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 already established itself as the most popular leisure activity in Cape Town, where it had a large, diverse, and enthusiastic following. These audiences had not yet been divided, as they would be during the Apartheid era, by censorship or segregation of movies. Consequently, movie fans were exposed to the most famous shorts and features coming from Europe and Hollywood, and, as this article demonstrates, movie-going in Cape Town was far more established in 1918, particularly among poor and ethnically diverse audiences, than scholars have previously recognized.

American director Harold Shaw’s The Rose of Rhodesia was one of several feature-length motion pictures produced in South Africa during the First World War. While Shaw and his erstwhile employer I. W. Schlesinger had visions of making South Africa a second Hollywood, they had gotten into the movie-making business because the war had left South African fans starved of new features. Shaw’s first South African film De Voortrekkers, a historical epic about the rise of white rule in South Africa, had been an enormous hit in the Union in 1917. On 23 March 1918, having severed his ties with the Schlesinger organization, Shaw premiered his independently-made feature at Cape Town’s City Hall. His professional future in South Africa rested on the hope that audiences would flock to see a film that he advertised as “his crowning achievement” (The Cape Times, 22 March 1918).

Who were these fans who held Shaw’s fate in their hands? What kinds of people went to the movies in Cape Town in 1918? What films did they see, and which ones appear to have entertained them? How did these fans behave in cinemas? And how was cinema-going informed by notions of status, class, and ethnicity in the city? The answers to these questions have relevance beyond The Rose of Rhodesia, and, indeed, beyond South African history. Many scholars have asserted that early cinema played an important role in the Americanization of global culture. Yet until recently there has been very little attention paid to the actual experiences of moving pictures audiences (for an important exception, see Allen et al. 2007). Few scholars have focused on South Africa, and virtually none have concerned themselves with the period when this film was released. This article will attempt to close this gap by providing a portrait of the moviegoing public in Cape Town in March 1918. It will demonstrate that Cape Town had a large, active, and diverse cinema-going public, which saw the same films as its contemporaries in London and Los Angeles. Indeed, the worldliness (not to say sophistication) of this audience may have been one reason why The Rose of Rhodesia had only a limited run in Cape Town before drifting into obscurity.

The starting point for any discussion of early cinema in South Africa is Thelma Gutsche’s The History and Social Significance of Cinema in South Africa, 1895 to 1940, a massive compendium of information about the subject which was begun as a doctoral dissertation in the 1930s and eventually completed in 1946. An exhaustively researched study based largely on South Africa’s English-language press, it chronicles the spread of cinema technology throughout the country, explains the history of the major film production and distribution companies, and lists the most popular films and stars of succeeding eras.[1] The thoroughness with which the book discusses these subjects is such as to discourage other scholars from bothering to undertake further primary research. Yet for all of Gutsche’s copious documentation, its focus on white audiences obscures much of the story of the cinema. The two decades separating Gutsche from The Rose of Rhodesia were momentous ones in the history of the movies in South Africa. They witnessed the advent of sound films (circa 1930) and the expansion of racial segregation throughout the Union. And, as we will see, the impression conveyed by Gutsche that cinema in Cape Town in 1918 was a segregated, relatively domesticated leisure activity, predominantly patronized by white audiences, is somewhat misleading.

Several other scholars besides Gutsche have written about aspects of Cape Town’s cinema history. One of the few studies of film culture in colonial Africa is Bill Nasson’s oral history of leisure habits in Cape Town at mid-century (Nasson, “She Preferred Living in a Cave,” 1990). Nasson’s interviews with elderly former residents of the city’s District Six neighbourhood provide a valuable framework for exploring an earlier era, and for evaluating the experiences of cinema-goers in other parts of the city. Michael Eckardt’s thesis Film Criticism in Cape Town 1928-1930 (2005) is a useful discussion of press coverage of cinema in the late 1920s and a thorough guide to the most significant cinema houses in Cape Town in this period. Yet it says little about the many theatres which were never written about in the newspapers, or about the period before 1928. Finally, David J. Gainer’s outstanding dissertation Hollywood, African Consolidated Films, and “Bioskoopbeskawing”, or Bioscope Culture: Aspects of American Culture in Cape Town, 1945-1960 (2000) illuminates cinema’s important role in the world of popular leisure activities in the city after the Second World War. Though its focus is on a later period, Gainer’s work provides useful clues as to the history of cinema during the earlier era. Although it falls short of a comprehensive picture of the industry and its fans in 1918, this body of scholarship provides a departure point for further study of the history of cinema in Cape Town.

At the dawn of the cinema age in 1895 Cape Town was a rapidly growing metropolis of approximately 170,000 inhabitants and one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan cities on earth. Though the 1904 census divided Cape Town into “Europeans”, “Coloureds” and “Africans”, the ethnic geography of the city and environs did not fit neatly into such simple categorizations (Bickford-Smith 1995, 205). Cape Town’s elite minority was self-identified “Europeans”, most of whom spoke English. The largest segment of the population was a group collectively identified as “Coloureds”, an elastic category whose sole organizing principle was that the city’s elite defined them as “not white” (see Bickford-Smith 1992). Within this vague and open-ended classification could be found the descendants of South Asians, indigenous Khoe/San-speaking peoples, liberated West African slaves, and Europeans. Many were descendants of slaves freed in 1833. Coloureds formed diverse communities within Cape Town, some Christian, others Muslim, some speaking English, others speaking a local dialect of Dutch which was increasingly referred to in this period as “Afrikaans”. In addition to these established communities, a number of large-scale migrations brought new peoples into the Cape area at the end of the nineteenth century. These included eastern and southern European immigrants, poor, landless Afrikaans-speaking farmers, black African migrant laborers, many from Mozambique, all of whom mingled among the diverse populations that had already moved or been brought to the Cape during the city’s three-and-a-half centuries of existence. Historian Robin Hallet includes the following groups in his vivid description of Cape Town’s population in the early-twentieth century: “Afghan mattress-makers, African dockworkers, German private detectives, prostitutes from St. Helena, Chinese laundrymen, Scottish policeman, Indian shopkeepers, Jewish second hand dealers, restaurant owners from Madeira, English soldiers, as well as, of course, as that large amorphous group described in the records as ‘labourers’, whether European or Coloured” (Hallet 1979, 4). The racial boundaries separating these groups were highly permeable. As Nasson has noted of the city at this time: “Cape Town was not a tidy city; the chemistry of its social structure and the old porousness of its color line could continue to confuse and erode ethnic boundaries” (Nasson 1990, p. 310).

In 1918, this diverse and flourishing metropolis was served by many bioscopes (as cinema houses were called in Southern Africa). In the pre-war era the major urban areas of South Africa, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban, had all experienced a boom in movie house construction. By 1914, economic recession, coupled with the over-construction of theatres, left the bioscope industry on the verge of collapse. In that year most of the major cinemas were purchased by American businessman I. W. Schlesinger, whose new company, African Theatres Trust, was to dominate the bioscope industry in the Union for the next two decades (see Cartwright 1958). Four years later, Schlesinger’s trust and its main rival between them controlled all but “a few independent cinema enterprises” (Gutsche 1972, 160). One of the few cinemas that Gutsche mentions as operating outside of these trusts was Fisher’s Bioscope, which had organized the showing of The Rose of Rhodesia at the City Hall on 18 March 1918.

It is difficult to determine the number of movie theatres in Cape Town during the First World War. Gutsche estimates that by 1914 there were 150 bioscopes in the Union of South Africa (Gutsche 1972, 119). A report by the United States Consulate in South Africa in 1915 maintained that there were 250 “cinema theatres” in the country (“Bioscope Films” 1915, 1302). And according to Harry Stodel, a Cape Town cinema manager, in 1918 the Union boasted over 300 bioscopes, with new independent bioscopes springing up daily (The Cape Times, 20 April 1918, 8). Although a comprehensive list of Cape Town theatres for this year is lacking, a good deal of evidence suggests that the City had more bioscopes than any other urban area in the Union: when the Union government established a tax on bioscope tickets in 1918, over half its revenue came from the Cape region (Gutsche 1972, 160). When the influenza pandemic hit the city in the fall of 1918 eight theatres were reported to have been closed in the District Six area alone (Gutsche 1972, 157). These were not the only bioscopes in the district, and since District Six contained approximately ten percent of Cape Town’s population, it seems reasonable to assume that other city districts had dozens of similar venues. Stodel, who had begun in the bioscope business selling tickets, and knew the industry intimately, estimated that in the [Cape Town] Peninsula some five to six thousand people attended the cheaper movie theatres on a daily basis (The Cape Times, 20 April 1918, 8). If accurate, this is a remarkable number of tickets sold annually in a city of approximately 172,000 people.

By 1918, Capetonians had come to view the bioscope with some ambivalence. Initially, cinema had been an elite form of entertainment, and the first moving picture demonstrations were staged at up-scale hotels. One of the earliest moving picture displays in the Union was conducted by a traveling American magician named Carl Hertz, who used them as part of his act.[2]  Until at least 1903, the handful of venues that showed moving pictures appear to have been able to maintain a “whites only” policy.[3]  During the next decade the cinema emerged as a pastime for all social classes, indeed, one often viewed as a “poor man’s entertainment” (The Cape Times, 20 April 1918, 8). As cinema ceased to be a novelty, dispensing with the variety showcase format of the so-called “cinema of attractions” in favor of longer features, the market grew increasingly dominated by dramatic films from Europe and the United States. Gutsche suggests that by 1912 these included “sordid” and “depraved” Hollywood films (Gutsche 1972,128), whose poor quality elicited outrage from citizens in the leading Cape newspapers, although such concerns did little to improve the quality of the films being shown.

By the eve of the First World War, the cinema hall had earned a reputation as a raucous and seedy place. Indeed, to reconstruct the experiences of the first audiences of The Rose of Rhodesia, we would do well to read Gutsche’s description of the Cape Town cinema scene of 1913, with its atmosphere of feverish excitement punctuated by shouts, screams, applause, and stamping, and a gallery who found diversion in catcalls and dropping orange skins and peanuts on those beneath (Gutsche 1972, 131). Habits such as these naturally dissuaded more sober citizens from patronizing the bioscope.

Cinema houses could be dangerous places, particularly for women, and were characterized by “flagrant instances of indecent behavior and the attendance of characters of a specially low type” (Gutsche 1972, 131). In many bioscopes audience enthusiasm was often informed by their consumption of alcohol and marijuana. One South African woman remembered how her parents, Russian Jewish immigrants, had opened several bioscopes before the First World War. She recounted how her mother would keep order in the theatre with a stick, beating recalcitrant patrons under a haze of marijuana that hung over the screen (Malherbe 1988, 137). A 1910 article in the newspaper of the African Political Organization, which advocated for the rights of Coloureds, deprecated the wild behavior of Coloured movie fans who wasted their money on cheap beer and bioscopes for an evenings entertainment (see Adhikari 1996, 63). Gutsche depicts the unruly fans of the early cinema as pathological and credulous. For example, she describes an incident in 1912 in which a cinema audience panicked after a patron shouted “fire”. In relating the story, she emphasizes the point that this particular audience was vulnerable to such panics because it consisted “largely of coloured people and easily-impressionable elements” (Gutsche 1972, 131). She ends her synopsis of the social place of the cinema on the eve of the First World War by asserting: “It may be safely said that at no time in its history did the South African cinema reach a lower standard or suffer a more opprobrious reputation” (Gutsche 1972, 131).

If the cinema house was as dangerous as Gutsche claims, that did not deter women from frequenting the early theaters in large numbers. Many of these seem to have been drawn to the bioscope as a public venue for babysitting children. Gutsche describes the chaos that ensued when “Unaccompanied children screamed, quarreled and fought, running about as they pleased” while “in the more impoverished districts, women themselves brought their babies and attended to their comfort under most unhygienic circumstances” (Gutsche 1972, 131). Saturdays appear to have been the worst, as a letter to the Cape Times indicates: “I went to a suburban bioscope yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. The place was crowded with children—from babies in arms to girls and boys of fourteen” (The Cape Times, 12 August, 1918). Yet the theatre’s program does not appear to have been tailored to this audience, as it reportedly “consisted largely of a blood-curdling melodrama—the usual thing—gambling, drunken men, half nude women, and, of course, there was a murder, when the heroine of the play knocks her husband over the head and he falls a limp, gruesome mass on the floor” (The Cape Times, 12 August, 1918). Cinema houses were also one of the few venues in which single women, particularly Coloured women, might socialize with young men without jeopardizing their respectability (see Taliep 2001, 75-6).[4]

From this low point the cinema, notes Gutsche, “gradually assumed a semi-respectable air” (Gutsche 1972, 121). One indication that this process was well underway by 1918 can be seen in the advertisements for The Rose of Rhodesia, which reassured patrons that the film would feature “no heart stopping, blood-curdling hair-breadth escapades and no sex problems or ‘false lover’ plots but rather a photoplay that is entirely different from the thousands that have preceded it” (The Cape Times, 16 March 1918), the implication being that the film needed to be differentiated from more low-brow fare. Another sign that the cinema’s reputation had improved by 1918 can be found in an article published in the Cape Times which discussed the prospect of a new tax on the city’s bioscopes. The paper quoted Harry Stodel as warning the Cape Town City Council that a tax on cinema tickets in District Six would shut down many theatres. “At these performances the bulk of the attendance consisted of coloured people, who, not being in the position of getting higher wages, would necessarily have to forego the bioscope. He asked if it was desirable that these people, instead of going to a decent place of entertainment, should be thrown on the streets and the temptations which beset them there” (The Cape Times, 20 April 1918, 8). Thus, far from encouraging rowdy behavior, the cinema was now being lauded as a wholesome form of leisure. It is worth noting that at about this time mining compounds near Johannesburg began showing free movies to their employees on weekends as an alternative to more problematic pastimes such as drinking and fighting (see Philips 1938).

By 1918, a pecking order of cinema houses, known as the “A-B-C” circuit, had emerged (Eckardt 2005, 34). While all of these theatres appear to have shown the same films, movies tended to premiere on the “A” circuit, and make their way gradually throughout the town and suburbs. Ticket prices were closely tied to an individual house’s status, as well as to the location of a seat within the theatre. Gutsche’s data suggests that more than three quarters of cinema tickets sold in 1918 were for the cheapest theatres (priced sixpence or less). By way of comparison, admission to The Rose of Rhodesia, was advertised at the “usual popular prices” of 1s at the door and 2s reserved, which would have put these tickets near the upper end of the scale, though not at the top (Gutsche 1972, 160).

In many cases early moving pictures were shown in vaudeville halls which already included bands or orchestras. Though the cinema choked off live entertainment as a rival during the World War, musical accompaniment remained an important part of most performances. In 1918, films shown in the upper-tier cinemas were accompanied by a small orchestra, and most bioscopes employed at least one pianist. Indeed, when the musician’s union went on strike that year, industry insiders attributed the ensuing drop in attendance in part to the fact that fans didn’t want to see movies without musical accompaniment (Mantzaris n.d.). Many theatres included sound effects such as horses’ hooves, bells, and gunfire in the performances. Upscale cinema houses prided themselves on providing the most realistic effects, which in some cases seem to have genuinely alarmed the audiences (Gutsche 1972, 104).

How segregated were motion pictures in Cape Town in 1918? Economically, there was probably a strong class identity associated with most cinema houses. As “poor man’s entertainment”, bioscopes generally attracted the city’s working classes. On occasion, a film drew elite audiences to the bioscope. For example, on 17 March 1918 The Cape Times published a letter from a correspondent who “only occasionally go[es] to the bioscope” who had been inspired to take his family to see a dramatization of Dickens’s Dombey and Son but, in the event, had to sit through “one of the silliest and most vulgar comedies” (probably Surf Scandals [1917]) prior to the main feature. But by and large the vast majority of the movie-going public came from the city’s poorer classes, and ticket prices would have discouraged working people from frequenting the more expensive bioscopes. Since the circuit system meant that all films would eventually come to the cheapest houses, poorer patrons had little incentive to pay for a more expensive venue unless the film in question was particularly noteworthy.

How racially integrated were motion pictures in South Africa by 1918? Johannesburg appears to have effectively segregated its bioscope shows by 1910. In that year a furor erupted in South Africa after the African-American boxer Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion. When films of the fight reached the Union, they were banned by the authorities despite the protests of many boxing fans. A letter printed by the Johannesburg Star indicates that whites in that city felt confident that racial segregation was working effectively in the city’s bioscopes: “The suggestion as to the baleful influence on the blacks is absolutely absurd, and completely falls to the ground when it is pointed out (as of course you know) that no Malay or Coloured people here are admitted to the bioscope” (The Star, 9 July 1910). On 7 August 1915 the South African journal Stage and Screen printed a letter from “A Coloured Girl” who complained that she been denied admittance to a theatre in the mining city of Kimberley because of her skin color. The editors of Stage and Screen, which targeted an elite class of literate movie fans, explained that they had printed the letter because they found it “amusing”, but went on to remind their readers that in Kimberley Coloureds were not allowed in cinemas, thereby intimating that this was not necessarily the practice throughout the country.

However, the bioscope appears to have remained relatively unsegregated in Cape Town prior to 1918. Efforts had been made to designate certain performances as “whites only” ever since the first bioscopes had opened. On 22 May 1910, The Cape Times published a letter from a correspondent who, complaining about the integration of cinema houses, demanded: “Let them open a bioscopic concern for ‘coloured only’”. An article titled “May Coloureds be excluded,” published in the paper earlier in the same week, attested to the public protest which had met the opening of a bioscope advertising as “For Europeans only” (20 May 1910, 9). In the event, the City Council was quick to respond to complaints from Coloured patrons, warning that any attempt at discrimination might result in the theatre’s license being revoked.

Many factors worked against the rigid segregation of bioscopes in Cape Town. Perhaps the most important was the volatility of the business. The period between 1908 and 1920 was a roller-coaster of boom and bust for bioscope owners, driven by economic recession, the war, and the influenza epidemic of 1918. Because it took relatively little capital to run a theatre, many owners were small businessmen, almost all Jewish immigrants, who operated on a narrow margin (Malherbe 1984, 139). Since they had to pay a rental fee regardless of how many people turned up to watch a film, these owners had to fill their houses as best they could, a problem further compounded by the fact that white English-speaking elites and Afrikaners in general, had a reputation for not attending bioscopes (Stodel 1962, 180). Cinema owners in segregated societies in North America got around this problem by providing separate seating areas for patrons; in the American South, for example, African-Americans had to sit in a balcony area above the white patrons. In 1918, segregation had not yet been built into the design of most Cape Town bioscopes. Despite the construction of a handful of “picture palaces”, many were simply converted stores or cafes where the owner showed films as a side-business. Others, like the hall in which The Rose of Rhodesia premiered, were public buildings constructed before the bioscope craze and rented out by entrepreneurs. These structures could not easily segregate audiences. Many theatres built after the 1930s in Cape Town would include separate entrances and seating sections for the different “races”, and during the post-war Apartheid era, Coloureds living in District Six would sometimes express nostalgia for the days when South African cinemas had only one entrance for all patrons (Nasson 1990, 285).

The city’s ethnic diversity also made it difficult for theatres with a Europeans-only policy to prosper. With such diverse ethnic neighborhoods, there were a relatively limited number of locations where a theatre owner could confidently operate a bioscope in hopes of attracting sufficient white patrons to fill the house. In the late nineteenth century, many foreign immigrants to Cape Town, including Afrikaans-speaking farmers from the Orange Free State and Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, gravitated towards “mixed” neighborhoods, a trend that accelerated during the First World War when the city’s population grew by 14%.[5] Driven by wartime conditions of austerity, poor whites from the countryside also found homes in predominantly Coloured neighborhoods such as District Six, the only neighborhood, in which poor white police recruits could afford to live (Nasson 1992, 311). As Nasson remarks of the District immediately following the war, “Its demographic and social context was that of a still lingering cosmopolitanism: despite the strengthening pulse of urban racial segregation, some immigrant Jews, Britons and Italians still lived cheek by jowl with the majority population of Coloured Capetonians and a trickle of Africans” (Nasson 1990, 285).

Africans and Coloureds retained some political influence in Cape Town, which allowed them to resist the segregation of the bioscopes. By 1910, the city was one of the few regions of the South African Union which continued to permit “non-whites” to vote through a property qualification. Before the war Coloureds and Africans formed 9.6 % of the Cape electorate, a percentage that rose to 20.8% by 1921 (Giliomee 1995, 205). While not conferring political clout commensurate with their numbers, it did allow Africans to influence white politicians and, on rare occasions, to field their own candidate (Bickford-Smith 1995, 444). In 1910, for example, when the City Council took up the question of bioscope segregation following complaints about theatres trying to enforce new “Europeans only” policies, the measure was successfully opposed by Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman, a Coloured councillor (“May Coloured Be Excluded?” 1910, 9).

This kaleidoscope of economic interests and ethnic identities inspired complicit theatre owners and industrious patrons to work together to subvert an already porous form of racial segregation, a collusion made easier by the ambiguous definition of “white”, which was often a question of social class as much as of physical appearance. In the Cape Peninsula, observes Giliomee, “no clear cut division existed between whites and coloureds whose lower classes lived interspersed” (Giliomee 1995, 203). A Labour Party pamphlet of 1915 declared it “impossible in thousands of cases … to say definitely whether, judged by appearance alone, a given individual is a Coloured or a white man” (Giliomee 1995, 206). If respectability was as important as skin colour in gaining admittance to the elite theatres, cheaper cinemas appeared to be open to anyone with the price of admission.[6]  Thus a startled white visitor from Natal described a movie audience in 1915:

The doors of a Bioscope entertainment are open, and the crowd waiting admission and jostling each other as they get tickets, includes representatives of every colour from the light-haired fair complexioned Scandinavian sailor or English workman to the sooty-black Shangaan, and if he enters the overcrowded room and braves the foetid atmosphere, he will find no distinction made, all and any colour occupy the same seats, cheek by jowl, and sometimes on each other’s knees.[7]

This vivid passage is often cited by scholars in order to contrast the extent of racial integration in Cape Town with that in other regions of the Union, and in the United States (see, for example, Frederickson 1981, 267). However, it should be kept in mind that the bioscope was a unique kind of public space which had proven particularly resistant to segregation. As Capetown historian Vivian Bickford-Smith has observed, many other public facilities in the city, such as hospitals, mission schools, prisons, and public sports fields, were well on their way towards racial segregation by the early twentieth century. As new kinds of spaces, bioscopes would have to go a process of a negotiation to determine their rules of use. They were for-profit ventures, which encouraged evasion of customary segregation by hard-pressed businessmen. Their services were ephemeral, and their customers relatively anonymous. In this respect bioscopes were more like suburban railways, which proved similarly difficult to segregate, as rail conductors were known to turn a blind eye to “non-Europeans” riding in first class compartments in the Cape if they had the requisite fare.

What kinds of movies did Cape Town audiences see? Though they were thousands of miles from London, these fans were well connected to the main currents of cinema in Europe and the United States. They saw the classic comedies and great epics of the early cinema age soon after their release. The Italian historical epic Cabiria(dir. Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) caused a sensation in Cape Town when it premiered there in 1915, and it was The Rose of Rhodesia’s misfortune to open the same week as the highly anticipated premiere of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Charlie Chaplin was the first movie star in South Africa, and from 1914 onwards his short comedies played incessantly across the city. In 1915, South Africa acquired its own entertainment magazine, South African Pictorial, which was devoted to stories about Hollywood and London’s biggest stars.[8] This does not mean that Cape Town audiences were more discriminating than their metropolitan brethren. Serials, westerns, and films with titles such as Jocko, The Super Monkey, a comedy advertised as featuring “the Most wonderful monkey ever screened” were just as likely to draw crowds as the latest film by Griffith. As Gutsche somewhat extravagantly explains, Cape Town tastes were “almost entirely melodramatic. Frenzied action to sustain sensational themes and adventure for adventure’s sake characterized most productions” (Gutsche 1972, 141). The point is that Cape Town cinema audiences had tastes that were as sophisticated as those of any other city on earth. While it would become a common trope of western film-makers that “African” audiences were undiscriminating, no distributor would make such a claim about Cape Town audiences, who craved the production values and novelty of Hollywood.

Cinema in Cape Town was largely uncensored. While the Cape government passed ordinances in 1913 and 1916 intended to ban films it regarded as objectionable, their provisions did not discriminate among audiences (Tomaselli 1988, 14). In tacit recognition of the difficulties of segregating “white” from “non-white” audiences, controversial films, such as the 1910 World Heavyweight Championship won by African-American boxer Jack Johnson, and D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1916), were simply kept out of the country altogether.[9] Gradually, censorship legislation and public policy segregated the bioscope world of Cape Town, but only long after The Rose of Rhodesia’s premiere and Harold Shaw’s final departure from South Africa.

Who would have seen the Rose of Rhodesia in 1918? The film was advertised in The Cape Times, which had a culturally literate readership of English speakers. The City Hall was located in an area in which white patrons would have felt comfortable frequenting, and the fact that The Rose of Rhodesia was advertised well in advance of the initial showing–seat reservations would be necessary, it was suggested—indicates that Shaw was not targeting casual moviegoers. Ticket prices were higher than for cinemas in less affluent areas such as District Six, but cheaper than those of the African Theatres Trust, recently raised from six to seven shillings in response to the passing of the 1918 Entertainment Tax. The film’s audience was thus likely to have been predominantly white and working-class, but could also easily have included “respectable” Coloured patrons. If so, it would have reflected a small and elite minority of Cape Town’s moviegoing public. For a successful run, The Rose of Rhodesia would have need to play at the city’s “B” and “C” circuits, whose audiences were largely working-class and “non-European”.

For Cape Town audiences, there would have been little to distinguish this film from their usual fare. Although London critics praised the film’s “natural” African actors and impressive African settings, these elements would have held little appeal to Cape Town audiences. Likewise, Rhodesia might be a land of mystery to Londoners, but not for Capetonians. Though two thousand miles away, the colony was connected by rail to the Cape, whose white inhabitants had many settler friends and relatives and whose press carried Rhodesian news stories daily. To see the putatively “tribal” peoples depicted in The Rose of Rhodesia, Capetonians need look no further than the city’s crowded “African” district. For Cape Town’s movie fans, Rhodesia was a backwater rather than the frontier.

Finally, The Rose of Rhodesia’s subject matter—an African chief’s uprising against white authority—would not have been particularly compelling for Cape Town audiences. Though the script was written by the American Shaw, it seemed to draw its scenario from two events in South Africa’s history. One was the 1856 Xhosa cattle-killing, in which an African chief, persuaded by a “witch-doctor”, exhorted his followers to purify themselves by destroying their crops and cattle, in an effort to drive the Europeans out of South Africa. The other was the so-called Bambatta Uprising of 1908, in which four members of the Natal police were killed on their way to arrest a Zulu chief. Their insurrection was met by a ferocious response which claimed the lives of over three thousand Zulus. However, neither incident would have resonated with the diverse communities of poor Coloureds and immigrants who made up the bulk of the Cape’s cinema audience. Although the rhetoric of “uprising” and “rebellion” was still in common parlance in the local press—stories about black mining strikes carried headlines such as “Stirring Up The Natives”—Cape Town audiences were far more concerned about the war in Europe, the possibility that the government would implement a draft, or the fate of their friends and family in East Africa, than any “native risings”.[10]

As Neil Parson’s article in this collection suggests, The Rose of Rhodesia’s abrupt disappearance from South Africa was inextricably tied up with a conflict between film director Harold Shaw, cinema entrepreneur A. M. Fisher, and business magnate I. W. Schlesinger. Yet its fate was probably sealed by the tepid response of Cape Town audiences. If The Rose of Rhodesia had received wide distribution in Europe and the United States, audiences might have thrilled to its scenes of “native” life and “exotic” African landscapes.[11]  The city’s movie fans appreciated spectacular productions by D. W. Griffith, comedies by Charlie Chaplin, and war footage from Europe. There would have been little to distinguish The Rose of Rhodesia in their eyes from the unmemorable melodramas on offer in any of the city’s dozens of cinema halls. Shorn of its exoticism in wartime Cape Town, The Rose of Rhodesia would have been just another hour’s distraction.

If The Rose of Rhodesia made little impression in Cape Town upon its release, its preservation is a boon to film scholars and historians. Very few films remain from the silent era, and almost none from South Africa. The film reflects the cosmopolitanism of a fledgling South African film industry able to bring together talent from Europe and America to produce moving pictures for a global market. Watching it ninety years later, we come closer to understanding the experiences of those audiences who attended its premiere in 1918, and, in the process, are reminded that white filmmakers have been putting Africa’s people, flora, and fauna on display in order to thrill Western audiences for the better part of a century.

Works Cited

Adhikari, Mohamed. 1996. Straatpraatjes: Language, Politics and Popular Culture in Cape Town, 1909-1922. Cape Town: J. L. van Schaik.
Allen, Robert C., Richard Maltby, and Melvyn Stokes, eds. 2007. Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Bickford-Smith, Vivian. 1992. “A Special Tradition of Multi-Racialism”? Segregation in Cape Town in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. In Class, Caste and Color: A Social and Economic History of the South African Western Cape, ed. Wilmot G. James and Mary Simons, 47-62. London: Transaction Publishers.
———. 1995. Black Ethnicities, Communities, and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town. Journal of African History 36, no. 3: 443-65.
———. 1995. Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Bickford-Smith, Vivian, E. Van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden, eds. 1999. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History. Cape Town: D. Philip Publishers, 1999.
Bioscope Films in South Africa. United States Commerce Report No. 153, 1 July 1915.
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Endnotes

[1] Many South African film scholars have ignored or disparaged Gutsche’s book because of her limited interest in the efforts of South Africans to make their own movies. The significant exception is Ntongela Masilela, whose article “Thelma Gutsche: A Great South African Film Scholar” offers an insightful appreciation of her text (Masilela 2000). Masilela recognizes that Gutsche is primarily interested in the relationship between the spread of urbanism and the modernization of South Africa, a theme that permeates her extensive corpus of scholarship.
[2]  According to press reports, the reception of the new medium was rather muted: “The card tricks shown by Mr. Hertz seemed somewhat stale, and the cinematographe seemed to disappoint the audience, who probably expected something marvelous” (Cape Times, 15 July 1896).
[3] A letter to the editor of one Cape Town newspaper in 1903 indicates that the city’s few theatres excluded all “non-whites” (Bickford-Smith 1992, 50).
[4] On the special significance of bioscopes for Coloured women in Cape Town, see Nasson 1990 and Muller 2002.
[5] The city’s population has been estimated at 172,000 in 1918, up from 151,500 in 1913 (Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 1995,71).
[6] In one case, a “prominent member” of the Coloured community asserted that he could get into any theatre simply by removing his fez (quoted in Adhikari 1996, 63).
[7] Quoted in Evans 1915, 297. Maurice Evans worked for the Native Affairs Department in Natal, and his reference to fans sitting “on each other’s knees” may reflect widely-held anxieties about the “Black peril” that swept settler communities in Southern Rhodesia and the South African Union in the early twentieth century. Fears of miscegenation and sexual violence by African men against European women sparked a public uproar which dominated settler newspapers, and encouraged the tightening of racial segregation.
[8] Published by I. W. Schlesinger, and later renamed Stage and Screen, its pages were dominated in the 1920s by moving picture news.
[9] Why The Birth of a Nation was not screened in South Africa until the early 1930s is a puzzle. Griffith was the most famous director in South Africa, and Shaw’s De Voortrekkers appears to owe something to Griffith’s style. The British Colonial Office approved the showing of the film throughout the empire, though it did not appear to have been shown in any “tropical” colonies.
[10]  An amusing example of how commonplace such rhetoric had become by 1918 is given by an advertisement that featured regularly in the Cape Times: “A REVOLT IN CAPE TOWN … against the now prevailing high charges for Tailor-made suits”.
[11]  Tarzan of the Apes (dir. Scott Sidney, 1918) and the wildlife documentaries of Osa and Martin Johnson were enjoying great popularity in the United States.

Created on: Thursday, 23 July 2009