Missing: Activities

Activities

1. Based on the images presented in A Dry White Season, how did the apartheid system work?

What are specific examples of the differences between white and black ways of life?

How does apartheid compare to the principles that once upheld racial segregation in the United States? What are the differences?

2. What are the advantages of telling the story from the point of view of a white South African? What are the limitations of this perspective?

3. In the movie, how do blacks attempt to resist the system?

How does black protest shown in the movie compare to the non-violent resistance used by Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States?

4. Which whites resist the system? How do they resist? Why do they resist?

What causes Ben to lose his faith in the existing political system?

When does resistance succeed?

What are the consequences of resistance?

5. Which blacks accept the system? Why?

6. As a teacher, Ben instructs his class in African history. How does the history presented in the movie uphold the principles of apartheid?

7. In the movie, A Dry White Season, how do members of the police and legal system justify the apartheid system?

How do their justifications compare to those offered by other South African whites in the movie?

8. How does the movie depict the relationship between South Africa’s political system and private family life?

Who betrays Ben Du Toit’s trust? Why?

Who offers him private support? Why?

9. Why do upholders of the apartheid system refer to their opponents as “terrorists and communists”?

Are those labels valid? Why?

10. In his notebook, Ben writes: “If I can change even one man who was as blind to the world as I have been, then it will have given meaning to my life.”

Do you think that such principles justify acts of disloyalty to the government? Why or why not?

11. How does the search for truth in A Dry White Season compare to a similar search in the movie, Missing, that is set in the same decade in Chile?

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