A Dry White Season
This is the name of the principal character in the film, the white history teacher who finally opens his eyes to the injustices in South Africa, and whose [hvis] real name is Donald Sutherland.
Who is Benjamin Du Toit?
This language is often called "Kitchen-Dutch" and is a simpler form of Dutch, developed by black workers in order to be able to communicate with their white bosses.
What is Afrikaans?
This is an area of poor people's houses in South Africa. Shanty town, location, informal settlement, matchbox houses, village, parish, swartercamp - a number of different words are used to name the housing areas for the poorest, primarily black people in South Africa.
What is Township?
This is the name of the old lady and main character of the text, who lives as a widow behind a high wall and a locked gate somewhere in South Africa.
Who is Lillian Thurgood?
This is how we can see that the events of the text are seen through the eyes of a first-person narrator.
What is the personal pronouns 'I' and 'me' and the possessive pronoun 'my'?
These are the two boys, the white boy and the black boy, who at the opening of the film play without a worry in the world on the green lawn of the beautiful house in white suburbia.
Who are Johan and Jonathan?
This is what the letters ANC stand for.
What is the African National Congress? This organisation was founded in 1912 in order to bring all South African Africans together and defend their rights and freedom. This organisation was a response to the political steps taken at the time towards becoming a racially segregated country. During the years of apartheid the party was banned, but eventually it won the majority of seats in Parliament in the first democratically held election in 1994.
This is an Afrikaans word for the imfamous passbok which was required by law to be carried by all blacks during the time of apartheid. Literally, it means a "dumb or stupid pass." The pass book would contain personal details and permits to work in a designated area. If a person couldn't produce their passbook when asked for it, he or she was likely to be arrested.
Was is Dompas?
This is when the text takes place.
What is at some point after the fall of apartheid?
This is how we can see that the text takes place after the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s?
What is - among other things - that the elderly white man - apart from mentioning the year 1994 - lives a relatively simple life under rather poor conditions whereas the black man drives a fancy and expensive car and works for the government?
This is the last name of the very brutal captain of the special branch in South Africa who does everything he can to keep the white minority in power and the black majority away from it.
Who is Stolz?
This is the name of the small town in South Africa where a massacre took place in 1961 because the police opened fire on demonstrators.
What is Sharpville?
These are the four official races of South Africa.
What are White, Black, Coloured (multiracial) and Indian?
This is the name of the black man who comes from the Transkei to the gate of the old white woman and tries to take advantage of her.
Who is William Sidlayi?
This is what happened to Vusi Nkosi at the police station.
What is that he was asked by the police officers and the Captain if he could fly, after which he was dropped out of a window with his hands tied on the back, being severely injured?
This is the name of a black township of Johannesburg in South Africa where Stanley takes Benjamin Du Toit, hiding in the back seat of a car, to see the dead body of the gardner Gordon Ngubene.
What is Soweto?
This committee or commission was set up in the late 1990s by the government to hear the testimonies of victims and offenders of the apartheid regime. Only a small number were cases later tried at court. The fundamental idea was to forgive each other's sins and not allow the past to overshadow the possibility of a bright future.
What is the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission?
This is a designated area to which black people were removed by force by the apartheid regime. This was done with the intention of making the black population stateless and a race without any rights in South Africa. It was also done to make sure that the white population had certain areas to themselves.
What is Homeland?
This is what the text shows us about the relationship between white and black people in South Africa.
What is that the blacks and whites in South Africa still live in some form of separateness, that the whites fear the blacks, and that the whites feel guilty about the way the blacks were treated during the years of apartheid (1948-1990)?
This is how we can see that there is hope for the people of the Rainbow Nation.
What is - among other things - that the black man in the story only retaliates what happened to him in the past by driving away without paying for the gas, and that it seems in the text that God points His finger at no one?
This is one out of many possible definitions of apartheid as it was known and feared in South Africa between 1948 and 1990.
What is "a former policy of segregation and political, social, and economic discrimination against the nonwhite majority in the Republic of South Africa"? (See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apartheid)
This was the last state president (1989-1994) from the National Party and of the apartheid era in South Africa. He was president of the interim government from 1990 to 1994 before the democratic election in 1994.
Who is Frederik Willem de Klerk?
In 1966 this settlement in the city of Cape Town was declared a whites-only area and the apartheid regime removed people by force from there for two decades. The history of this settlement cn be viewed in a museum in Cape Town.
What is District Six?
There are the names of the two Alsatians which have been trained to obey commands and ultimately to kill.
Who are Tembi and Tor?
This is how we can see that the elderly man working at the gas station and suffering from amnesia is in fact the brutal captain of the police station, responsible for the mistreatment of Vusi Nkosi.
What is that the captain and the elderly man are educated people who know how to quote William Shakespeare, for instance 'To be or not to be, that is the question'?