‘Sarafina!’ (PG-13)

From the exclamation point in the title to the rallying chant-along finale, "Sarafina!" doesn't exactly revel in restraint. Then again, neither does the apartheid it's singing and dancing about. A surreal blending of showtime musicality with police-dog reality, the movie touches upon the political issues in its own crazy way.

It stars Whoopi Goldberg as Mary Masembuko, a high school teacher in the blacks-only township of Soweto, South Africa. Married to a radical fighter on the run, and stowing away his AK-47 rifle behind her stove, she teaches government-line history to the students, but interjects with the real truth about those Great Moments in Afrikaner History . . .

Now, hold the phone. Which part of South Africa is Goldberg from? Her accent doesn't make it quite clear. Could it be the Orange Free State of New York? Obviously, her prime purpose is coattail power. By headlining this adaptation of South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema's political-consciousness musical, she bears the message to America's video rental stores.

The actual story (the one with the real South Africans in it) is about the growing consciousness of trusting school kid Sarafina (Leleti Khumalo). A student in Goldberg's class, she soon gets the word on the white lies in her textbooks. She also learns about other treachery. There are government informers and puppets (including writer Ngema as a constable) everywhere and the police are just itching to roll out the German shepherds, tear gas and armored cars. Newly charged, Khumalo criticizes her mother (Miriam Makeba) for playing nanny to pampered white children. She also realizes mentor Goldberg is in real danger.

Based on the real children's resistance movement in Soweto in the mid-1970s, "Sarafina!" unleashes images of now-archetypal facets of South African political life: the funerals, the stone-throwing youths and so forth. With its song-and-dance call to defeat injustice (the play was written before the repeal of apartheid laws), it's basically "Agitprop: The Musical!" Imagine an African Doris Day waking up in a police state, singing about it (to mbaqanga music), then learning that even the innocent get their heads bashed in.

Director Darrell James Roodt offers some well-choreographed, if modestly budgeted moments. There's something undeniably stirring about entire groups of black children in preppie school uniform doing "West Side Story" routines against the dusty shantyscape. Khumalo is extremely appealing. When she speaks daily to -- and deifies -- a photograph of black leader Nelson Mandela, then in musical fantasy scenes imagines herself as him, the scenes work primarily because of her in-built naivete.

The trouble is, in a movie about South Africa, what possible happy ending could Khumalo's own story conclude with? Musicals end happily after all, and people aren't linking hands across the Transvaal yet. The movie dips into the Doris Day genre again. Battle-weary Khumalo's final revelation is not that resistance is futile, or that Mandela's photograph is actually just a photograph. It's that brutal police massacres may come and go, but Mom is a girl's best friend.