[In the following essay, Nasson discusses the reception of Lee's Malcolm X in South Africa.]

In Spike Lee's modest contribution to method writing, By Any Means Necessary, a high-octane account of the making of Malcolm X, we learn that on the Johannesburg shoot to capture Nelson Mandela as a Soweto teacher for the film's final clip, "there was a whiteout of our activities, like we were never there, according to the news organizations of South Africa." There is a nice whiff of radical audacity to this, but it is quite preposterous. With the shooting of Malcolm X no particular danger to the already crumbling fabric of South African society, white English-language papers took rather positive notice of filmmaker and subject. In fact, the only unsporting notes appeared in the country's leading liberal weekly, Johannesburg Weekly Mail, and in the black Johannesburg Sowetan. These reported grumbling amongst local black crew over working conditions under the visiting director, adoringly identified by his production assistant as "a brother who had come home to visit."

What have we here? What we have is not just a filmmaking chronicle that is somewhat economical with the truth, but a film with an equally rough-and-ready grasp of historical logic. Inserting Mandela into Malcolm X may have made it natural for the film to have its April 1993 South African premiere at the African National Congress (ANC) Culture and Development Conference. But the ANC president, with his multiracial populism, is surely not the most appropriate symbolic figure to link the legacy of black struggle in America associated with Malcolm X to black liberation politics in South Africa. The more obvious historical symbol is Steve Biko, murdered in security police detention in 1977. The martyred Biko was the best-known proponent of the separatist black consciousness that, in the 1960s and 1970s, drew a good measure of its intellectual, cultural, and political inspiration from the Black Power movement in the United States, with the contraband speeches and autobiography of Malcolm X then a prominent samizdat source. Still, Spike Lee's purpose is a "brothers-in-the-struggle" historical biography for the 1990s. After all, finding apt historical analogies can be complicated, if a little more even-handed toward both past and present.

With the current "rediscovery" of Malcolm X through this film, the brother has already been appropriated in some fairly novel South African ways, including the mock-heroic. Thus, the university teacher who heads a fringe Coloured National Liberation Front that seeks a post-apartheid transition to an autarkic homeland for people of mixed black and white ancestry has been dubbed "the Coloured People's answer to Malcolm X." Moreover, Chris Hani, the recently assassinated South African Communist party leader and ANC guerrilla commander, haunted several reviews of the movie as the embodiment of Malcolm X, in that "he died preaching peace," or owed his political consciousness in part to the African-American racial experience as articulated by Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael. This last flatulence, aired by the ANC journal, Mayibuye, is silly.

Malcolm X is the third of Spike Lee's movies to be shown in desegregated South African cinemas. Do the Right Thing was favorably reviewed by liberal white critics, while screened mostly in cinemas in black areas. Similarly, Jungle Fever was acclaimed for its relevance "to life in a multiracial society such as ours" and was shown to mixed, middle-class cinema audiences mainly in white areas.

The ease with which these supposedly incendiary African-American films have been absorbed by South African political culture makes the reception of Malcolm X not just interesting, but intriguingly so. It is, for instance, mistaken to imagine that poor and marginalized township youths have swarmed into cinemas to view this brash portrait of black nationalism; inflated seat prices generally restrict movie going to the middle class and better-off working-class minority. There were, of course, black audiences. Promoted as a "civil rights" biography, Malcolm X saw service in fund-raising showings for ANC branches, community organizations, and both colored and African high schools. And despite tart criticism of Lee's historical representations of Islamic life from local Muslim publications, Malcolm X as El Hajj Malik El Shabazz had popular benefit screenings for Muslim educational and welfare projects. Yet, by and large, the commercial showings were to ethnically mixed audiences in mostly white venues. In short, actual viewing was a fairly low-key business. Attendance was accompanied by nothing like the boisterous black crowd activity that used to accompany South African screening of Scarface or El Cid in urban working class areas such as District Six in Cape Town during the peak 1930s-1960s decades of cheap cinema. Then, thanks to frenzied fans in surging ticket lines, Hollywood entertainments were an occasional threat to civic sobriety or even public order in white cities.

None of this is to suggest that Malcolm X failed, as Americans say, to go down big. None other than Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow, while on a promotional tout in South Africa, was warmly interviewed at peak time on the state-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation. Breathless black and white journalists were assured of an ultimate common cause between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the history of America's antiracist struggle. The English-language white press heaped considerable praise on the production, typified by the headline "Lee's Winner." The national Sunday Times observed, "Whereas King offered his followers comfort and hope, Malcolm X offered anger and action." Indeed, major Afrikaans papers provided positive reviews, with the influential Cape Town newspaper, Die Burger, declaring Malcolm X the hero of young, black South Africa. But, whereas English reviews neatly assimilated Malcolm X to the nonracialism of South African political correctness, Afrikaner critics were less sanguine about the film's radical black nationalism, suggesting that its extremism could be likened to the current antiwhite rancor of the Pan-Africanist Congress, with its "One Settler, One Bullet" slogan.

On the left, the Socialist (affiliated with the International Socialist Organization, based in the United States) criticized Lee for muffling Malcolm's hostility to capitalism and for glossing over Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) meddling in Africa but praised the film's portrait "of a tradition of uncompromising black struggle." On the other hand, ANC-supporting black papers and periodicals, such as the Johannesburg New Nation, carried the black role-model image as a strong theme, with the consumerist Tribute peddling Malcolm X goods in its March issue; Denzel Washington adorned the cover over the slogan, "VOTE for a New Government."

But the popular story is not all glitter. One unifying thread in responses to Malcolm X was skepticism, ranging from mild to caustic, about Lee's handling of historical facts and contingencies. Another was that dragging in Mandela to signify global black struggle was labored or trite. A third, coming, ironically enough, from the Afrikaans magazine Vrye Weekblad, was annoyance at the idea of Malcolm X as a torchbearer for South African resistance, on the grounds that local liberation movements have no need of imported heroes. A final reaction was that the saintly iconography of X was ultimately merely another Hollywood marketing opportunity, what one perceptive critic called "buy any means necessary."

This year, for the first time, demonstrating black students at the liberal University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg have hoisted a banner or two declaring, "By any means necessary." Perhaps more important, though, are the larger and longer cultural connections, many of which are not so politically comprehending. After all, Malcolm X entered a country whose youth, predominantly black but including whites, are in abject enchantment with American popular culture, be it rap or the Raiders. And, predictably perhaps, the film may find its true niche as the ideological equivalent of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. Black street stalls sell X clothing and caps, stores in largely white shopping malls stock X merchandise from local manufacturers—all invariably without any reference to the source. Numbers of college students are under the quaint impression that X is the New York Giants or Chicago White Sox logo. A final South African irony for Malcolm X, the movie, is that the symbol of an oppressed people that had forgotten its surname may already be on the way to losing its first name too.