David C. Oosthuizen

David C. Oosthuizen (1938-2005) was a documentary filmmaker

Biography

David Charles Oosthuizen was born on 16 May 1938. From approximately 1965 onwards he worked for the Department of Information in its various guises, sometimes on what were deemed “secret” projects. However, most of his documentaries were straightforward propaganda shorts, made to sell the National Party government’s ”separate development” policies to local and international audiences. A number of them, made for a series called Ditaba, dealt with individual “homelands”, while others, like Kutlwanong: a Place of Hearing (1969), The Parliament, Republic of South Africa (1974) and A Place Called Soweto (1982) had a little more personality.

In 1974 he accompanied the then Prime Minister, John Vorster, on a visit to the Ivory Coast and in 1976 he travelled with him to Israel, both journeys resulting in documentary shorts. On 25 April 1977 the Ministry of Information invited a group of journalists to visit Robben Island in order to illustrate that the persistent rumours of poor living conditions and mistreatment were not true. The occasion was filmed by a then unknown government cameraman, subsequently identified as Oosthuizen. The footage was first used in Clifford Bestall’s 1999 documentary The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela.

Oosthuizen was employed by the Ministry of Information until August 1977, but earlier that year he had become a director of a firm called Visiorama, together with J. van Zyl Alberts, managing director of the newspaper The Citizen and the magazine To The Point, and Matthys Heyns, managing director of Heyns Films. The following year Dr. Eschel Rhoodie, the Secretary of Information, revealed that like the print publications, Visiorama was a front company for the department, which continued to employ it to make propaganda shorts until the early eighties. It’s been suggested that every now and then Oosthuizen was required to make a short mildly critical of the government for UPITN, primarily to keep up appearances of impartiality. He died on 25 July 2005.

Sources

Rand Daily Mail (various issues)

James Sanders – South Africa and the international media 1972-1979: a struggle for representation (2000)

Archival card index of the Western Cape Provincial Library Service

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