Mo Shaik laughed a little, then put it bluntly: "We didn't know shit."

He'd summarised it so well that no-one could tangle with his wry interpretation.

The subject was February 2, 1990, when then-president FW de Klerk unbanned liberation movements in a speech in Parliament that shook the world. Few, bar the hushed inner circle of the regime, knew he was going to do it.

But Shaik revealed that once it was said, he was aware that he would probably no longer be killed by apartheid forces.

The revelation was somehow a shock, just as De Klerk's announcement was to all who were fighting bravely within the country, in prison and in exile.

Of course this was what they had all wanted, but - as former Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils remarked - it meant there would be no revolution, no marching through the streets of Johannesburg, Cuban-style, in fatigues and berets.

These reflections come around the beginning of Behind the Rainbow, a new documentary film which goes on circuit on Friday. It's open heart surgery on the ANC as it slices into nearly 40 years of liberation history, and its Franco-Egyptian director, Emmy Award nominee Jihan el-Tahri, can boast a grand achievement.

"I didn't intend to stay four years," she said this week, explaining that it was previously most common for her to locate herself in a country where she is working on a film for "one, two months at a time" while she is doing preparation.

But Lebanon-born el-Tahri is now quite a fixture in Melville, where she lives in Johannesburg.

It wasn't easy in the beginning. She knew what she wanted to do: to understand where the liberation movement had come from, where it was at and where it was going.

That has been her consistent métier through several highly-praised documentary works including The Koran and the Kalashnikov, about Osama bin Laden's training camps in Sudan, the extraordinary House of Saud in which the royal family tells its history of the desert kingdom, L'Afrique en Morceaux which tackles the tragedy of the Great Lakes region and Cuba! Africa! Revolution!, the story of Fidel Castro's troops fighting racism and oppression in Africa. The latter was recently screened to acclaim in South Africa.

For the first six months, el-Tahri and her crew had little success in enticing our major political players to sit down with them. Unrelenting in her purpose, she now has a film alive with important voices from the jagged edge of a desperate divide - Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, Mac Maharaj, Pallo Jordan, Kader Asmal, Victor Moche, Siphiwe Nyanda.

There will be some surprises for those who are not versed in the ANC's courageous history, for instance, Zuma's fond recollections of Mbeki during the time when they were in Swaziland, running one of the most dangerous operations in Umkhonto we Sizwe's history.

Their deep relationship as comrades and, largely, friends for years has seldom been elucidated, and this adds a certain poignancy to more recent history.

Where Zuma has a warm, if ironic laugh about being in exile together, his reflections on the arms deal, his disbelief at being singled out *1 and the shadow left by an arduous, doomed rape trial show some real pain. Those watching, who have found themselves drawn into taking sides, will undoubtedly have an emotional response either way.

"But I did not try to tell the story of the two men," el-Tahri says. And she is right. This film reaches inside its subject, the ANC, without veering from that complex narrative.

Certainly, in the recent past, the dramatic power thrusts of both Zuma and Mbeki have been ineluctably absorbing, but the party itself - its wars, the pounding of its blood, its agonising truths - provides a far more fascinating delivery of ideas and meaning. The footage of life in the MK camps from the 1970s is so rare that it is moving. Even the images from Codesa - when the ANC gave in, and proposed sunset clauses that effectively stymied the complete economic and moral liberation of the masses - should touch us. Sheer guts has got lost in the miasma of analysis.

Although her narration is critical, el-Tahri most deftly unravels sub-texts through her camera, for instance where she uses weary faces in the crowd at the fraught Polokwane conference in December to unveil the final blow to Mbeki as he delivered his closing address.

If his heart had never beat in sync with the poor of this country, it was never more evident than here. He was not booed, but his plot to vanquish *2 had lost all its might. And, speaking of Polokwane, el-Tahri somehow manages to exceed the brief we got from the media covering the events through simple, careful portraits. At the end of the conference, as Mbeki faced his final curtain, he is pictured clapping to Leth' umshini wam as Zuma takes to the stage, booming with power. Mbeki's companion, also clapping, is Mosiuoa Lekota.

If we did not see, this film goes some way to opening our eyes. And that means that if we have forgotten, we must remember. And since the media largely concentrates on examining the day to day political strife, we could so rapidly allow the significance of the past to be excised. This film revives it. It lifts the layers of polish, the layers of dirt. It reveals the underneath, the many things we did not properly contemplate. Even though it has been nearly 15 years since the South African soul was shifted, we have had pitifully few conversations.

Destined for international TV and festival screenings, this film is part of el-Tahri's crusade to take African voices off the margins. It will surely do the same for us, take the breadth of those opinions we should be considering, off the periphery.

"Sometimes we confuse what we think with what we should be seeing. It's about the what, not the who. We must take the time to look back or we give ourselves a raw deal."

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