Tainted Heroes - documentary

A more balanced view of events leading up to the South African general elections of 1994. Full documentary

A full-length documentary film about the use of violence by the ANC and other liberation movements in South Africa.

The documentary, Tainted Heroes, is two hours long and deals with history from the 1976 Soweto Student Uprising to the inauguration of former president Nelson Mandela in 1994. A central theme in the documentary is the ANC’s “People’s War Strategy”, which led to the execution of violent attacks on rival liberation movements with the aim to weaken rivals, such as Inkatha, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), the PAC and AZAPO in order to establish the ANC as the solitary representative of black people in the eyes of the NP government and the international community.
In a trailer, which was released recently, Strike Thokoane, a leader of the BCM and Deputy President of AZAPO, conveys his experience of political violence which was executed by the ANC against these two organisations. Violence included necklace murders, in which a tyre filled with petrol was placed around a victim’s neck and set alight.
Ernst Roets, filmmaker, says the documentary is not an anti-ANC film, but that it conveys an important part of the history of South Africa which has been swept under the carpet by the ANC government.
“The general narrative nowadays is that everyone who was on the side of the ANC is portrayed as untainted heroes, while everyone who differed from the ANC is dubbed villains. The facts communicated by Tainted Heroes show that the history of our country is more complex than that,” says Roets.