Issue 25 – Special Issue: Colonial Africa on the Silent Screen: Recovering The Rose of Rhodesia (1918)

I greatly enjoyed seeing The Rose of Rhodesia and reading the excellent essays collected here. But my perspective is a little different from theirs. I am a historian of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and particularly…

On 23 March 1918, a new South African feature film was screened in public for the first time at Cape Town’s City Hall. A seven-reel melodrama involving a stolen diamond,…

The editors wish to thank Nederlands Filmmuseum for graciously allowing its restored print of The Rose of Rhodesia to receive a premiere screening in Sweden in 2007, and for making a digital…

Title: ROSE OF RHODESIA, THE (Die Rose von Rhodesia) Director: Harold Shaw Production Date: 1918 Length: 5 reels (81 minutes) Format: 35mm, black and white, silent, full (silent) aperture Speed: 16…

Abstract The Rose of Rhodesia (1918) has received short shrift in film history because it was made by a company independent from, and crushed by, the South African entertainment business monopoly…

Harold Shaw parted ways with the movie magnate I. W. Schlesinger in October 1917, after an acrimonious personal dispute, and immediately set about organizing his own film production company. Shaw…

Abstract The Rose of Rhodesia may have premiered in Africa, but its audiences were neither primitive nor parochial. When the film opened in Cape Town on 23 March 1918, cinema had…

Abstract This essay aims to give a more general introduction to the film-historical context surrounding The Rose of Rhodesia (1918). What was it like to make films in the late 1910s? What…

Abstract In this essay I discuss the racial discourse underlying the regulation of space, actor movement, and gesture in The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), whose animation and restraint of black characters,…

Abstract This essay examines The Rose of Rhodesia as both romantic fiction and ethnographic spectacle. It discusses the film’s development of imperial heroes, Lord Cholmondeley and Jack Morel, and a colonial heroine,…

Abstract The Rose of Rhodesia is difficult to place in relation to British imperialism and race relations, because its situation with regard to both is ambivalent. Though clearly an “imperial” film,…

Abstract The return of The Rose of Rhodesia to the public domain comes at a remarkable time for Zimbabwe. This melodramatic film about an “unusually large rose diamond” makes an uncanny prophesy about…

Abstract This paper considers the ways in which The Rose of Rhodesia participates in colonial constructions of race, specifically as the latter relate to questions of land and insurrection. Drawing on a…

Abstract The South African feature film The Rose of Rhodesia was produced when the imperial romance, a genre associated in particular with Rider Haggard, enjoyed great popularity. Some of its typical features…

Abstract “Could this be Lord Cholmondeley?” wonders Rose Randall, The Rose of Rhodesia’s magazine-reading heroine, when a scruffy stranger arrives at her door. Rose’s weakness for romantic fiction is an obvious…

Abstract From earliest times, diamonds have fascinated the purveyors of mass entertainment. Through the impact of literature and, later, cinema, and with the decisive intervention of manipulative advertising, diamonds came…

Act I. Chief Ushakapilla wants his only son, Mofti, to become leader of all Africa. When word comes that the colonial governor has denied his request for land for a…

Intertitles have been numbered for ease of reference. English translation by Vreni Hockenjos. Intertitle 1 Erster Akt Act One Intertitle 2 Der Kraal des Häuptlings “Ushakapilla”. The kraal of Chief…

Matti, how did you become a silent film musician and composer? When I was studying music at Södra Latin high school in Stockholm in 1989, the school’s film club asked…

Compiled with the generous assistance of Neil Parsons and James Burns. Fig. C1. Ink sketch of Harold Shaw, The Bioscope (London), 24 February, 1916, 759. Fig. C2. Harold Shaw on the cover…

The following biographical information has been compiled and written in collaboration with Neil Parsons, who has generously shared his research into The Rose of Rhodesia with the editors. HAROLD MARVIN SHAW (Director).…

The following list of films directed by Harold Shaw has been compiled from various books and online databases, including Alan Goble’s Complete Index to World Film (http://www.citwf.com), the British Film…

Map 1. South Africa, circa 1900. Source unidentified. Map 2. Central and Southern Africa, 1896. George Gill, The British Colonies, Dependencies, and Protectorates (London, 1896). Map 3. Africa, 1922. The Comparative Atlas…

Fig. G1. The Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company. The Graphic, 25 October 1890. Fig. G2. Tensions between the BSAC and Portugal. Punch, 5 June 1891, 266. Fig. G3. The…

JAMES M. BURNS teaches African history at Clemson University. He is the author of Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2002) and co-author of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2007). He has published…