On Screen
BOWEN, BARBARA
On SCREEN By Barbara Bowen South African Suffering Seen Through a Camera's Art Come Back, Africa is an extraordinary film, a "fictional documentary" which is Greek tragedy except for a thin...
...They must be allowed to be themselves, to express themselves in their own manner . . . ." And his actors have succeeded in doing just that...
...followed by dismissal when Zachariah and his friend Eddy cooperate with a minor work-stoppage, the white who feels that something is wrong but hasn't the courage to do anything about it...
...Now it is too late...
...Concealing his cameras in the rear of a station wagon, he shot much of the film in Sophiatown, the desolate African slum outside of Johannesburg where "whites" are forbidden...
...Rogosin looked long for a man with such a face: He could not have done better...
...And it is also documentary in that Rogosin has portrayed so many of the humiliations of the Africans and the pointless, brutal arrogance of the whites...
...It is an experience that is indispensable to the growth and elevation of the human spirit...
...Moreover, Rogosin has himself found his own personal point of departure for film-making: "That which others suffer," he wrote, "can only be experienced through art, and even then only to a slight degree...
...Lionel Rogosin, its producer and director, went to South Africa with the permission of the Union of South African Government of Hendrik Verwoerd ostensibly to make a travelogue...
...when the police come to arrest Zachariah, the forced breaking up of families, the charges of "Communist...
...there is music and joy that fills the African heart—street flute players, a wedding procession, little children with music in their feet...
...And there is Zachariah, a man with a gentle face, a gentle man—who loses his second job as a "boy" because he danced with his mistress' wrap to radio jazz...
...Only one scene smacks of extended rehearsing...
...He has just had a street brawl with Marumu and, bewildered, seeks an explanation of what drives the man...
...The cast was told what Rogosin wanted conveyed in each scene and then proceeded to work out their own words and actions to project the meaning...
...He is told by the sage of the gathering that Marumu had been overdisciplned as a child and persecuted by the whites as an adult until finally he rebelled, savagely and senselessly, and now believes only in force...
...In the sense that Rogosin laid out a plot, the film is fictional...
...There she is assaulted and murdered by Marumu, an African leader of a gang of young hoodlums...
...Here, Zachariah joins some friends in the establishment of a shebeen queen—an African woman who makes and sells illegal liquor (liquor is forbidden Africans under Verwoerd...
...Rogosin was working against time—to find his cast, shoot the film, and get it out of South Africa before he was found out...
...Had we been able to talk to him 30 years ago," the sage says, "he might not be this way...
...Though South African law forbids the spouse of a domestic to live and sleep in a white household, Zachariah goes to see his beloved Vinah, and is arrested and jailed for 10 days...
...Come Back, Africa is art enough to make you suffer, but even more important, art enough to make you grow and to elevate your human spirit...
...When he loses his job, Vinah is forced to take a job as a domestic...
...Rogosin, in choosing his African actors, has followed a difficult though rewarding course...
...The conversation grows impassioned as they discuss African-white relations and a young painter in the group scores the "liberals" for wishing to play the role of benefactor, wishing to be responsible for lifting the Africans up, rather than letting the Africans lift themselves up...
...as he stated it in an article, ". . . more is involved . . . than simply casting people of the milieu...
...in the sense that the actors created their own dialogue, it is documentary— as are the shots of the mines, the street singers, the dancing...
...Zachariah returns to find her dead and the violence of his grief and his bottomless rage at the system which brought it about are a portent of the fury of action that has been taking place in the Union of South Africa...
...But Come Back, Africa is not all tragedy...
...Flung from job to job—domestic servant, waiter, garage attendant and road-gang laborer—he finally brings his family down to share the squalor of Sophiatown...
...Come Back, Africa (the opening words of the anthem of the African National Congress) won the Italian Film Critics Award at the 1959 Venice Film Festival...
...Vinah is fired and returns to Sophiatown to await his release...
...The protagonist of Come Back, Africa is Zachariah, who is driven out of Zululand by famine and goes to work in the gold mines outside of "Jo'burg," hoping to earn enough money to send home to support his wife, Vinah, and his children...
...The whole daily round is shown—the miserable wages, the "pass book" to work in Johannesburg, the planned dehumanization of the African forced to live in places like Sophiatown, the cry of "Open up, you bloody Kaffirs...
...On SCREEN By Barbara Bowen South African Suffering Seen Through a Camera's Art Come Back, Africa is an extraordinary film, a "fictional documentary" which is Greek tragedy except for a thin thread of hope based on the solidarity of Africans...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 16
