In 1980 three uMkhonto weSizwe fighters held 25 people hostage in a Pretoria bank. Mandla Dube’s Netflix film rebuilds that day as a thriller in which the only ransom on the table is Mandela’s freedom.

On 25 January 1980, three young members of uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, ran into a Volkskas bank branch in Silverton, on the eastern side of Pretoria, with the police close behind them. Silverton Siege, directed by Mandla Dube and released by Netflix in April 2022, takes that day and rebuilds it as a hostage thriller with an unusual price tag: the three fighters want nothing from the vault. What they want is the freedom of Nelson Mandela.

A sabotage mission that collapses before it starts

Thabo Rametsi plays Calvin Khumalo, the de facto leader of the group; Noxolo Dlamini is Terra Mabunda and Stefan Erasmus is Aldo Erasmus. The three are MK operatives sent to sabotage a petrol depot outside Silverton, but the local police, led by Captain Johan Langerman (Arnold Vosloo), have been tipped off. The mission is aborted, the getaway van is shot up along with a comrade, and the trio escape on foot through the city’s sewage tunnels before surfacing near Church Square, in the centre of Pretoria. Spotted again, they take refuge in the nearest building that will have them, which happens to be a bank.

Inside, Calvin tells the customers and staff that this is not a robbery and asks them to stay calm so that nobody gets hurt. The screenplay then stacks the pressure. Langerman addresses the fighters by name, which tells them someone in their own organisation has talked. A helicopter they demand arrives with a pilot, Sechaba (Tumisho Masha), who is working for the police. And a brigadier takes over operational command once it emerges that the bank supervisor, Christine (Elani Dekker), is the daughter of the minister of justice.

It is at this point that Calvin decides the standoff has to stand for something larger than three cornered men. He demands that Mandela be officially pardoned and released, and the hostage-takers press the point by setting fire to piles of banknotes outside the bank in front of the television cameras, while the crowd gathered in the street takes up the call to free Nelson Mandela. From there the film works through the question of the informer, a trade of hostages for food and water, and a final police assault. Its closing credits link the siege to the campaign that ended a decade later with Mandela walking out of prison.

What the record says about Silverton

The real event was shorter and grimmer. The South African History Online archive names the three men as Stephen “Fanie” Mafoko, Humphrey Makhubo and Wilfred Madela. They were on their way to sabotage petrol depots at Waltloo, near Mamelodi, when they realised they were being followed, and they ducked into the Volkskas branch, where they held 25 civilians hostage.

Their recorded demands mixed politics and logistics: the release of Nelson Mandela and of another prisoner named Mange, a meeting with the head of state, R100,000 in cash and an aircraft to fly them to Maputo. Police negotiators spoke with them for hours while an anti-terrorist unit set up surveillance in a neighbouring building. In the evening the shooting started — it has never been established who fired first — and a hand grenade exploded among the hostages. All three men were killed. Two hostages, Valerie Anderson and Anna de Klerk, died of their injuries.

Reporting from the time the film was announced describes the siege as the first South African event covered live by the media, and Dube has said the three men taught their hostages freedom songs during the standoff. The director has also described Silverton as the place where the Free Nelson Mandela campaign began. At the very least, it was one of the campaign’s early flashpoints, a full decade before Mandela’s release in February 1990.

Roughly 60 per cent fact

The gap between that record and the film is deliberate, and the people who made it have said so openly. The project started with Sabelo Mgidi, a self-taught screenwriter and the author of three books, who stumbled on a few sentences about the siege while researching a web series and went on to write a complete screenplay. He took it to the production company Coal Stove, co-founded by the actor Wandile Molebatsi, whose uncle George Molebatsi had been the trio’s commander in the underground. Dube read the script while he was shooting his previous feature and decided to come on board.

Speaking to City Press in 2019, Mgidi put the film at about 60 per cent factual, with creative licence covering the rest, and both he and Dube said they wanted a thriller rather than a documentary. That licence explains the fictional names — the film’s trio are Calvin, Terra and Aldo, not Mafoko, Makhubo and Madela — and much of the scaffolding around them: the suspected informer, the police plant in the pilot’s seat and the supervisor with a cabinet minister for a father appear nowhere in the South African History Online timeline of the day.

Dog Day Afternoon, relocated to Pretoria

Dube’s reference points are on the record too. He studied at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles alongside Sechaba Morojele, who later edited the Silverton script, and both of them were taught by Frank Pierson, the screenwriter of Dog Day Afternoon. Dube has said the two analysed that script and Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film in detail. The family resemblance sits in the premise itself: a bank, a crowd in the street, the press looking on, and hostage-takers who end up addressing the public as much as the police.

Dube also said he wanted Pretoria to be foregrounded to the point of becoming a character, and the film was shot on location in the city. During development the project secured backing from the National Film and Video Foundation and a Department of Trade and Industry rebate under the Emerging Black Filmmakers Transformation Fund. Pambili Media produced, with Walter Ayres and Dube as producers, Shaun Harley Lee as cinematographer and Rashid Lanie as composer. The film runs 100 minutes and moves between English, Afrikaans and Zulu.

The soundtrack draws on the music of the struggle years and beyond it: Fela Kuti’s “Zombie”, Chicco Twala’s “I Need Some Money”, Johnny Clegg and Juluka’s “Impi”, Philip Miller’s “Hamba Kahle Umkhonto” and a Zamo Mbutho rendition of “Asimbonanga”, the song Clegg wrote for Mandela while he was still in prison.

From Kalushi to Silverton

Silverton Siege belongs to what Dube calls his Legends of Freedom series, alongside a planned film about the Rivonia Trial. The first instalment was Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu (2016), which Dube co-wrote with Leon Otto, about the young MK fighter from Mamelodi who was executed by the apartheid state. The connection runs deeper than theme. According to City Press, the real Silverton mission was meant as retaliation for Mahlangu’s execution, and Dube brought back the same lead: Rametsi, who played Mahlangu, now plays Calvin. When Netflix announced the film, Dube called it his strongest work so far.

The cast

Rametsi was born in Umlazi in 1988 and holds a law degree. His performance as Mahlangu won him Best Actor at the first BRICS Film Festival, and his international credits include The Giver and an episode of Homeland. Arnold Vosloo, born in Pretoria, built a Hollywood career on villains — Imhotep in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, Zartan in the G.I. Joe films, Habib Marwan in the fourth season of 24 — and comes home here as an apartheid-era police captain. Elani Dekker, nominated for a SAFTA for Toorbos, plays Christine, while Michelle Mosalakae, known on South African television for Isibaya and The Queen, makes her feature debut as Rachel.

Released on Freedom Day

Netflix announced the film and its cast in March 2022 and released it worldwide on 27 April, Freedom Day in South Africa, the anniversary of the country’s first democratic election in 1994. The timing framed it from the start as a commemoration as much as a genre piece.

A closing note

Silverton Siege asks a hostage thriller to carry a historical argument, and the tension between those two jobs is written into the project from the 60/40 split its screenwriter described. Viewers who know the 1980 record will see where the film parts ways with it; those who do not may come away wanting to look it up. For a story that, by Mgidi’s own account, amounted to two or three sentences when he first found it, that may be the most useful thing the film does.