Govan Mbeki and The ANC Youth League

The movie Searching for Sugarman, for all its many deficiencies, does raise analytical issues which ought not to be dismissed. It is true that the film presents South African politics in a confusing way and avoids the issue of race. But these failures do not entirely invalidate the film, and they certainly should not lead us to ignore the important sociological questions to which it points. The interaction between South African youth and global Counterculture from the late 1960s through the 1980s was a significant phenomenon, which Searching for Sugarman explores in interesting and suggestive ways.