Lionel Rogosin, a filmmaker against apartheid

In 1959 — “Anno Domini 1959” — a film reached the screens that set out to show the public apartheid as it was lived day to day by the non-white majority of South Africa¹: it was Come Back, Africa, a film by the American Lionel Rogosin, a committed Jewish filmmaker, author of films about racial segregation in the USA and the struggle of African Americans for their rights:

“I heard about South Africa, about apartheid and the rise of the National Party. The rebirth of fascism preoccupied me. We had defeated fascism in the Second World War, but that victory seemed to me a fleeting one. I sensed that it would rise again and endure in another form. The situation in South Africa displayed all of its symptoms: imperialism, racism, and so on. I went there to make a film against apartheid and to portray apartheid”².

It was the first American film to have been shot in collaboration with Black South African artists, the writers Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane³, and to have given a voice on screen to people of different social backgrounds⁴.

This film is akin both to Soviet cinéma-vérité⁵ and to Italian neorealism. The main character, Zacharie Mgape, Rogosin met at a bus stop. As Lewis Nkosi recalls: “The characters he engaged to act in the film were complete amateurs. The white performers were for the most part progressive whites. But the violence that characterized relations between whites and blacks was so clear and so familiar to them that they had a perfectly authentic overall view of it”⁶. Come Back, Africa is a reconstruction and makes plain the choice of an author who wishes to make neither a documentary nor an ethnographic film. Let us note that Miriam Makeba made her appearance in it as a singer and that she became famous. Fundamental as much for its problematics as for its aesthetic, Come Back, Africa develops the same thematics as certain Yiddish short stories from South Africa, notably those published in New York in 1957⁷, and one may pose the question that Rogosin poses to himself, that of Jewish engagement in the struggle against apartheid:

“My very first contact with the revolutionary Jews of South Africa took place shortly after my arrival in Johannesburg in October 1957. With my ex-wife Elinor, I made a film about the life of Africans under the apartheid regime. We left South Africa in October 1958 with my son Michael, whom we made in South Africa, and my film Come Back, Africa, which I had sent abroad in little bits and pieces for fear of seeing the authorities confiscate it.

Although this was my first real contact with apartheid, my engagement was far older. As a child, the sympathy and affection I felt for blacks made me sensitive to the injustice and cruelty of racism. Then, in the forties, the shock of the Holocaust was such a trauma for me that I swore to fight fascism and racism in all their forms.

In South Africa, one of my very first contacts was with Monty and Mirtle Berman — they would act in the film — left-wing people who brought me their help and support. Thanks to them, I met numerous revolutionaries, dissidents, and Marxists who actively opposed the government. One thing struck me almost at once: most of them were Jewish. But that was not all. By a strange coincidence, most of them came from Lithuania. Now, my father’s entire family was originally from Lithuania. In fact my grandfather was a Talmudist who taught at the Yeshiva of Vilnius. By a coincidence full of humor, in seeking to fight apartheid I had traveled six thousand miles only to find myself in the midst of my ‘compatriots’ at the southernmost edges of Africa!“⁸

An undeniably dissident film — it was immediately banned in South Africa⁹ — and unique of its kind — it marked a break with American cinematic production aimed at South Africa — Come Back, Africa may rightly be called revolutionary, even though, for reasons unknown to us, it sometimes happens to be passed over in silence¹⁰. It stages the inhuman living conditions of the miners of the Rand, just as do the South African Yiddish short stories of Richard Feldman, “Massika, the night watchman” and “Carbide ash,” contained in his collection Blacks and Whites, published in New York. Although Rogosin had not read these stories, his interest and his orientation run in the same direction. We witness a convergence of ideas and an identical aim: to make known to the public, reader or spectator, the reality of apartheid in everyday life. If the reach of the short stories is lesser compared to the film — they touch only a committed Yiddish-speaking public, albeit one scattered across the four corners of the world — the film, for its part, has the possibility of awakening the awareness of a wider public. Nevertheless, stories written in Yiddish escape censorship, which is not the case for the film. The correlation, however, seems different: the stories establish a continuity between the situation of oppression of the Jews in Europe and the situation of exclusion of the blacks in South Africa. The film establishes a continuity between the racial exclusion of blacks in the United States and the discrimination against non-whites in South Africa. But on closer inspection, the aim pursued is the same for the Jewish writers and for the Jewish filmmaker: to denounce racism in all its forms.

American reality and South African reality

The film inscribes itself within a crucial preoccupation of the 1950s: racial segregation in the United States, apartheid in South Africa. On the African continent, it is the period of the movements of national liberation¹¹. This struggle against colonial oppression would give rise, in Africa and in the United States, to a political awakening — the demand for independence and the struggle for civil rights — as well as to an artistic awakening — the search for an identity of one’s own. It would pass by way of négritude as championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire and the reappropriation of “jazz,” a word that was invented by whites, as Archie Shepp points out. Through be-bop with Charlie Parker, then hard bop with Thelonious Monk, Black culture¹² takes on a dissident role in reaction to the commonly accepted “Uncle Tom-ist” conception¹³.

Whereas in the United States an organized movement would be constituted to fight for respect of the constitution, the South African National Party would consolidate its racist power based on the exclusion of all non-whites and on an ever bloodier repression. With the official condemnation of racial segregation in schools in 1954, the African Americans would experience an evolution of their movement — the next ten years would see the collapse, “one by one, of all the legislative and judicial provisions that make negroes/blacks second-class citizens”¹⁴; but at the same time the racist whites, ready to do anything to thwart it, would mobilize. The struggle against segregation now takes the form of an organized action: in 1956, Reverend Martin Luther King calls for the boycott of the buses of Montgomery (Alabama); in 1958 the boycott of white racist shops takes place in Tuskegee (Alabama). These great non-violent mass demonstrations whose aim is to integrate the two races win the support of liberal whites¹⁵, some of whom were victims of the witch hunt under McCarthyism. They obtain the support of the newspapers and the television networks, indeed even the intervention of the federal government (racist riots of Little Rock and Nashville).

In Africa, the former colonies accede to independence one after another (the first country to attain it is Ghana in 1957). Only South Africa radicalizes its racist policy and crushes the resistance of the non-whites, then of the white opponents — Denis Goldberg would spend twenty-two years in prison — who would be forced to act in clandestinity. This atmosphere is manifest in Rogosin’s film: we will witness in it a political discussion of a clandestine character to which we will return. Political struggle — the ANC — and artistic struggle — reaction against the absence of an identity of one’s own, creation of a specific music — organize themselves, as had been the case in the United States, and radicalize themselves. Let us make here a brief historical reminder. The village masses dispossessed of their lands and subjected by the State to exorbitant taxes are forced to expatriate themselves and come to work in the mines, the plantations, or the urban centers. How to occupy, that is to say “channel,” this low-priced labor force, this unskilled workforce, outside its working hours? The problem of “leisure,” that is to say of the containment of the workers penned at the periphery in the compounds and the locations, would arise. First, nightclubs and breweries are created where the Africans come into contact, for the first time, with Western music, essentially American. African churches and other cultural organizations multiply around the mining centers. It is thus that there is born, there too, a specific music, which has the air of exoticism at the beginning¹⁶, but which, little by little, would become a factor of effective awakening¹⁷. This role was quickly perceived by the South African government, which saw in music a dangerous revolutionary element¹⁸. This is what is shown, among other things, by the film African Jim, shot in 1949, one of the first films to truly stage a Black problematic (the rural exodus) and in which one sees the Jazz Maniacs, a legendary group that was a victim at once of the violence in the townships and of the segregation of white musicians: although the film deals with the social difficulties and the urban violence with which the main character finds himself confronted, it largely ignores the scale of an ever stronger segregation that culminates with the brutal expulsion of the blacks from Sophiatown in February 1955. The denunciation of the structural violence exerted by apartheid upon the Black working class, only Come Back, Africa (1959) carries out in so overwhelming a manner.¹⁹

The American film aimed at South Africa

Of all the African continent, South Africa had the oldest cinematic production: it goes back to 1895, and the first screening was projected for whites²⁰. The film industry, whose reach is recognized from the start, would find itself entirely in the hands of the whites, who would use it for economic and ideological ends. It is absolutely forbidden to show whites in a negative role: getting the worst of it in a boxing match or behaving in an immoral fashion, for example, is inconceivable and perfectly incongruous. It is absolutely imperative that whites always have a magnifying role. From the start, American films rest on a Manichaean, stereotyped, and finally caricatural image of reality: on one side there are the minorities to be ridiculed, principally the blacks, on the other the whites to be glorified. In the film Fights with Nations (1905), the Mexican is the type of the “treacherous companion,” the Jew of the “briber,” the black of the “dancer” of the worst kind (“cake walker,” “buck dancer”) and a “razor thrower”²¹.

What picture of Africa is to be given in the colonial era? It is a gigantic land peopled with wild animals, in the midst of a wild nature, at the foot of impassable mountains, of impenetrable forests where giant scorpions and “painted-up” tribes lie “in wait,” given over to frenzied dances — faced with the advertising of certain travel agencies even today, one wonders whether there has been any change since. The human beings of Africa are attributed an animal behavior²²:

“Incapable of understanding the languages, the customs, and other aspects of African culture, directors at once commercial and ethnographic refused to see the Africans as a people having in common essential experiences proper to humanity as a whole”²³.

The point of departure of this representation is not the Africans, but the impressions that the colonists and the imperialists have of Africa as a function of deeply rooted prejudices. The films conceived and produced in Great Britain or in the United States were then exported to Africa and shown to the “natives.” To this colonial vision of Africa is added the negative, indeed injurious and contemptuous, vision that Hollywood cinema maintains about blacks. But films about jazz, for example, which stage Black musicians and dancers, with all that this entails in the way of clownish staging — in certain films, whites are even painted up to make them resemble blacks and to show all the grotesqueness of it — open up perspectives for the South African spectators of Johannesburg who go to the cinema reserved for them, the “Harlem.” It is interesting to note the parallel between, on the one hand, the traditional dances and musics presented in the colonial films, and on the other hand, the jazz played and danced²⁴ in the films about Black music in the USA, that of the Cotton Club for example, a jazz club in Harlem where Black Americans did not have the right to enter!²⁵ One identifies with these Black American artists, one is fascinated by them. This opens up perspectives: one is no longer alone, there are blacks in the USA too, and one can see them at the cinema! One also identifies with the heroes of westerns or detective films. Apart from the fact that the Black South Africans, who were not considered adults, did not have the right to see just any film, those films that they do have the right to see allow them to escape the everyday and its problems. One wears one’s hat à la Richard Widmark, one dreams of shoes that are so expensive that they are called can’t-get shoes, shoes that one cannot buy!²⁶

Alongside the “exotic” films proving, if need be, the immutable superiority of white civilization, there are other films, some of which were banned for politico-ideological reasons: this was the case of The Green Pastures (1936), which suggested that God, Moses, Noah, and so on, were all blacks — in New York the film was acclaimed by both communities, white and black — and also of No Way Out (by Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950), which staged, besides a “civilized” human being criticizing the paternalism of the whites, a riot ending with the victory of the blacks. The role of the doctor was held there by Sidney Poitier, who, the following year, played Absalom Kumalo in Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), the novel by Alan Paton brought to the screen by Zoltan Korda. This film, which pleaded in favor of racial harmony and reconciliation and which exalted the magnanimity of the whites without offering in counterbalance a positive Black hero with whom to identify, was much criticized for its paternalism — at the premiere, the Black actors were not invited, and the cinema where the film was projected, the Metro, was forbidden to blacks.

Here is what Zakes Mokae thinks of it: “Many people, whether in the film industry or outside it, have often put this question to me. First of all, the title of the film is Cry, the Beloved Country. Whose country? It is the usual paternalistic liberal discourse, which suggests in fact that if the African could be just a little more disciplined, place more trust in the White man, be patient and believe in God, the situation would improve. How long are we going to wait for the Almighty to save us from slavery? For South Africa there is only one answer. It is a revolution of the people”²⁷.

An important discussion of this novel is precisely the object of a controversy at the shebeen in Come Back, Africa; it brings together the most important Black South African intellectuals engaged in the struggle against apartheid.

Come Back, Africa

Rogosin’s film surprises by a “banalization” that confers on it a modern existential dimension: no hero in the traditional sense, no exceptional situation, no way out either. It stages the non-white man permanently the victim of a situation of exception — racial discrimination — the man who lives “in the jungle of the cities” — to borrow the title of Bertolt Brecht — subjected to an inhuman everyday life, unbearable living conditions, a wandering that turns to marking time, a crushing urban reality, the work of a beast of burden. This new gaze for the South African film rests on the “banal” destiny — banal because interchangeable — of the main character, Zacharie, who, fleeing drought and famine, comes to the city to look for work. One might draw a parallel between Rogosin’s main character and Kafka’s, Karl Rossmann, in his novel Amerika, or rather The Man Who Disappeared, who begins again and fails endlessly, rolling his rock without end like Sisyphus. Punctuated by the search for and the loss of work, the comings and goings of the workers from the periphery toward the city, the descent into the mines and the ascent to the surface, the film rests on a pivot that one might call central: movement, vertical and horizontal. The horizontal movement is that of walking, of the absence of rest, of the hurried and solitary crowd: it is bound to the journey, to the displacement toward the place of work. Metaphorically, it might anticipate the workers on the march toward their own destiny. To verticality, which marks a break, is bound the work in the mine, the descent to the bottom of the dark shaft, or else the work in the hotel. Zacharie will do many very different jobs to provide for his own needs, then for those of his family: miner²⁸, domestic servant, car washer, kitchen helper, road-mender. This forced mobility will confer on him the identity of having none — a status reinforced by an identity book always on the point of expiring²⁹, making of him a nothingness of being, a being-toward-death: forbidden life by the sole fact of the color of his skin, Zacharie can, at any moment, be arrested, imprisoned, executed.

Rogosin first situates his character in an in-between, between the countryside and the city of Johannesburg. There, Zacharie has stirrings of a return: they will be rendered null and void by the coming of his wife and children to the city, once he has managed to find work in Johannesburg. The destitution and dilapidation of the setting or the dwelling place refer back to the difficulty of a life that is not expressly formulated. Attentive to a reality that he picks out as he goes, Rogosin brings to the screen a precarious, unstable, shifting everyday, faced with a well-anchored situation that, materialized by the image, reaches consciousness: it is, of course, apartheid. The film gives to see, it shows, in the manner of Wittgenstein. It does not demonstrate. It is neither an ideological film nor a didactic film.

It opens with a close-up of the white city of Johannesburg, its skyscrapers, its stairways, its roofs, its walls, its façades, all of it accompanied by strident ringings, by the noise of the machines in the mines. Buildings — that is all one perceives of the white city, deserted, inhuman by the very fact that one sees no living soul in it. Verticality and horizontality telescope into each other. A flood of Black workers, come from the wretched periphery, pours into it every day. This crowd of workers presents itself at first as a compact mass; very quickly, however, one perceives that it is composed of individuals who are different and differentiable by their African or European clothing, their hat, their bearing, or else their demeanor. Some carry a suitcase. Zacharie will detach himself from this crowd to acquire a singular role, because exemplary. The evocation of a differentiated crowd — this too is what characterizes Feldman’s stories: one speaks there of the sons of dozens of different ethnicities, while underscoring: “Each is an individual apart, and all are as one man.” The descent into the mine, which marks the break with the horizontal movement, makes everyone uniform: flanked by their lamp, unrecognizable in the darkness, the miners have a gaze whose disquiet shows through in the obscurity.

The emptiness on one side and the overflow on the other that the screen makes manifest show the true “balance of power” — Black majority versus white minority — unveiled by the author. This relation is constantly present: in the scenes of mutual aid when one must find work, the reunions in the street, the encounters and the discussions at the shebeen, the groups of musicians, children and adults, the wedding guests. One might illustrate this situation with this quotation from Deleuze: “Art, and especially cinematic art, must take part in this task: not to address a people, presumed already there, but to contribute to the invention of a people. At the moment when the master, the colonizer, proclaims ‘there have never been people here,’ the missing people is a becoming, it invents itself, in the shantytowns and the camps, or else in the ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute”³⁰.

Opposite, there are a few isolated whites, generally domineering, bellowing orders, using a stereotyped, fixed discourse and contemptuous expressions (“Kaffirs”). Apart from exceptions, of course, important for the film: the husband of Myrtle, who does not understand why his wife constantly loses her temper with Zacharie, who does everything wrong, out of ignorance, he says, and the owner of the Carlton Hotel, who finds himself forced to dismiss Zacharie, because the latter surprised Mrs. Williams half-naked in her room (“She is mad,” the owner will say). These few conscious Jews present in the film are bearers, they too, of Rogosin’s message. This is fundamental. The film incorporates different visions, Black and white, of South Africa, which are the expression of an effective struggle against apartheid.

Parallel to movement, bearer of the author’s message and contained in the title, Come Back, the music that served originally as the film’s pretext becomes the common language of the excluded — South Africans and African Americans —³¹, and the vehicle of an awakening: when the young boys play in the street, the whites watch them from the height of a terrace, while the blacks remain below. It serves as an index of the violence in the locations: Zacharie’s son must fight against thugs who want to steal his flute. The music punctuates the film from beginning to end: at the mine, a voice rises recalling the work under slavery; a tune played by marimbas, which will return like a leitmotiv throughout the film, accompanies the workers who make their way to the city; when Zacharie works for a white couple — his mistress had immediately called him “Jack” for greater convenience! — he turns on the radio and dances to the African music — a song by Miriam Makeba — that it broadcasts; the jazz music underscores out-of-the-ordinary events, granting a thrill of freedom — the mechanic takes Zacharie for a drive in the car, under the dumbfounded eye of the boss who sees them go by — and the escapade ends in a dismissal, all the more so as the mechanic is suspected by the boss of being a communist; the stonebreakers punctuate their movements with an encouraging and hypnotic chant; the chant accompanying the effort can also be a chant of protest: ordered to lift a heavy load, a few Africans begin to sing to the rhythm of the effort. In fact, they sing: “We work, we work for the white man, but we, we shall be no better off than before.” Music, which may be accompanied by dance, plays a role of the very first rank during the festivities inside the locations: there, all sorts of instruments are played, one sings and one dances. Music, dance, and chants are a social act through which is expressed the collective and singular destiny of the oppressed majority, establishing a long historical chain.

To music is opposed the muteness that manifests itself throughout the film: in the crowd of workers on the road to the mine, at the bottom of the mine, in the work and the relation with the whites³². The key moment of the film is the one where, transcending the muteness imposed from without, word and music come together: in a shebeen, high place of protest, where Zacharie is taken by his friend. Miriam Makeba sings songs of her country while the people set out their point of view, born of the confrontation with the racial discrimination lived day to day. Different analyses of the situation allow the spectator to form an idea of the African reality as seen by Africans. In an analysis that rests on a Rousseauist vision of society and that gives a large place to the role of education — Zacharie’s wife, Vinah, thinks that thanks to education, their children will know a fate better than their own — one of the speakers — Can Themba — attempts to explain the violence in the townships. Starting from the example of the gang leader Marumu, who appropriates everything by force — he has raped a young student and he will be the murderer of Vinah, Zacharie’s wife — he rises up against the cataloguing of people according to their color, their racial or religious belonging: in so doing, one shuts them up in a straitjacket from which they cannot escape. This compartmentalization has harmful effects on the structure of society: one sets against one another people whose hatred one stokes and whom one drives to violence³³. On the contrary, people must discuss among themselves, must learn to know one another, for they live in the same world. If one had been able to speak to Marumu twenty years earlier, when tsotsis had killed his father and his mother feared that the same thing might happen to him, he would never have come to this. To find a structure into which to merge — this is what a man of mixed race advocates, a man who finds himself not in a positive in-between, in the sense that he might make the link between the Black and white communities, but who is on the contrary rejected by the whites and by the blacks: he has found refuge in a religious sect that accepts everyone, indifferent to the color of the skin. But, he is objected, will it receive into its midst someone who would believe in nothing? He insists on the fact that for three centuries the Africans have been trying to draw closer to the whites and that the liberals are the only ones to make an effort in that direction. Which effort? asks a far more radical speaker — Lewis Nkosi. The liberals, who believe they can settle everything over a cup of tea, want above all no adult African. Through the film Cry, the Beloved Country, he denounces the attitude of the Reverend Kumalo, who says yes to all the whites, because he believes in their world. Does he not go so far, after having found his murderer son again and having attended his condemnation to death, as to build a church on his return to his homeland! The liberals are honest, but they hold things back. They want an African such as he was in his natural milieu, uncontaminated. They promise him the right to vote, but keep the country. Let them, then, give their country back to the Africans, and in exchange, they will have the right to vote!

A year after the film, the Sharpeville riots broke out. More than thirty years had to pass before South Africa passed into the hands of the Black and non-Black South Africans. Peacefully — which some, the prophets of the Apocalypse for example, regretted! The authors of the film, except Bloke Modisane, had the joy of attending this event. Rogosin’s film has gone around the planet. It constitutes the film about apartheid and might illustrate this quotation from Deleuze: “The cinema author³⁴ finds himself before a doubly colonized people, from the point of view of culture: colonized by stories come from elsewhere, but also by its own myths become impersonal entities in the service of the colonizer. The author must therefore not make himself the ethnologist of his people, any more than invent himself a fiction that would still be a private story: for every personal fiction, like every impersonal myth, is on the side of the ‘masters.’ There remains to the author the possibility of giving himself ‘intercessors,’ that is to say of taking real and non-fictive characters, but by putting them themselves into a state of ‘fictioning,’ of ‘legending,’ of ‘fabling.’ The author takes a step toward his characters, but the characters take a step toward the author: a double becoming. Fabulation is not a personal act, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, an act of speech by which the character never ceases to cross the frontier that would separate his private affair from politics, and himself produces collective utterances.

Daney observed that African cinema (but this holds for the whole Third World) is not, as the West would have it, a cinema that dances, but a cinema that speaks, a cinema of the act of speech. It is by this that it escapes both fiction and ethnology”³⁵.

Notes