Meriem J

Cry Freedom, a film directed by Richard Attenbourough is a very touching and striking movie. The story takes place in a large period of time, which goes from 1975 to 1978.It shows the sad and the cruel reality that black people have lived in South Africa during the Apartheid. It shows how cruel and racist can human beings can be wih other human beings, it shows how people can be bad,awful and evil with other people just because of the colour of their skin.

The film turns around the power, the strength and the brilliant ideas of an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa named Stephen Bantu Biko. This wonderful person founded the Black Consciousness Movement to empower the black population. He had a very famous slogan which he repeated several times to motivate black people to love theirselves as they are. This slogan is: ‘’ Black is beautiful’’. By this slogan he meant that black people are okay as they are, so they should look upon theirselves as a human being.He was against the separation and the difference between black and white people. He didn’t want from white people to tell to the blacks, how to think or how to be educated or neither how to educate their child. He wanted from black people to know their own country’s history and to be proud of it, to keep their culture, traditions, their ideas, and to delate form their minds that black people are inferior. However this ideas caused him several problems and he was banned.Some people acussed thim for being racist, but he just wanted equality between black and whites.Biko died on 12^th September 1977.One of the persons who at first thought that Biko was racist was a white South African journalist and anti-apartheid named Donald Woods. But he quickly changed his mind when he knew him, and they became really close friends.Donald Woods captured the attention of the world whit an article of the death of his friend Stephen Biko. When he published details and photographies regarding biko´s death at the hands of the South African police, Woods was banned and the newspaper was shut down. He escaped to Lesotho and then to UK, where he wrote and compaigned for international sanctions about the racist South African government.

This story made me think a lot this last days, because it really touched me. I have always been against racism and I will always be. I was shocked about how cruel people can be,about how insensitive and intolerant human beings can be with other human beings, how  some people can’t accept difference. Aren’t black people, human too? Don’t they have feelings too? Shouldn’t we all respect each other no matter how different we are? … This sad and shocking event that happened in South Africa made me think of all this things… Where are human rights?  However thanks to men like Biko men who doesn’t care about the consequences and fight for their rights ,fight for justice, people who fight for their people, for their culture , for their traditions and for their country, society expecience a huge progress, men like Biko build history.