Twenty-five years ago, one of the most famous documentary series aired its final chapter. Henry Hampton’s fourteen-part Eyes on the Prize (1987, 1990) became the defining vision of the American civil rights struggle for millions, compiling memories and broadcasts from across the country into a single visual history of the movement. The award-winning documentarian Connie Field provides what is in many ways the international complement to this remarkable series in Have You Heard from Johannesburg (2010). Over seven episodes and nearly nine hours (in its feature-length versions), Field and her crew take audiences around the globe to see how the struggle against South African apartheid motivated solidarity activism across national boundaries. From its song-inspired title to the sheer magnitude of its impressive research, Have You Heard has taken all the steps to occupy a similar position to its American predecessor. For what gave Eyes on the Prize its lasting power was not a pioneering thesis, but rather the combination of human detail, tight narratives, emotional resonance, and arresting visuals that made it an ideal introduction to civil rights in secondary and collegiate classrooms. This formula of merging accessible history with media showmanship, executed with astounding skill and an emphasis on narrative, is precisely what Connie Field has achieved in her monumental documentary.

Have You Heard explores the global antiapartheid movement through seven stories. Each of the hour-plus episodes presents a self-contained arc, and when these episodes are combined the result is an overview of activism, primarily in Europe and the Americas. The first episode explores the origins of apartheid, the founding of the African National Congress (ANC), its departure from nonviolent protest, and its decimation after the Rivonia Trial. There is some discussion of early boycotts in the United States and Europe, but this and the final episode concentrate on domestic South African history, bookending the discussion of foreign solidarity in a way that reproduces the ANC’s exile. Oliver Tambo is featured in the second installment, which follows his extensive travel abroad to build support for his banned party. The need for Westerners to set aside Cold War anticommunism and Christian pacifism in order to support the now militant ANC provides dramatic tension, culminating in Tambo’s successful courting of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme and the World Council of Churches. This sets the stage for future episodes that look thematically at the growth of primarily Western solidarity.

And there is much to discover, with the thematic focus giving the films an opportunity to look closely at what antiapartheid meant to individual nations and activists who adopted it. The third episode provides a fascinating study of the historic linkages between the Netherlands and the Dutch-descended Afrikaners. The internationalization of the Black Consciousness Movement and the Soweto Uprising helped inspire support for the black majority from a population long sympathetic to the minority government. Next, Field and her crew look at the highly successful sport boycott of South Africa. The emphasis here is on the Commonwealth countries of Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, where activists clashed with rugby enthusiasts over tours of the all-white South African Springbok team. This is the first of four “stand alone” episodes available on the DVD set in both television-friendly hour broadcasts and longer self-contained features. The fifth installment, “From Selma to Soweto,” illustrates the connections between American civil rights and apartheid, emphasizing how African Americans in particular drove the popularization of the cause on college campuses and in Washington.^{Footnote 1} “Bottom Line” takes up the divestment and boycott strategies to provide a comparative perspective on U.S., British, and Dutch campaigns against firms doing business with South Africa, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. The final episode argues that international pressure worked with increasing unrest in South Africa to force the end of apartheid, while the decision to adopt Nelson Mandela as the figurehead for global organizing made it logical that he would lead the transition to majority rule.

In just under nine hours, Field captures the outlines of a truly transnational movement. Over ten years, the filmmakers watched fifteen hundred hours of archival footage, reviewed over six thousand photos, and conducted more than 130 interviews in ten countries to compile the most complete and striking visual representation of the international antiapartheid struggle. The collection of so much material borders on astounding and would make an impressive archive, especially considering that more than thirty of those interviewed have since died, including Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Beyers Naude, Christopher Nteta, Diana Collins, Dennis Brutus, and Damu Smith. Though the Western states (Anglo-Dutch in particular) receive the most attention, Have You Heard integrates them within postcolonial African political trends and the growth of international criticism of apartheid in supranational bodies like the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee. Field’s crew does a laudable if sometimes uneven job balancing the various levels of perspective within cohesive plotlines that, at their finest, flow naturally across borders. The project compares favorably with Håkan Thörn’s (Reference Thörn2009) analytical monograph on Euro-American organizing and the discrete national essays assembled by the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET 2008).^{Footnote 2} By taking such a broad perspective, Field is able to delineate the common outlines of the movement while showing that specific national contexts demanded different strategies and produced different results. It is this breadth of narrative and research that is the series’ greatest strength.

Have You Heard’s historical contributions are nowhere more apparent than in its crowd-pleasing emphasis on oral history, which highlights the human element of grassroots organizing. Interviews with activists and policymakers take center stage and reveal the variety of experiences that motivated solidarity. Narration is kept to a minimum. It intervenes in two- or three-sentence staccato bursts, primarily to segue between testimonies that drive the interpretive aspects of the films and contextualize the carefully selected contemporary footage. Montages scored with emotive antiapartheid songs dramatize individual memories and invest the series with energy and momentum. This method communicates the humanity and spirit of the movement in a way no text has yet achieved. Speakers revel in individual acts of resistance, ranging from the bold to the humorous, including the young Briton who posed as a bus driver in order to deposit the Springbok rugby team in the middle of a field on match day. Such moments often become lost in analyses of transnational movements, but Have You Heard does a masterful job of connecting the individualized local action with global trends. In addition to interviewing activists, Field has done yeoman’s work speaking with members of the South African government, Afrikaner athletes, and even high-ranking businessmen from Shell Oil and Polaroid, who offer critical perspectives on the solidarity movement that are among the most fascinating and valuable of the entire series. The result is dynamic, engrossing, and at times incredibly moving.

In privileging oral history, Have You Heard reminds viewers of the starkly different expectations of the documentarian and the academic. Field has long eschewed the Griersonian “Voice of God” narration, which most closely resembles monographic writing styles. Rather, she follows Howard Zinn in championing “history as told by the ordinary person and their experiences” (Abrash Reference Abrash2010). She first used this interview-heavy method in her widely heralded film on the role of women factory workers in World War II, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), and it has been her hallmark ever since.^{Footnote 3} Interviewees provide both historical evidence and commentary based on interpretations of their own memory, arranged by Field to advance a central argument. Interviewees act—according to the media theorist John Corner—as “articulators of the film, rather than as recruits to the project” (Reference Corner1996:128). Not a single historian appears on camera, nor does the director offer much overarching gloss on the material. Rather, she urges audiences to construct a historical narrative from the common elements present in the myriad overlapping testimonies. The result is convincing but not reflexive, embodying the documentary tradition that claims to be a barely mediated primary source while still pursuing a specific argument.

It is this neatly constructed central argument that will likely make the series so gratifying for average audiences but slightly frustrating for historians, especially those of southern Africa. Many interviewees, looking back from the victorious position of the late 1990s when filming occurred, tend to compress and tidy up decades of grueling work in ways that create a pleasantly closed narrative. By removing herself from the films, Field chooses not to offer a critical perspective to the memories of her speakers. If individuals do not recall elements of thirty years past, they are left largely unexplored. This perspective minimizes the missteps and contingencies of the global movement. The result is a teleological view of the ANC struggle in which events lead inexorably to the peaceful victory over apartheid, aided tremendously by international pressure. Have You Heard consciously establishes this framework from the first minute; Nelson Mandela’s election—and the founding of the idealistically multiracial state—opens and closes the series. The stories in between constitute mere steps toward this ultimate and perhaps mythic goal. The Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party, the Inkatha Freedom Party, Winnie Mandela’s violent excesses, and internal ANC conflict would complicate the central storyline and therefore barely or never appear. By privileging activist memories that look backward to celebrate personal achievements and eventual victory, in the words of film scholar Bill Nichols, a “hierarchy of voices becomes lost” (Reference Nichols and Rosenthal1988:56). The ordered, mythologized, and localized recollections of a subset of apartheid opponents become the history, while the process that led to their inclusion in the films is not apparent to the audience. While there is much truth to Field’s depiction of the ANC, the movement, and their opponents, there is a frustrating lack of nuance for a nine-hour series made by the famed author of the ironically subversive Rosie the Riveter.

This mythmaking comes in part from the ambitiousness of a project that must balance its incredible research with a sufficiently entertaining mass appeal. Field makes tough decisions to organize her material and prevent it from becoming unwieldy. As a result, the film is, in the director’s own words, about “the global movement that affected apartheid; it's really not about apartheid” (Svetvilas Reference Svetvilas2010). South African events between the first and last episode primarily contextualize international responses, creating some unwieldy transitions that are likely unavoidable in such a multinational project. Yet neither does Have You Heard take time to recognize the complexities of the movement abroad. For instance, Field follows most historians in marginalizing the role that liberation movements in Portuguese Africa, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), and Namibia (southwest Africa) played in promoting Western solidarity, particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s when little organized resistance existed in South Africa.^{Footnote 4} There is no commentary for the clips displaying castigations of Rhodesia, and the Dutch Komitee Zuidelijk Afrika’s long history as the Angola Comité before 1976 receives no attention. Neither is there much recognition of the complicated internal politics that sometimes hampered the international movement, including the ideological tensions in Britain discussed at length by Roger Fieldhouse (Reference Fieldhouse2005) or the cyclical ebbs of American collegiate activism. Such exclusions maintain viewer attention to the implicit narrative, but Field misses an opportunity to ruminate on the deeper meanings and structures of solidarity.

Omissions aside, the search for cohesive plotlines has its most problematic impact on the chronology. Dates are used too intermittently in a series with overlapping thematic episodes, and some footage—particularly for earlier periods—seems imported from other eras. Using one decade’s visuals to dramatize previous actions is understandable from the aesthetic view, but disordering interviews with Tambo and protest coverage flatten the history and undermine the experiential learning and shifting strategies that helped the movement succeed. Chronological manipulation also allows the filmmakers to adjust the order of events to fit specific scripts, a practice most apparent in “From Selma to Soweto.” In constructing the argument that African Americans fueled the U.S. antiapartheid movement, long discussions of TransAfrica’s 1984 protests at the South African Embassy precede mention of the successful MASS Divest campaign (almost wholly excised from the television-length episode), implying that Washington-based African American efforts inspired the renewal of national organizing. In reality, Massachusetts was the first state to withdraw pension funds from businesses operating in South Africa, eighteen months before the embassy protests and after three years of less ostentatious (and less filmed) lobbying by a multiracial coalition of politicians, unions, churches, community organizations, and activists.^{Footnote 5} This built on successful city and university divestment movements that had been occurring piecemeal across the country for nearly a decade. African Americans such as Mel King played leading roles in Massachusetts and elsewhere, but by favoring the testimonies of TransAfrica members in terms of screen time and placement, Have You Heard overwhelms an alternative assessment of events offered by the series’ own footage. The intersection of multiple campaigns by myriad peoples at varying levels of influence explains the successful American agitation against apartheid in the 1980s.

Though offered as a critique, the above example demonstrates that despite Field’s purposeful pursuit of stories, there is greater depth to the films than a few simple narratives. One of the criticisms of Eyes on the Prize was that its emphasis on well-known movement figures offered little new to the academic discussion of civil rights, but the same cannot be said of Have You Heard. The unrivaled research captures a great deal of untapped resources, including narrative strands taken up intermittently or not at all. It is often these secondary themes and isolated insights that prove most illuminating and provide intriguing questions for future scholarship. One aspect is the obvious but too rarely discussed reflective quality of antiapartheid organizing. From the United States, where solidarity emerged from civil rights struggles, to New Zealand’s realization of its own discriminatory policies, the movement forced Western nations to turn the spotlight on their own international, economic, and social traditions. As the Australian aboriginal activist Gary Foley comments in the “Fair Play” episode, “[Apartheid] prompted a fundamental rethink in themselves about ‘What is our position [on race]?’ They were forced to confront that whole issue, and none of them had ever done that before.” Field occasionally relegates such reflections to the cutting room floor or the voluminous DVD special features, illustrated by the excised scene from the final episode in which the late British activist Mike Terry claims his work was more important for the United Kingdom than South Africa. But the series should nonetheless be celebrated for recovering this history and making it accessible to worldwide audiences. As scholars delve deeper into the antiapartheid movement, they will find rich food for thought in the images and testimonies of Have You Heard.

Documentaries are not histories in the academic sense. Testimony, witness, and presentation often receive more attention than criticism and contextualization. They take greater liberties in pursuit of cohesive plotlines that simplify complex events into digestible if thought-provoking entertainment. As a result, directors like Field can reproduce teleological perspectives, purposefully or not, where all rivers flow toward seemingly inevitable conclusions. The approach provides an organizational framework that helps maintain audience interest, but it eliminates many of the contingencies—the oxbows and shifting banks, if you will—in a half century of global struggle. The result is a sometimes overly neat consensus on a transnational movement, enlivened by arresting testimonies and hinting at an array of subthemes that deserve further exploration. The films offer an excellent, approachable first draft of history that belongs in the classroom. But they should be the beginning of the discussion, and not its end. Instructors should use the ever-growing literature to question the triumphal narrative of the ANC’s Rainbow Nation, explore the discrete national effects of the movement, and ask whether the antiapartheid movement truly resulted in what Håkan Thörn believes is a global civil society. Have You Heard from Johannesburg is without a doubt the best and most engaging primer on the global antiapartheid struggle available in eight and a half uplifting hours, and it deserves to be viewed widely.