Goodbye Bafana
| Goodbye Bafana | |
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Cinema poster
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| Directed by | Bille August |
| Produced by | Roberto Cipullo, Gherardo Pagiei, Kwesi Dickson, Ilann Gerard, Andro Steinborn, David Wicht, Jan-Luc Van Damme |
| Written by | Greg Latter, Bille August |
| Starring |
Dennis Haysbert Joseph Fiennes Diane Kruger |
| Music by | Dario Marianelli |
| Cinematography | Robert Fraisse |
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Release date
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Running time
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140 minutes |
| Country | South Africa, Italy, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Germany, France |
| Language | English Xhosa |
| Budget | $30,000,000 |
Goodbye Bafana (released on DVD in the United States as The Color of Freedom) is a 2007 drama film, directed by Bille August, about the relationship between Nelson Mandela (Dennis Haysbert) and James Gregory (Joseph Fiennes), his censor officer and prison guard, based on Gregory's book Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend. The movie also explores the relationship of James Gregory and his wife as their life changes while Mandela is under Gregory's watch.
Bafana means 'boys'. Gregory lived on a farm and had a black friend when he was a child, which explains his ability to speak Xhosa.
The young revolutionary Nelson Mandela is arrested, and it is the task of censor James Gregory to watch him. He has long since moved to South Africa with the family for his work in the prison of Robben Island, and slowly he clashes with the politics and racist culture of his countrymen and the people of his own race. Gregory begins to express hatred for South African apartheid. In time, Gregory challenges his superiors, and seeks to improve Mandela's life until he is released from prison after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, and is elected president of South Africa.
The autobiography the film was based on, Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend, was derided by Mandela's longtime friend, the late Anthony Sampson. In Sampson's book Mandela: the Authorised Biography he accused James Gregory, who died of cancer in 2003, of lying and violating Mandela's privacy in his work Goodbye Bafana. Sampson said that Gregory had rarely spoken to Mandela, but censored the letters sent to the prisoner and used this information to fabricate a close relationship with him. Sampson also claimed that other warders suspected Gregory of spying for the government, and that Mandela considered suing Gregory.
Writing in The Guardian, critic, Alex von Tunzelmann, stated that the movie was a "dubious tale" of Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, based on his prison guard's memoirs and that it was a story that contradicted all other known accounts of his time in imprisonment. She went on to say that there was no excuse for the "historical negligence in this movie" – stating that its implicit dismissal of the contradictory accounts of Nelson Mandela and others could be seen as insulting.
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