Peter (04/15/83)
Excerpted from The New York Times (4/15/83) "Apartheid Still Rules, 'Gandhi' or No Gandhi by JOSEPH LELYVELD... JOHANNESBURG, April 14 --- "His triumph changed the world forever." So say the billboards and advertisements for the Academy Award-winning film "Gandhi," which is due to open her next week and is already provoking a storm that shows, onec again, how little Gandhi changed South Africa. The political awakening of the young Mohandas K. Gandhi started in 1893 on his arrival in this country, with his ejection from a segregated train. South Africa's trains are still segregated and, more to the point of the controversy the film has inspired, so are its movie theaters. Thus Indians and all other non-whites will be barred from the charity premiere of "Gandhi" that will be held here next Thursday on behalf of the National Cancer Association. The exclusion of Indians has an added piquancy for a reason that seems to have gone unnoticed in South Africa: the theater in downtown Johannesburg where the film will be playing to white audiences is on the exact site where Gandhi made a speech that was one of the milestones of his life. A Scene Re-enacted It was there, in the old Empire theater, on Sept. 11, 1906, at a mass meeting attended by 3,000 Indians, that he launched his first campaign of satyagraha or nonviolent resistance --- a scene that is scrupulously re-enacted in Sir Richard Attenborough's film. "Gandhi" is to open in six South African cities next week. In only three of them --- Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town --- will nonwhites have any chance of seeing the film, even on a segregated basis... ...The odd thing about the controversy is that everyone involved in it knows that movie theaters are segregated, yet no one seems to have anticipated a problem over "Gandhi." Indeed, white South Africa generally congratulated itself that a movie that deals at length with Gandhi's encounter with South African racism could be shown here. "It just didn't occur to me, believe it or not," John Delport, national secretary of the cancer association, said when asked why he hadn't tried to arrange a multiracial showing... * * * * * * * (submitted to the net by Peter Squires, BTL-WH 4C350 ...ihnp4!machaids!pxs )