pākehā and Tauiwi showed up in large numbers, something they hadn’t done for similar protests in 2004 or 1975. It seems the lessons learned from Māori activists in 1981 took a long time to sink in.

It is vital that the fight against racism in Aotearoa and Palestine learns from the past, especially the long history of Māori activism. It’s awesome seeing new people join the movement but we should always remember that this is a fight with a lineage that goes back over 250 years. If Pākehā want to avoid making the same mistakes again and again they should learn from this history.