Cover art by George Perez
Princess Koriand’r of the planet Tamaran has returned to Earth to reclaim her mantel as Starfire, a member of the DC Comics superhero team Teen Titans. Her flight over her adopted planet leads her to Africa, a continent that she has never visited. When she spots a mob of blacks setting a woman on fire while screaming “Informer!,” Starfire intervenes and soon finds herself caught between 24 million blacks fighting for freedom and the five million whites who hold political power in South Africa.
Although Starfire initially sides with the white soldiers who chased off the black mob that murdered the woman, she realizes the situation is more complicated when those same soldiers beat a black man for not carrying proper identification, an act which equally enrages the superhero.
“I never looked around, never really cared what was happening on Earth,” Starfire says to herself. “But this planet is my home now, too. And I’ve got to care.”
The two-issue Teen Titans Spotlight on Starfire – subtitled “Apartheid No More” – was published in 1986 at the height of demonstrations in the United States against South Africa. A first wave of protests erupted during the 1960s after anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. They then became more pronounced when South African troops opened fire on students in Soweto in 1976 and Black Consciousness leader Stephen Bilko was murdered in 1977.
The adoption of a new constitution in 1984 granting political rights to “coloreds” and “Asians” but not blacks, coupled with South African Bishop Desmond Tutu winning the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, further raised awareness of apartheid in the United States, as well as opposition.
Hollywood helped with that awareness, releasing the film Cry Freedom in 1987 – starring Denzel Washington as the slain Stephen Bilko – A World Apart in 1988, and A Dry White Season in 1989. The 1987 blockbuster Letha Weapon 2, meanwhile, pitted the buddy-cop team of Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh against white South African diplomats operating a massive drug ring in Los Angeles.
In 1985, Steven Vam Zandt, lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, enlisted the aid of over fifty fellow musicians for the anti-apartheid album Sun City. The “Apartheid No More” narrative in Teen Titans Spotlight on Starfire was thus part of a broader cross-media effort to raise awareness and elicit change in South Africa.
In the comic book, Starfire meets Father Nelson Mandutu, a fictional spiritual leader within the black freedom movement. “They believed her to be an informer, telling the government of our plans for freedom,” he explains of the violent attack the superhero witnessed when she first arrived in South Africa. “Our sad plight has resulted in violence, and I have fought against violence for many years. But my friends here, they don’t always listen to what is best.”
Starfire is eager to listen, however, and so the priest continues. “We aren’t allowed to live in the city, so we are forced to travel five hours to work, five hours home,” Father Mandutu says of blacks in South Africa. “Our jobs are menial ones because our people aren’t well educated. You would laugh at our schools, Starfire. White schools get almost $800 for each student, our schools get little more than $100. They think we are too stupid to know better, but that will change. As I said, we are too patient, but that will change, too.”
When Starfire first met Father Nelson Mandutu, she rhetorically asked, “This is it? Your home? But it’s nothing more than aluminum huts, dirt roads. How can you live here?” Those same shanties were the visual centerpiece an anti-apartheid movement in the United States during the 1980s. Numerous American universities had investments in South African corporations and found themselves under attack by college students demanding that the schools divest their holdings in the African nation.
According to Bradford Martin in his 2012 book, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan, the list of colleges targeted ranged from such Ivy League institutions as Dartmouth, Columbia, and Cornell, to universities well-known for student activism like the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, to Purdue University in Indiana and the University of Utah. On each of those campuses, “students built shantytowns to symbolize the oppressive conditions faced by black South Africans under apartheid.”
President Ronald Reagan considered the insurgent African National Congress in South Africa to be a communist front and feared that any changes in the South African government would result in communism gaining a foothold in Africa. College shanties were thus subjected to attacks by the far right – both verbally and physically. Members of a right-wing student newspaper at Dartmouth College, for instance, used sledgehammers to demolish recently constructed shanties on campus.
While Cold War rhetoric was used as justification for the Vietnam War in the 1960s, it failed to contain the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. As Andrew Hunt notes in his 2021 book We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan, U.S. investments in South Africa dropped from $2.8 billion in 1983 to $1.3 billion in 1985, while Exxon, Coca-Cola, IBM, Xerox, and Honeywell had ceased operations in South Africa by 1987. Awareness in the United States of the atrocities against native blacks in South Africa was having an impact.
It also had an impact on writer Marv Wolfman and his decision to highlight the atrocities of apartheid in Teen Titans Spotlight on Starfire. “As with most people, I’ve read about the problems facing South Africa for many years, but for some reason the problems never hit home,” he admitted in the back pages of the comic book. “Partly because South Africa is all the way around the world. Partly because I’m white. Partly because for many years there was almost no media attention paid to the horrors of Apartheid. But over the past few years attention has been paid and we are learning about the incredible inequities a minority government can inflict upon a majority population.”
Even then, Wolfman was reluctant. DC published comic books around the world and translated them into several different languages in Africa – including the native Zulu of South Africa. Wolfman thus feared repercussions against any anti-apartheid narrative, especially the banning of DC comics on the continent. DC publisher Jenette Kahn was not concerned, however, simply telling Marv Wolfman to “make it strong” when he pitched the idea to her.
When Father Nelson Mandutu is murdered by rogue South African soldiers, Starfire is framed for the crime. After proving her innocence, she confronts the actual culprit. “The countries of the free world are refusing to go along with the policies of apartheid,” Starfire tells him. “The days of supremacy of one race over another are over, and it’s just a matter of time before the disgusting system collapses of its own evil. History is on our side. Freedom will be theirs, and nobody, not you or this government, or any other dictator can hold it back. The march for peace will continue.”
Starfire then offers to stay in South Africa and help with the fight against apartheid. The wife of Father Nelson Mandutu – who has taken up the mantel of her slain husband – tells the superhero, “You can do more for us by letting others know the truth.”
In 1986, the Teen Titan from the planet Tamaran – with the help of Marv Wolfman and DC Comics – followed Adia Mandutu’s advice.
Anthony Letizia