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Shepherds and Butchers
Director: Oliver Schmitz
Starring: Steve Coogan, Garion Dowds, Andrea Riseborough
3/5
Black life is fodder in this beautifully filmed, hard-to-watch indictment of apartheid and the death penalty. In Shepherds and Butchers, black people have no real dialogue and no agency. They are stereotypes. They are executed, they weep, they rage, they are executed, they pray, they rage, they are executed...
It can be argued that that is the whole point of this prison and courtroom drama based on the novel by senior advocate Chris Marnewick, produced by Anant Singh and directed by the acclaimed Oliver Schmitz (Mapantsula, Hijack Stories).
It is set in 1987, at the height of the apartheid state’s brutality, a year with a record 164 executions, mostly of political prisoners. Black lives were fodder and this cautionary tale from the past shows just how brutally and callously so.
Leon Labuschagne (Garion Dowds) is a teenage prison warder who, instead of going to the army for his compulsory national service, takes the alternative option of enlisting in the prison services. He is still a child, but proves to be excellent at calculating “the drop”. This is the weight of the prisoner’s body in correlation to the length of rope required to ensure that a neck breaks cleanly during a hanging. Sometimes it doesn’t and they must try again.
Bowels loosen during death and Labuschagne must then clean the bodies of the men he has grown to know, read letters to, read the Bible to...
If just reading this makes you upset and anxious, this is probably not the film for you. The horrifically effective gallows scenes become increasingly difficult to watch. I ended up writhing in my chair and groaning silently and, eventually, I couldn’t open my eyes any longer when the film returned to the gallows.
We meet Labuschagne at breaking point – he’s just assisted in 21 executions in 72 hours. He snaps and opens fire on a kombi of black soccer players after leaving his shift at the prison, killing seven.
His lawyer, Johan Webber (Steve Coogan), will argue that it is the state that is to blame for a mental breakdown that led to him lashing out. That “good” boys like Labuschagne are forced into an evil system and corrupted.
I was supposed to be one of those boys, but I refused to go to the army, instead invoking the anger of the military state. So the film should and did resonate with me. I understand Labuschagne, the character brought to life excellently and with nuance by Dowds.
But as a film about white oppression that teaches a strong lesson to white viewers, Shepherds and Butchers is one thing. As a film that will be watched by black South Africans, I can see plenty of problems.
I can only think that it could be traumatising and triggering not only to those who experienced the brutality of apartheid, but to many black viewers of later generations.
Essentially, this high-budget production reduces black life to elevate white consciousness. It says, at it’s core, that #NotAllWhites were inherently evil during apartheid.
While this is all good and well, and while the film can be said to stick to its lane, one wonders at the sensitivity of the producers insisting it should have opened the Durban International Film Festival this year (there was a whole drama around it not being chosen after it premiered in prestigious Berlin).
Because, in many ways, say the #FeesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter movements, black bodies are still fodder to a system of white capital. This film needs a trigger warning on its poster.
It’s a powerful and flawed film, but this really doesn’t feel like the right time in history for its lessons. Not while a black-directed, black-life, apartheid-era film like Kalushi, which focuses on freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu, is only just starting to see the light of day.
