Then there is trouble. The local students strike against a government decree that they be taught in Afrikaans instead of English. Both are European tongues, but Afrikaans is spoken only in South Africa, while English seems to them the language of the winds of change from outside, the language of freedom.
Mangena gets orders from his boss to raid a secret protest meeting they've heard about - a fairly innocent meeting, they're sure. "Use minimum force," the white man says. The raid goes as planned, and the area would probably have remained relatively tranquil, but a few days later new faces appear in the district: De Villiers (Malcolm McDowell), the hard-line officer from the Special Branch, and his thuggish assistant. They insist on extreme measures, eventually involving torture and death, to put down the protests. And then the black policeman's whole world comes crashing down around his ears. For his son is one of the protesters.
"Bopha!" (which means to arrest or detain in Zulu) is based on a play by Percy Mtwa and is the first film directed by Morgan Freeman, whose acting career has included two Oscar nominations ("Street Smart" and "Driving Miss Daisy") and who starred in "The Power of One" (1992), a much more innocent film about South Africa.
Like that film, "Bopha!" was shot on location in Zimbabwe, and captures the beauty as well as the unhappiness of southern Africa.
Unlike it - unlike almost all the recent films about South Africa - it is told primarily through black eyes, and that is one of its greatest values.
I've admired such films as "Cry Freedom" and "A Dry White Season" while at the same time wondering why they saw South Africa through white eyes. "Cry Freedom" begins as the story of a black leader named Steven Biko, but he is killed halfway through, and the story focuses on his friend, a white newspaper editor. One is reminded of the bit player who thought "Hamlet" was about a gravedigger who meets a prince. To see South Africa in terms of white masters and black victims is comforting, but too simple; apartheid is a cruel system in which some of the spoils go to blacks, who are happy to have them, and it does not escape notice that Sergeant Mangena's house is the nicest in the township, with two bedrooms, electricity and a refrigerator.
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