STRANGE FRUIT ! Pride is A Deeper Love

"Pride is ACTIVISM started as ACTIVISM and must continue as ACTIVISM, otherwise Pride is like any other Music Festival or Event! We still face serious challenges to our Constitutional Rights as Equal citizens of South Africa. WE ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS OUR WEAKEST LINK. Its a POLITICAL STATEMENT for EQUALITY not just on paper but in SOCIETY AT LARGE. We cannot have a Political Platform for Social Justice turned into GAY DISNEYLAND by those who choose to ignore the issues of the majority of South African citizens. This is not what both Gay & Straight Freedom Fighters died and fought for. PRIDE is time to reflect on those who gave us our freedom and those who still don't have it." 

Dressed in the gold suit my mother wore to her Wedding reception in 1970, hairstyle inspired by Miriam Makeba during her Black Panther years married to Stokely Carmichael, singing a self composed (with genius producer Mason Black),  revamp of a Nina Simone cover of a Billy Holiday protest song with a South African HIV/Aids Activist and Queer Film legend Jack Lewis.

Jack's thoughts on and behind directing "Strange Fruit"

"Strange Fruit - the Nina Simone version - has always been a sad favourite of mine. 

The "Strange Fruit" video is deeply disturbing because of the images of dead black people hanging from trees. The song, first recorded by Billy Holiday in 1939 as a protest against the lynching of black people in the American south is extremely haunting.

 Last year Sizakele Sigasa, an outreach coordinator at Positive Women's Network and a lesbian and gay rights activist, and her friend Salome Masooa were brutally murdered in Soweto. The people arrested for their murder were released for lack of evidence. No one has yet been charged for their murders. Then the xenophobic hate crimes driven by inequality, competition for scarce resources and greedy,corrupt business people, hit in April and May 2008. Over 600 Somali immigrants have been killed - with hardly an arrest or conviction of anyone. This is part of a cycle of hate crimes against black people, immigrants and refugees. The gender-based terror faced by girls and women on a daily basis and broader crimes in our communities speak to a culture of violence that must be overcome.

The murder of Sizakele and Salome were not isolated incidents. There have been sustained attacks and murders of black lesbians. Most recently Eudy Simelane - a Banyana Banyana soccer player and lesbian in Kwa Thema. Only where there has been community mobilisation and unrelenting pressure put on the police and the prosecutors, have perpetrators been arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced.

Our version of "Strange Fruit" is designed to make pain visible and to use anger to spur people into action, to encourage us all to support groups such as the 07-07-07 Campaign, TAC and the One in Nine Campaign, working for the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators and to encourage people who have information to report perpetrators to the police.

Because the violence we are confronting involves hate crimes against lesbian and gay people, the theme of "Strange Fruit" seemed to take on an additional meaning when the song was sung by the very talented Odidi Mfenyana in high drag in the style of 70s pop Diva Grace Jones.

 The performance is deliberately a defiant overstating of Odidi's own sense of difference, a refusal to accept that the those filled with hate will win. The millions who accept dignity and human rights for all can overcome through thought, speaking out and action."

- August 2008

Jack Lewis lectured in political economy before founding Idol Pictures in 1993 and the Out in Africa South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1994. He has directed and produced numerous South African documentaries. He co-directed his first feature film, Proteus, with Canadian John Greyson in 2002 and produced Casa de la Musica, winner of the Encounters Jameson Best SA documentary Audience Award 2003.