Sarafina Historical Accuracy Analysis

Sarafina Historical accuracy Is the film Sarafina historically accurate? Sarafina is based on a South African girl who lives in the 1980s during the Apartheid of South Africa. Apartheid means separateness and is when african people were not allowed the same freedoms and privileges of a white people (Lopez). The National Party was the racist governing party of South Africa (National Party). The film is divided into five parts. There is a ten minute introduction and twenty minute segments following. Sarafina is very historically accurate. In the first ten minutes Sarafina was accurate. In the beginning of the film Sarafina, South African youths are burning down a school room and it did in fact happen that there were student strikes and vandalism …show more content…
One of the events that happen is the protest of South African students at the school. The students scattered after the police shot at them. Many students got shot by the police and some students threw rocks at the police (Lopez). There were protests with signs by students at their schools and some teachers and administrators joined them (Education). There were hundreds of African people who were killed in protests with machine guns. Some of the students threw rocks at the police after the police kept shooting (March 21). In the next scene the school kids are very mad about the police. They are outside a black police officer’s house and burn the house. They children chase the police man in the dark and beat him. Since the children were so mad that they poured gasoline on the officer and lit him on fire (Lopez). There was a South African black man named Benjamin Kinikini, he was a councilor, who was dragged out his house and his family and they got stabbed and burned to death by two blacks …show more content…
The end of the film shows the cruelty of the whites to the blacks. Sarafina gets electrocuted by an electric chair and one boy says he had a wet sack over his head then got electrocuted. The whites would have find the black’s reactions entertaining, when a guard puts a girl in a cell with bodies and she cries, he says “look your eyes are pissing.” One boy gets hit again and again by a guard and he cries. A girl said that they, the girls, had to remove all their clothes and then white people whipped them. Then when the guards got tried they had other guards whip them (Lopez). Life was very terrible for people in the South African prisons. People did get electrocuted and a former torturer said that he could not remember the very specific details of what he did with the electrocution. A point they do not touch on in Sarafina is how much worse the prisons were for females than men. The guards often raped women and got them pregnant. The women had to deal with their periods and would get punished when they had their period (Lawler). There were many tortures, but there has not been a very deep study into the torchures (Holmes). In conclusion, Sarafina is historically accurate. There was injustice done to many South Africans and they were sent to prison. The youth was a huge impact in ending the apartheid and many people died in that