Durban Film Fest Opener ‘Legacy’ Explores How History of Oppression Led to Broken Promises of Post-Apartheid South Africa

Tara Moore’s “Legacy: The De-Colonized History of South Africa,” which opens the 45th edition of the Durban Intl. Film Festival on July 18, is the South African-born, U.S.-based actor and filmmaker’s attempt to grapple with the brutal history of her homeland as it celebrates the 30th anniversary of democracy.

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Describing the film as an “exploration” of the long journey from the colonial era to the birth of a democratic nation, Moore examines how a legacy of systematic oppression that sought to quash the rights and hopes of the country’s Black majority laid the foundation for a modern nation still struggling to live up to its promise.

“South Africa is the most unequal country in the world,” the director tells Variety . “The question is, why does it remain that unequal if we have democracy? Why does that inequality persist if in ’94, by law, everything was supposedly equal? That’s the real question, and I think that’s what this documentary [tries to understand].”

Moore was born in South Africa, in the dying years of apartheid, at a time when mixed-race marriages were illegal under South Africa’s white nationalist regime; as the first-time filmmaker puts it: “Much like Trevor Noah’s book, I was born a crime.” Her parents were academics — her mother, a political scientist, is a South African of Indian descent; her father is an economist from Canada — and she was raised between South Africa and Connecticut, where her parents taught at Wesleyan University and Trinity College.

From the start, Moore lived a peripatetic life. Throughout her childhood, her parents — who she describes as “adventurers” with a sense of “wanderlust” — would take sabbaticals at universities around the world, with Moore spending parts of her youth in Singapore and South Korea. In 1994, with South Africa on the verge of its first democratic elections, they took short-term teaching positions at Stellenbosch University, a historic institution nestled in South Africa’s Afrikaans-speaking heartland. Before long, they fell in love with a flower farm in the scenic wine region and uprooted the family from its Connecticut base.

The experience, Moore says, was like moving to “another world, but also another time.” Though South Africa was finally making the transition to majority rule, Stellenbosch — a predominantly white town in the cradle of Afrikaner nationalism — was a stark contrast to the liberal American college town that Moore’s family had left behind. Her mother, she says, was the first professor of color at Stellenbosch University, which was founded in 1874 and includes some of the founders of apartheid among its notable alumni, and Moore was one of the first students of color at her private school.

Though the family lived a fairly privileged life, her youth was marked by experiences that underscored how South Africans across races were living on a “different playing field.” Once, she recalls, her father gave her a large bill to buy strawberries from a local market, drawing incredulous comments and stares from the locals. “They’d never seen a brown kid with this much money,” she says. On another occasion, when Moore and her brother set up a flower stand at the end of their driveway, people accused her sibling of stealing the flowers because “they didn’t think that someone of our color could own a farm.”

Because of her parents’ academic work, Moore still returned to the U.S. throughout her youth. Moving between the two countries “felt like going back and forth in time,” she says, but it also afforded her a unique lens into how South Africa’s young, fractious democracy was beginning to take shape. “You saw how much change was happening,” she says. “When you’re away for a year, you come back, you see little things changing so much. It was lovely to see a country grow.”

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“Legacy” largely traces the run-up to the 1994 elections that saw Nelson Mandela come to power, putting an end to nearly five decades of white rule under apartheid. The film includes extensive archival footage, as well as interviews with leading academics, activists, historians and political figures, including Wilhelm Verwoerd, whose grandfather, Hendrik, is considered the “architect of apartheid.” The interviews help Moore shed light not only on the brutal colonial- and apartheid-era legislation that disenfranchised more than 80% of the population, but on how those policies laid the groundwork for the rampant inequality that persists in South Africa today.

If “Legacy” functions in some ways as “A People’s History of South Africa,” that’s no coincidence; the film is the product of a long period of reflection and soul-searching by Moore, who in her adult life has wrestled with the knowledge that much of South Africa’s experience of colonialism and apartheid was absent from the text books she studied as a child. “I wish I had learned this history growing up,” she says.

Reflecting on the fact that her childhood peers are today South Africa’s decision-makers and thought leaders, Moore notes that while many are quick to direct blame for the country’s ills at the ruling African National Congress (ANC) — the beleaguered party of Mandela’s Black liberation struggle — many “don’t understand that apartheid got us in the hole in the first place.”

“Yes, this government is corrupt. I’m not a fan,” she says. “But it didn’t get us here. It’s just not getting us out.”

Three decades of democratic rule have certainly begun to redress the inequity of the apartheid era, even if much work remains to be done. Economic uncertainty, soaring crime rates and political turbulence that saw the ANC fail to win an electoral majority for the first time since 1994 point to some of the challenges ahead for a country still coming out from the long shadow cast by apartheid. Moore insists, however, that she’s “very hopeful about South Africa.”

“Thirty years is a very short time for a country,” she says. “1994 was the beginning of our journey. It was the end of apartheid and white supremacy and racial domination, but it was the beginning of democracy. It was the beginning of a country,” she continues. “It took hundreds of years to get to democracy, so of course, that’s four-and-a-half centuries of damage that we’ve got to reverse. And it’s going to take some time.”

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