‘MANDELA’ TACKLES APARTHEID ISSUE : TV Review: Pro-Human or Pro-Communist?

TV’s first apartheid movie is more than just a love story of great heart, force and social conviction.

Jerry Falwell has called it “communist propaganda,” his usual label for anything he opposes. Citizens for Reagan is certain it’s “pro-terrorist.”

On the contrary, it’s pro-human.

Others will have to judge if “Mandela” (8 p.m. Sunday on HBO) is a definitive, absolutely truthful account of Nelson (Danny Glover) and Winnie (Alfre Woodard) Mandela, the hero and heroine of millions in the South African human rights struggle.

Beyond any doubt, though, it imparts a separate set of truths about the crushing sorrow and degradation of black South Africans under a minority white racist regime, one that has regarded fairness and humane treatment for nonwhites as odious, alien concepts. And, by tracing the Mandelas’ lives, it shows how moderates anywhere can become radicalized by an oppressive system that offers barely any hope for peaceful, meaningful change.

In a sense, then, “Mandela” is a metaphor offering insights that reach far beyond the social, political and economic battlefields of South Africa.

An old editorial cartoon from a 1960s American newspaper applies here. It showed angry blacks emerging from their dilapidated housing in an urban slum as a white policeman admonished them to “get back in there and act like human beings.” There were points in each of the Mandelas’ lives, no doubt, when they ceased being “human beings”--as defined by Afrikaners--and became revolutionaries.

There’s some fat in this affectionate treatment that makes director Philip Savile’s job more difficult. Although Ronald Harwood’s eloquent script favors the Mandela love story over the political story, it is Nelson’s deepening political involvement that extends the courtship, and we wait 45 minutes just to see Nelson and Winnie finally marry.

There are familiar themes here, including government abuses in the name of anti-communism. There on the screen are the horrors of Sharpeville on a day in 1960 when police shot into a crowd of blacks protesting “pass” laws, killing 69 and wounding 180. Many of the victims reportedly were shot in the back while fleeing.

Glover (“The Color Purple”) makes a fine, passionate Nelson, whom we meet in 1947 as a magnetic young lawyer who joins the African National Congress with his partner, Oliver Tambo. His career evolves through stages--the passive resister, the saboteur, the fugitive. We see him only fleetingly after he reenters prison to begin serving a life sentence in 1964.

There he remains, the everlasting light of the anti-apartheid movement. The government has offered to free him in exchange for his renunciation of violence. But he has refused to renounce violence unless the government does.

That fine actress Woodard is a stunning Winnie, her radiance as a young social worker ultimately hardening into defiance. She is harassed by the government, jailed and later banned to Brandfort in the Orange Free State while building her own reputation as a human rights leader.

“I didn’t marry a man,” she says about Nelson at one point. “I married a struggle.”

Whatever its virtues, “Mandela” cannot evade the truth-in-packaging issue that confronts TV docudrama. This story is mostly sympathetic to the Mandelas, no matter their possible tactics, and you wonder about those soft edges. Nelson the alleged Marxist goes unexplored. And there is nothing about Winnie’s refusal to condemn the increasing black-on-black violence that has killed suspected government collaborators.

Returning to Falwell and the better-anything-than-Red crowd, the fundamentalist minister charged in a letter to HBO Chairman Michael J. Fuchs that the Mandela movie was “nothing more than communist propaganda intent on swaying the congressional vote” on whether to remove U.S. economic sanctions on South Africa. Falwell opposes the present sanctions.

“Please be advised that the Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation will be urging all of their supporters to boycott the use of HBO for the month of September,” Falwell wrote.

Fuchs rejected Falwell’s charges and contended that Falwell had smeared as “communist propaganda” a movie that he had not even seen. In Falwell’s world, smelling a Commie is as good as seeing one.

In the real world of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, meanwhile, apartheid continues.