My Five Screen Portrayals of Nelson Mandela, From Best To Worst

Posted on February 10, 2017 by toddpanther

I had tried to avoid seeing BET’s “Madiba,” because I was afraid of it being really, really bad. I caught parts of it last night and was pleasantly surprised. Laurence Fishburne will die giving some great performance somewhere.

(Dear BET: I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but the little I saw last night made up for six hours of “New Edition” 🙂 Yes, I will relectantly admit it was a supergroup, but still….. SIX? LOL! I turned it off after the group sang “Can You Stand The Rain.”)

Anyway, the little I saw of “Madiba” last night was the Mandela that I had read about.

It made me think about how many times I’ve seen Madiba portrayed on screens big and little over the last 30.

Here are my five Mandela portrayals, from best to worst, with small commentary:

Idris Elba in “Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom:” No shade on Larry, but I wish he had been in this BET one! His movie did not really deal with the socio-political aspects of his story, but he did a LOT with what he had.
Sidney Poitier in “Mandela and DeKlerk:” A cable TV film that should be seen more. (So, shhh…check it out :))
Danny Glover in “Mandela:” Another forgotten cable TV film. (Shh…. :)) I remember falling in love with Alfre Woodard and Winnie Mandela at the same time because of this production. It’s important to point that this film was made during the Reagan administration, when The Powers That Be publicly considered Mandela a terrorist and many of the anti-apartheid protesters thought he would die in prison, sparking a South Africa race war.
Morgan Freeman in “Invictus:” In a way, this should be higher, because Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela the reconciliation president matches the actor’s on- and off-screen assimilationist persona.
The worst of the Nelson Mandela depictions was not hard to figure out. Beyond a shadow of the doubt, it would have to go to Terrence Howard (!) in “Winnie Mandela,” an extremely flawed film based on an extremely flawed book. (However, Jennifer Hudson’s extraordinary performance as the title character almost salvages the flick.) I struggled not to laugh out loud watching Howard, who, to be fair, was giving it his best.

Maya Angelou and James Baldwin

Posted on February 2, 2017 by toddpanther

It’s a looooong wait until Feb. 21.

My New Article From The United Nations About The Gambia……

Posted on January 24, 2017 by toddpanther

……is here.

Posted on January 20, 2017 by toddpanther

Obama Frees Puerto Rican Political Prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera!

Posted on January 18, 2017 by toddpanther

A rare, clear progressive move from a Black president determined not to be progressive (def: left).

If Obama was a angry Black man, he could free Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier as a protest to the unapologetic right-wing radicalism that is coming Friday. But, alas, all his life he has been proud not to be that.

Mini-Book Review: For Coretta Scott King, A Time To Break Silence

Posted on January 15, 2017 by toddpanther

My Life, My Love, My Legacy.
Coretta Scott King, as told to the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds.
Henry Holt and Company.
368 pp., $30.

The first First Lady of Black America has a lot to say, particularly since her first memoir, from 1969, was revised, not updated, about 25 years ago. Veteran Black journalist Barbara Reynolds, no stranger to chronicling the Civil Rights Movement, lets Coretta, who died in 2006, be Coretta, and the widow decided that meant turning her life into a Christian fable, a generation-filled testimony of faith and courage. The first half of the book re-hashes her time with MLK, but it’s the second half that awakens the reader from a black-and-white documentary slumber. That second act is where King details her struggles to create the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, and makes sure to, in a gentle Christian fashion, settle old scores against her husband’s former comrades-in-arms. So Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams and, later, the Black American apartheid activist Randall Robinson, are briefly portrayed as Black men who attempted to deny King the Black leadership mantle she said she inherited from God and Martin. King wanted this book to make clear to history that she was an important part of a dangerous movement for Black liberation (“We forged a rough and blood-drenched road, but Martin never looked for easy victories”). She convinces the reader that she was a well-respected national and international human rights leader in her own right–a Blackish heir to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was dubbed “The First Lady of the World,” and, to a lesser extent, singer-activist Paul Robeson. (Her story is sometimes candid, but other times exactly that, a story: for example, ignoring reams of documented history to the contrary, she claims her husband never cheated on her.) As Black America moves to permanently claim a younger, hipper, actual First Lady, it might be important to remember when thinking about both women that maintaining a public display of dignity–something they both mastered–was not enough; that it was direct, dangerous action against the forces of war, capitalism and white supremacy, accepting a life of risk that Coretta knew all too well, that made real, lasting history.