Assignment Africa

African Jim (1949) and The Magic Garden (1951), both directed by Donald Swanson, have a unique place in the history of film in South Africa as amongst the first films to place black identity and experience at their centre. While there is considerable scholarship on the films, there has been little consideration of Donald Swanson's varied career and output. This article shows how he participated in a network of documentary and colonial filmmakers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, first in Gaumont-British Instructional (GBI) and subsequently in African Film Productions (AFP). It builds on my earlier research and the recent recovery of two colonial films that he scripted and directed, Chisoko the African (1949) and Mau Mau (1954). Tracing Swanson's beginnings with the GBI series on British Railways for which he wrote two scripts, I identify key characteristics of his style and aesthetics. This leads into a discussion of the contexts within which GBI established its Africa office in Johannesburg; it was GBI's expertise in making films specifically for British audiences that led to the commission for Chisoko the African. I analyse the film, touch on its reception and consider evidence of Swanson's colonial imaginary which was characterised by a binary opposition between African primitivism and western civilisation. Finally, I note key aspects of his later work before drawing conclusions about the connected colonial film histories between Britain and Southern Africa; individual colonial film figures and their networks; and the importance of film in relation to histories of the late 1940s and early-mid 1950s. These contexts offer new perspectives on the appeal of African Jim and The Magic Garden for African audiences in South Africa. Notes 1 J. Maingard, South African National Cinema, (Oxford and New York, Routledge, 2007). *With thanks to Hilary Sapire, and participants in the ‘South Africa on Film’ workshop, ‘Southern Africa: History, Culture and Society’ seminar series, London, June 2011; fellow researchers in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (APC), University of Cape Town, for comments on earlier drafts of this work, especially Joanne Bloch, Alex Dodd, Carolyn Hamilton, Glen Ncube and John Wright; Freddy Ogterop for helpful details of Donald Swanson's life and work; Sue Ogterop, UCT Libraries, for unfailing research assistance; Steve Arnold, Stephen Lyons and Tom Rice for valuable references; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Carli Coetzee, Ann Cvetkovitch, Lyn Schumaker, Lauren Van Vuuren and the JSAS reviewers for critical comments; the British Film Institute (BFI) and Imperial War Museum (IWM), London. Special thanks to Emma Sandon. 2 On the films' reception see Maingard, South African National Cinema, especially pp. 77–89; P. Davis, In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema's South Africa (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, and Athens, Ohio University Press, 1996); L. Dovey and A. Impey, ‘African Jim: Sound, Politics, and Pleasure in Early “Black” South African Cinema’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 22, 1 (June 2010), pp. 57–73; and the documentary In Darkest Hollywood. For synopses see Maingard, South African National Cinema, p. 77 (African Jim) and p. 85 (The Magic Garden). 3 D. Swanson, Highveld, Lowveld and Jungle (South Africa, Central News Agency, Ltd., 1957); The Freedom Killers (Cape Town, Simondium Publishers, 1961); Sunrise over Tanesia (Cape Town, Simondium Publishers, 1965); Assignment Africa (Cape Town, Simondium Publishers, 1965). The Freedom Killers appears on the list of Objectionable Literature in the Cape Town Archives Repository. 4 T. Rice, ‘British Instructional Films’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/british-instructional-films, retrieved on 8 April 2013. 5 His first film for GBI was All Things Equal (1946), a training film sponsored by the Scotland Yard Criminal Investigation Department. See ‘All Things Equal’, available at http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/organisation/7738, retrieved on 5 April 2013. A missionary film is listed in the BFI database as having been produced in 1945 by Swan Film Productions, Swanson's later film company, but there is no clear evidence of Swanson's involvement in this. If this was the case, he would have filmed in Africa before Chisoko the African. Swanson co-directed All Things Equal with another GBI stalwart, Harold Goodwin, who would later become the Associate Producer on Chisoko the African. Goodwin was also the scriptwriter and Associate Producer for the first film in the British Railways series, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1946). 6 For an overview of postcolonial theory's key proponents, a critique of its essentialising tendencies, and its potential contribution to British imperial history, see D. Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24, 3 (1996), pp. 345–63. On ‘imperial imaginary’, see E. Shohat and R. Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York, Routledge, 1994), pp. 100–36. 7 J. van Zyl, ‘“No God, No Morality, No History”: South African Ethnographic Film’, Critical Arts, 1, 1 (1980), pp. 32–7. 8 K. Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid (London and New York, Routledge, 1989); Davis, In Darkest Hollywood; L. Marx, ‘Black and Blue in the City of Gold’, in S. Nuttall and C.-A. Michael (eds), Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 127–40; G. Baines, ‘On Location: Narratives of the South African City of the 1940s and 1950s in Film and Literature’, South African Historical Journal, 48, 1 (2003), pp. 35–46; V. Bickford-Smith, ‘How Urban South African Life Was Represented in Film and Films consumed in South African Cities – in the 1950s', Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads, 3 (2006), pp. 431–42; L. Kruger, ‘Filming the Edgy City: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Form in Postapartheid Johannesburg’, Research in African Literatures, 37, 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 141–63; Dovey and Impey, ‘African Jim’; L. Modisane, ‘“Suddenly the Film Scene is Becoming our Scene!” The Making and Public Life of Black-Centred Films in South Africa (1959–2001)’ (PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010); L. Modisane, South Africa's Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centred Films (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 9 Baines, ‘On Location’, Bickford-Smith, ‘How Urban South African Life Was Represented in Film’, and Davis, In Darkest Hollywood, also locate the films in relation to others in this cluster/period. 10 Davis, In Darkest Hollywood, pp. 21–34. See also Rutherford's comments in the documentary film In Darkest Hollywood (1993), made by Davis and D. Riesenfeld. 11 Davis, In Darkest Hollywood, p. 34. 12 This is largely due to the emphasis on textual ‘readings’ of the films and their location in historical context, which has not stretched to also locating the films' director within the trajectory of his professional development. 13 Maingard, South African National Cinema, p. 134. Like its first version (Harold Shaw, 1916) the film dramatises the Boers'/Voortrekkers' encounter in 1838 with Dingane, the Zulu king, the ‘Battle of Blood River’ (Ncome River) and Dingane's assassination from the perspective of the Boers/Voortrekkers. See Maingard, South African National Cinema, pp. 16–34. 14 See http://colonialfilm.org 15 Emma Sandon had discovered Chisoko the African in her research on colonial films held in the BFI in the mid-1990s, which she passed on to June Givanni, then at the BFI, who subsequently informed Colin MacCabe of this ‘rich corpus of colonial films that had not been fully catalogued’. See C. MacCabe, ‘“To Take Ship to India and See a Naked Man Spearing Fish in Blue Water”: Watching Films to Mourn the End of Empire’, in L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film, (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–2. 16 T. Rice, ‘Chisoko the African’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/46, retrieved on 17 August 2010. 17 His last film for GBI is Mining Centre, Johannesburg (1950), co-directed with S.G. Fergusson and co-produced by J. Arthur Rank Film Productions. See ‘Mining Centre, Johannesburg’, available at http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/20480, retrieved on 6 October 2009. 18 This was the substance of the subtitle to the report. See J. Merle Davis, Modern Industry and the African (London, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 2nd edition, 1967). 19 G. Reynolds, ‘The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Struggle for Hegemony in British East and Central Africa, 1935–1937’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 29, 1 (March 2009), p. 61. 20 Ibid., p. 71. 21 J.M. Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 27. 22 There had been some experimentation with films for Africans in the 1920s on the basis that they had ‘different cognitive abilities’. See T. Rice, ‘BEKEfilm’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/bekefilm, retrieved on 10 April 2012. William Sellers, a medical officer in the Nigerian government, ‘championed’ a formal method of filmmaking designed for Africans that included long takes and minimal effects, and which Notcutt picked up in his filmmaking with BEKE. See Burns, Flickering Shadows, pp. 39–42. 23 Some of the films continued to be screened in Central and East Africa through 1938. See Reynolds, ‘The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment’, p. 70. Three surviving films are held at the BFI and streamed online at http://www.colonialfilm.org: African Peasant Farms – The Kingolwira Experiment (1936), Tropical Hookworm (1936), and Veterinary Training of African Natives (1936). 24 For a full list of the Council, see L.A. Notcutt and G.C. Latham, The African and the Cinema: An Account of the Work of the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment during the Period March 1935 to May 1937 (London, Edinburgh House Press, 1937), pp. 209–10. The Chairman was Lord Lugard, International Institute of African Languages and Literatures; the Vice-Chairman was Dr T. Drummond Shiels, Chairman of the Dominions, India and Colonies Panel, BFI. 25 L. Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 49, 129. 26 R. Low, The History of the British Film 1929–1939: Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (London and New York, Routledge, 1997 [1979]), p. 25. 27 Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, The Film in National Life (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1932), p. vii. 28 R. Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule: The Case of Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia’, in T. Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Humanity Books, New York, 1973), p. 186; Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology. 29 C. McIntyre, ‘Celebrating International Women's Day’, http://lib1.lse.ac.uk/archivesblog/?tag = audrey-richards, retrieved on 15 April 2013; Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’, p. 178; M.C. Musambachime, ‘The University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies and Social Science Research in Central Africa, 1938–1988’, History in Africa, 20 (1993), pp. 237–48; Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology. 30 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 60. 31 Ibid., pp. 101, 128; Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’, p. 178. 32 Ibid., pp. 182–4. 33 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, pp. 99, 119, 144, 171, 182. 34 On the strikes see I. Henderson, ‘Early African Leadership: The Copperbelt Disturbances of 1935 and 1940’, JSAS, 2, 1 (October 1975), pp. 83–97. 35 Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’, p. 191; Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 61. 36 For details of the research and personnel, see Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’; Musambachime, ‘The University of Zambia's Institute’; L. Schumaker, ‘A Tent with a View: Colonial Officers, Anthropologists, and the Making of the Field in Northern Rhodesia, 1937–1960’, Osiris, 2nd series, Science in the Field, 11 (1996), pp. 237–58; Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology. Brown and Schumaker discuss aspects of the tensions described. 37 Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’, pp. 184–5, 191–2, 197. 38 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 61. 39 Ibid. 40 On the 1945 strike see K.P. Vickery, ‘The Rhodesia Railways African Strike of 1945, Part I: A Narrative Account’, JSAS, 24, 3 (September 1998), pp. 83–97; K.P. Vickery, ‘The Rhodesia Railways African Strike of 1945, Part II: Cause, Consequence, Significance’, JSAS, 25, 1 (March 1999), pp. 49–71. 41 Both Latham (of BEKE) and William Sellers applied for the post of Director, which went to Sellers. 42 It was also ‘at the forefront of discourses surrounding the use of cinema in the colonies’. The anthropologist Peter Morton-Williams conducted research for the CFU on African audiences in 1952. See T. Rice, ‘Colonial Film Unit’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/colonial-film-unit, retrieved on 30 March 2013; Burns, Flickering Shadows; R. Smyth, ‘The British Colonial Film Unit and Sub-Saharan Africa, 1939–1945’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8 (1988), pp. 285–98; R. Smyth, ‘The Post-War Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa: 1946–1955’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12, 2 (1992), pp. 163–77. 43 The Federation was established in 1953 and ended in 1963, before Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland gained independence from Britain in 1964. Schumaker notes that the ‘underlying motives’ for the proposed federation of these territories ‘included stopping South African expansion northward and preserving good relations with Southern Rhodesian settlers who controlled the mining of strategic minerals’, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 26. 44 For example, Mr Tea and Mr Skokiaan (1939) and The Two Brothers (1940). See Maingard, South African National Cinema, p. 73; T. Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa 1895–1940 (Cape Town, Howard Timmins, 1972), pp. 328, 356, 381. 45 For details on the full span of CAFU's life and work from 1948 to 1963 see T. Rice, ‘Central African Film Unit’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/central-african-film-unit, retrieved on 22 April 2013; Burns, Flickering Shadows, especially pp. 60–105; R. Smyth, ‘The Central African Film Unit's Images of Empire, 1948–1963’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3, 2 (1983), pp. 131–47. 46 See L. Nell, Images of Yesteryear: Film-making in Central Africa (Zimbabwe, Harper Collins Publishers, 1998). 47 T. Rice, ‘Gaumont-British Instructional’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/gaumont-british-instructional, retrieved on 3 May 2012; T. Rice, ‘Southern Rhodesia Is This Your Country?’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1278, retrieved on 19 April 2013; B.M. Connolly, ‘Southern Rhodesia – Is This Your Country?’, Sight and Sound, (Spring, 1948), pp. 7–9. 48 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 208. 49 The Times, 29 November 1948, p. 8. See also Rice, ‘Chisoko the African’. Nell suggests that they were ‘publicity films’, of which ‘two were technical films on the copper industry, and two were of general interest’, Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia and Chisoko the African. See Nell, Images of Yesteryear, p. 196 n.2. 50 The Times, 14 December 1949, p. 9. See also Rice, ‘Chisoko the African’. 51 Swanson, Assignment Africa, p. 3. 52 He mistakenly calls him John Collier in Assignment Africa. For an account of this history see K. Bradley, Copper Venture: The Discovery and Development of Roan Antelope and Mufulira (London, Mufulira Copper Mines Limited and Roan Antelope Copper Mines Limited, 1952). 55 Swanson, Assignment Africa, p. 2. 56 Swanson, Sunrise over Tanesia, p. 9. 53 Swanson's crew included Goodwin as Associate Producer and V.B. Lyndon-Haynes as Production Manager, both of whom had worked with him on the British Railways series. Ronald Shears, also a GBI man, was commissioned as cameraman. He subsequently worked on The Mystery of the Snakeskin Belt (1950), which Swanson co-wrote, and African Jim. All the crew had previously worked on GBI productions in Africa. These levels of familiarity would have facilitated the reproduction of GBI's documentary codes and conventions. 54 See Nell, Images of Yesteryear, p. 196 n.2. 57 He was not unique in this as by this time it was common practice. 58 See M. Paris, ‘Africa in Post-1945 British Cinema’, South African Historical Journal, 48, 1 (May 2003), pp. 61–70, who notes how the Colonial Film Unit ‘explained the war to African audiences’ (p. 63) [my emphasis]. This notion of ‘explanation’ is, in my view, transferable to colonial films for British audiences, especially instructional films aimed at young educational audiences. 59 C. MacCabe, ‘To Take Ship to India’, p. 16. 60 The role of District Officer and his point-of-view in colonial film is underscored by several examples including Palaver: A Romance of Northern Nigeria (1926), and District Officer (1945), both streamed and analysed at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1342 and http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1331 respectively; Men of Two Worlds (1950), analysed at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1845; and Sanders of the River (1935). 61 P. Jaikumar, ‘An “Accurate Imagination”: Place, Map and Archive as Spatial Objects of Film History’, in L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film, p. 172. 62 On the question of the ‘disembodied’ voice in documentary, see C. Wolfe, ‘Historicising the “Voice of God”: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary’, Film History, 9, 2 (1997), pp. 149–67; M. Stollery, ‘Voiceover/Commentary’, in S. Anthony and J.G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 168–78. 63 On the problems experienced by Swanson in shooting this scene, see his Assignment Africa, p. 43. 64 On the representation of village life in popular ethnographic films in the 1920s see E. Sandon, ‘Projecting Africa: Two British Films of the 1920s’ in E. Hallam and B. Street, Cultural Encounters: Representing Otherness (London and New York, Routledge, 2000), pp. 109–47. 65 Swanson, Assignment Africa, p. 31. 66 Ibid., p. 30. 67 F. Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, Duke University Press, 1996), p. 6. See J. Maingard, ‘The Rose of Rhodesia: Colonial Cinema as Narrative Fiction and Ethnographic Spectacle’, Screening the Past, Special Issue: Colonial Africa on the Silent Screen: Recovering the Rose of Rhodesia (1918), 25 (2009), available at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/25/rose-of-rhodesia/maingard.html 68 Sandon, ‘Projecting Africa’. 69 On the common colonial trope of associating the ‘primitive’ with drumming, see Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, p. 109. 70 Swanson, Assignment Africa, p. 21. 71 See G. Williams, Guide to Sources of Illustrative Material for Use in Teaching History (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 62; A. Eyles, Gaumont British Cinemas (London, BFI, 1996), p. 190. Enchantment (1948) stars David Niven and would have been popular with cinema audiences. The Ostrich (1949) is a short film produced by Gaumont-British Animation. Nell notes that Chisoko the African was ‘widely shown in British cinemas during 1949–50’. See Nell, Images of Yesteryear, p. 196. For further detail on these issues of reception see Rice, ‘Chisoko the African’. 72 Today's Cinema, 72, 5796 (29 April 1949), p. 7. 73 ‘Recent Religious Films’, Look and Listen, 1953. 74 Rice, ‘Chisoko the African’. For a discussion of cinema audiences in Northern Rhodesia see C. Ambler, ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia’, The American Historical Review, 106, 1 (February 2001), pp. 81–105. 77 Ibid., p. 9. With the hindsight of postcolonial theory one might call the Kalela dance a ‘hybrid’ form incorporating elements of ‘mimicry’. 75 J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, The Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 27 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1968 [1956]). 76 Ibid. 78 Ibid., p. 44. 79 It was a J. Arthur Rank film for children. See E. Rutherford, Nine Lives: the Autobiography of Erica Rutherford (Canada, Ragweed Press, 1993), p. 76; ‘Rand Actors in Rhodesia: Children's Film Nearly Finished’, Sunday Times, 24 October 1948. 80 Swanson, ‘South African Film’, New York Times, 2 October 1949, available at http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/donald+swanson+south+african+film, retrieved on 8 August 2012. 81 When she met Swanson, in her early twenties, she was living as a man, married to Gloria Green. It was many years later, at the age of 52, that Rutherford underwent surgery and changed her name from Eric to Erica. 82 The funding was largely provided by Green's parents, Sonny and Hetty Green. See Rutherford, Nine Lives, p. 77. 83 It was part of the powerful Schlesinger Organisation that emulated the Hollywood studio model, and thus enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the production, distribution and exhibition of film entertainment in South Africa. By the late 1940s, when Swanson arrived on the scene, Schlesinger's holding company African Films Trust had a monopoly over film production through African Film Productions (AFP), and over film distribution and exhibition through African Consolidated Films (ACF) and African Consolidated Theatres (ACT). The ‘three greats’ (ACF, the Fox Corporation and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) reportedly used strong-arm tactics to force out any would-be competitors ensuring that striking out independently was almost certainly doomed to failure. Complaints to the government by ‘independents’ in the 1950s led to a Board of Trade and Industries investigation into monopolistic practices in cinema distribution in 1958–1962. 84 Rutherford, Nine Lives, p. 84. 85 Ibid., p. 83. Rutherford names Sanderson as the senior partner of their attorneys which suggests that the firm was the Johannesburg-based Hayman, Godfrey and Sanderson that later merged into the high-profile Bowman Gilfillan. 86 Ibid. 87 Maingard, South African National Cinema, p. 79. 88 Ibid., pp. 6, 78, 179 n.6. The ‘All-African’ descriptor was used for all the films focusing on black identities in the early to mid 1950s but African Jim was the first to do so. 89 Rutherford, Nine Lives, p. 90. 90 For detailed analysis of Zonk! see Maingard, South African National Cinema, pp. 90–9. 91 Rutherford, Nine Lives, p. 90. 92 Ibid., p. 84. The cinema screenings would have been on 35 mm prints. 93 Davis, In Darkest Hollywood, p. 32. 94 Rutherford had discussed the idea for the next film with Jenny Hutt, African Jim's editor, who was married to Sylvester Stein. Stein was working on the Rand Daily Mail with Ambrose-Brown and introduced Rutherford to him. He later became editor of Drum magazine, 1955–1958. Hutt was the daughter of Allen Hutt, a key figure in the Communist Party of Great Britain, summary details available at http://www.communistpartyarchive.org.uk/9781851171354.php#HUTT, retrieved on 21 September 2012. 95 Ibid. See ‘Gold: Judgment Day’, Time (1 May 1950), available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,812355,00.html, retrieved on 6 August 2012. 96 ‘Africans may see film on terrorism: Kenya documentary sent to London’, East African Standard, (17 September 1954), p. 29; T. Rice, ‘Mau Mau’, available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/3233, retrieved on 19 June 2012. 97 Monthly Film Bulletin, 22, 256 (May 1955), pp. 77–8. 98 The website holds information on over 6,000 films, and over 150 films are available online with critical notes on over 350 of the most important films. Two volumes are other important outcomes. See Grieveson and MacCabe, Empire and Film; L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 99 See MacCabe, ‘To Take Ship to India’, p. 3

African studies · The Imaginary · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies