Most people will find this semi-musical about South Africa's apartheid years deeply disturbing. And, because it is a passionately committed enterprise, its dramas are more affecting than those of such better-acted African stories as Cry Freedom and A Dry White Season. Sarafina (Leleti Khumalo) is a teenage pupil at a Soweto school where rebellious talk costs lives and oppression by the military is the order of the day. Her teacher Mary (Whoopi Goldberg) teaches national pride mixed with history - too heady a brew for the authorities who soon have her in their sights. What follows is an all too familiar story of massacre, beating, kidnap and torture, only slightly relieved by the surging songs that drive the story along. Well-shot and edited and just well enough acted to get by, this is a harrowing, moving and entertaining history lesson in itself, although, alas, surely not the beginning of the end to racial oppression in the world.


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