Black Diamonds is a recently released short documentary by Dutch filmmaker, Saska Vredeveld (view the film here). The film offers an inside view of the personal lives of three black South African entrepreneurs, including the odd Felicia Mabuza-Suttle,  the “Oprah of South Africa.” The film’s promotional material very mistakenly refers to these people as South Africa’s emerging middle class, while I would peg them more accurately as the new rich.

There are contradictory ideas present between “the struggle” and the fruits of that struggle. These three people take pride in their wealth considering the hardships they faced as blacks under apartheid by calling it self-empowerment. However, I didn’t regard anything about their exorbitant lifestyles as self-empowering simply because the emphasis seems to be on the “self.” The hard fact that this film omits is that most black South Africans have remained dirt poor in the new South Africa. The film  prefers to focus on the few who’ve achieved great personal wealth and pass it off as whole class of people.

Black Diamonds does  highlight the conflict between business culture and race well. In other words, the difficult decision that black business professionals face between joining in with the behavior of the white status quo, or to take a subversive path  and risk irrelevance.  Business executive Richard Ndlela comments that business is the white man’s game and that black businessmen must “adapt or die,” whereas Vusi Vardos Mahlaba (the most interesting character, pictured above) prefers to keep his business in the black township.

This is a revealing and fascinating film about the mentalities of a few rich black South Africans who have “made it,” but they are certainly not the middle class as the film’s promotional material describes (if this is the middle class, I’d like to see what the affluent class looks like). “Black diamond” success stories are problematic as popular representations of South Africans because they feign racial and economic equality.

As it turns out, black wealth is not Vredeveld’s first stab at a niche group. She has also directed a documentary about South Africa’s poor white people called White Poverty. I’ll reserve my comments for when I actually see the film, but thoughts are already running through my head. I will say that Vredeveld may be searching for the untold story, which is great, but it must be done responsibly as well.

For a well-rounded documentation of black wealth in South Africa, I suggest checking out “Destination Johannesburg.” The site, a project of the French newspaper Liberation, hosts short documentaries on various people living in and around Johannesburg. Sandton resident, Letepe Maisela in particular offers a well-articulated account of his own success within the context of broader socio-economic struggles among black people.

– Allison Swank