South Africa in the mid-1980s was a land of relentless violence and conflict. As a foreign correspondent based in Johannesburg in those years, I moved from one burning black township to the next, and then on to the huge, tense funeral marches to bury the fallen.
Amid states of emergency, crackdowns by the white-minority rulers, and battles among black factions, it often felt like no outcome was possible other than all-out war between whites and the exiled African National Congress.
What we didn’t realize at the time was that, in utmost secrecy, a few people were trying to get the two entrenched enemies to meet and talk. And given the emotions and anger of those days, it certainly took more courage and skill to talk than to keep fighting.
“Endgame,’’ the season premiere of Masterpiece Contemporary on PBS (Channel 2) tomorrow night, tells the gripping story of one of those courageous initiatives - how a bespectacled, soft-spoken Englishman got talks going between rival teams led by the ANC’s deputy leader in exile, Thabo Mbeki, and a white Afrikaner academic, Willie Esterhuyse, at a manor house in the English countryside.
The challenge for director Pete Travis (“Vantage Point’’) and screenwriter Paula Milne was to keep the drama compelling while staying true to the facts of the slowly unfolding negotiations set in motion by Michael Young, who was public affairs director for the Consolidated Goldfields mining conglomerate.
They pull it off masterfully. The characters and settings are true to that recent past, gritty and ripping with tension. It helps to have William Hurt as the enigmatic Esterhuyse, who grapples with his own conflicted suspicions of the ANC and its tactics, colored by his growing awareness that whites were surrendering their humanity to suppress the black majority. Having heard many actors embarrass themselves with the unique English accent of Afrikaners, I was impressed at how well Hurt caught the inflections of their language.
The movie opens with scenes that capture what’s at stake: In one township street battle in 1985, rioters are stoning armored vehicles near a police roadblock. That’s where we meet Michael Young, played with persuasive understatement by Jonny Lee Miller (“Trainspotting’’). Young is being smuggled into Soweto to try to launch one of his company’s community-building projects. He is rebuffed. It’s quickly obvious to him that such efforts are pointless without much bigger changes.