| Come Back, Africa | |
| Director: | Lionel Rogosin |
| Producer: | Lionel Rogosin |
| Starring: | Vinah Makeba Zachria Makeba Molly Parkin Miriam Makeba |
| Music: | Lucy Brown, Chatur Lal |
| Screenplay: | Lionel Rogosin Lewis Nkosi William Modisane |
| Cinematography: | Ernst Artaria Emil Knebel |
| Editing: | Carl Lerner |
| Distributor: | Lionel Rogosin Films[1] |
| Runtime: | 83 minutes |
| Country: | South Africa United States |
| Language: | English |
Come Back, Africa is a 1959 film, the second feature-length film written, produced, and directed by American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. The film had a profound effect on African cinema, and remains historically and cultural importance as a document preserving the heritage of the townships in South Africa in the 1950s. It may be classified as reportage, documentary, historical movie or political cinema, since it portrays real events and people. It reveals an interpretation of meaningful social facts and a strong ethical assumption towards human behaviours like racism.
Like Rogosin's feature debut On the Bowery, Come Back, Africa is a scripted film based on fictional narrative, in which actors play invented roles. However, unlike mainstream films and against Hollywood traditions, its actors are street people, improvising lived experiences: they play their own lives or those of people like them. That is why Come Back, Africa is a fiction / non-fiction, a hybrid of fictional film and documentary: a docufiction. Additionally, it is a rare combination in film history of docufiction and political film.
Both Lionel Rogosin in America and Jean Rouch in France, at the same time, considered themselves as Robert Flaherty's heirs for similar reasons. Both used amateur actors, "street people" playing their own roles in search of truth or to unveil some hidden mystery beyond crude reality: Rogosin, contrary to Flaherty, sustained by strong ideological beliefs, Rouch, beyond Flaherty, inspired by surrealism, which he believed to be a useful means to reveal the truth of cinema'’ (the cinéma-vérité) and also an important tool to be used by an ethnographer for scientific research. Following different paths to reach similar results, both converged in ethnofiction with surprising results (See: Glossary).
Come Back, Africa comprises a storyline acted out by black South Africans, from whose own experiences the film's events are drawn. Desperate to feed his household, Zachariah, a young Zulu, departs his famine-stricken kraal to work in the Johannesburg gold mines. He eventually settles in one of the squalid apartheid-era townships, only to find himself confronted with a barrage of South Africa's infamous pass laws restricting his every move. Zachariah learns that he cannot seek employment without a pass; paradoxically, he cannot obtain a pass without employment. Meanwhile, his family is consistently threatened with exile or imprisonment if they fail to comply with these draconian regulations.
Zachariah subsequently drifts through a succession of odd jobs as vadelect, garage attendant, waiter, and public labourer – ridiculed, insulted, and ostracised by unfeeling Afrikaner superintendents. As they struggle to support their home, even Zachariah's spouse Vinah is forced to take up domestic service; she lives on the property of a white landowner, away from her husband. When the latter visits her one lonely evening, he is arrested by the SAP on trespassing charges.
Upon his release from detention, Zachariah discovers that Vinah has been murdered by Marumu, an infamous Sophiatown hoodlum, after resisting several unwanted sexual advances. His overwhelming sense of torment, helplessness, and frustration is intended to capture the resentment of South Africa's indigenous population. Denied basic civil rights, many must weave a treacherous path of survival through the myriad of legal and unofficial racial codes, while their families disintegrate on the townships' violent streets. Some – like Zachariah – are utterly defenceless in this struggle, impossibly torn between apartheid's calculated suppression and the wanton atrocities of organised crime.
The film was premiered at the 1959 Venice Film Festival. Rogosin financed and backed Bloke Modisane's escape from South Africa and his transition period in London, where he wrote his book Blame me on History. Rogosin at the same time bribed officials in South Africa and managed to get Miriam Makeba out of the country against the payment of a bond so that she could present the film with him at the Venice Film Festival. The film along with Makeba's singing and "afro" hair-style created a sensation and the film won the prestigious "Italian Critics Award". It was almost impossible to get black artists out of South Africa at the time, and impossible for these artists to make a career outside of the country. Rogosin engaged Makeba under contract, and financed her travels and living expenses in England and the United States. He also hired a publicity agent, and arranged her appearance at the Village Vanguard in New York City and her debut on The Steve Allen Show.
After the Second World War, Rogosin wanted to make a film that would expose the apartheid system to the world. He made his first film On the Bowery (1956) as a way to prepare for making Come Back, Africa.
Rogosin and his wife Elinor arrived in South Africa in May 1957, and spent six months preparing and getting to know the people and country. He secretly met Myrtle and Marty Berman (organizers in the anti-apartheid movement) who introduced him to the groups fighting against apartheid and to Bloke Modisane, a writer and journalist working for Drum magazine. Modisane then introduced Rogosin to Lewis Nkosi, another young Drum journalist, and other journalists, musicians and writers.
Rogosin, Modisane and Nkosis worked out a simple script with which Rogosin improvised and worked with non-professional actors. The filming was done under the danger of being discovered by the apartheid regime. Rogosin carefully made up different stories for different people so that he was able to film and get the materials out of the country safely. The tiny film crew shot on location in the streets of Johannesburg, Sophiatown and in restricted areas prohibited to whites, where 50,000 African homes were being annihilated to make room for a white suburb called Triumph. Filming finished in October 1959, and Rogosin left South Africa. The editing was done in New York by Carl Lerner, who was receiving the rushes from South Africa.
Rogosin's crew worked in secret, disguised as a commercial film unit making a musical, and in constant fear of confiscation and deportation. It was one of the first non-musical films, if not the first to document the lives of black people in Africa using native languages. The South African government attacked Come Back, Africa and banned it from being shown in South Africa.
Beside the Critics' award at the Venice Film Festival, the film won many awards and was a critical success in Europe. It had its biggest impact in France where Madame Yvonne Decaris who ran the legendary Pagode cinema, in Paris, opened the film. It was reviewed by many great French intellectuals such as Roland Barthes. It then went on to be taken up and screened through the French Cinéclubs system; it is estimated that over a million people saw the film in France.
Rogosin opened the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York in the spring of 1960[3] and premiered Come Back, Africa one week before the Sharpeville massacre.
Fanakalo is used for the mine scenes (it is the mining lingua franca), Afrikaans is used by the policeman who arrests Zacharia for a pass offence, Zulu is Zacharia's home language and English is used by the intellectuals in the shebeen scene.
Rogosin wanted to expose the ordeal of the people but also wanted to capture the culture of the streets. He was passionate about the music and dancing he observed in the townships, so he also had a "story" for the authorities that he was making a street musical / travelogue, which he used to obtain permission to film outdoors. There are scenes with gumboot dancers, penny-whistle musicians, a group singing Elvis Presley's hit Teddy Bear, and a young Miriam Makeba singing in the shebeen scene.
Music Director – Pandit Chatur Lal
Lionel Rogosin's diaries of this period are collected in the book Come Back Africa – Lionel Rogosin, A Man Possessed, edited by Peter Davis.
In 2007, Rogosin's sons Michael and Daniel co-produced a 55-minute "Making of" documentary entitled An American in Sophiatown. The film was directed by Lloyd Ross.
Milestone Films released a restored Come Back, Africa on DVD and Blu-ray in 2012.