Race, Empire, and The Rose of Rhodesia

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, it has a greater affinity with the “liberal” kind of contemporary imperialism than with other sorts. Its racial attitudes appear liberal, too, albeit in a patronizing kind of way. As a “Rhodesian” film it makes little sense; but then it was neither set in Rhodesia nor made for Rhodesians, of any colour. White race attitudes varied and shifted, mainly according to the material functions of the white people who interacted with (in this instance) Africans; The Rose of Rhodesia can be reconciled with three or four of the different and—particularly at this time—rapidly changing racial discourses in southern Africa and in Britain that resulted from these interactions. However, the attitudes displayed or implied in the film were also affected by at least three other factors: Harold Shaw’s own upbringing in the southern United States at a time of great racial tension but also “anti-imperialism” there; his main motive, which was to entertain; and his estimate of the market(s) he was targeting.

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This is not an easy film to analyse in terms of its relationship to British imperialism and contemporary racial attitudes. People’s understandings of both varied enormously at this time, depending on who they were, where, why, and exactly when. No imperial discourse was ever monolithic, or came near to it, even within a single national or colonial society. The same applies to views—expressed, hidden or unconscious—on race. If we could place this film securely in a definite context—let’s say, if it had been made by a white Rhodesian for other white Rhodesians—we could at least narrow down the analytical options, connect it with one particular discourse; although even then we would need to take account of mavericks. But of course it wasn’t. Harold Shaw wasn’t a Rhodesian. In all likelihood he never visited the place. The film isn’t set there, though it pretends to be. It wasn’t made for Rhodesian cinema-going audiences, which were far too small to be worth bothering with. We know it was shown in Cape Town and in the UK, almost certainly to the (mainly white) “lower” classes predominantly. The survival of a German version suggests it might have been intended for Germany too. Its relative failure in all these venues, however, suggests that it might not have been welltailored for them. Shaw himself came from another society entirely, the USA (either Kentucky or Tennessee), which had different racial discourses than all of these, and obviously another take on “imperialism”.

The temporal aspect is also confusing; shot as it was during the First World War, and screened in South Africa while that war was still going on, but then transferring to England late in 1919, when several aspects of the dominant metropolitan imperial discourse had begun to change: become less “imperialistic”, or at least less aggressively so, in the wake of the recent horrors that many people attributed to the colonial rivalries of the pre-war years. It is this confusion that makes it difficult for us to get a firm handle on the attitudes to empire and race which seem to be revealed in it. Different beholders would have had different eyes for these. On the other hand, it may be exactly this that explains the ambivalent nature of the film.

I guess that to most of its contemporary audiences The Rose of Rhodesia will have appeared pretty liberal. For many white South African audiences, indeed, its portrayal of the “native” Africans must also have been unsettlingly positive. They have grievances (over land) with which we are supposed to sympathise. Their personal contacts with the white characters seem, on a social level, faultlessly egalitarian: Morel (the missionary) and Chief Ushakapilla have great and obviously genuine respect for each other as “wise men” in their respective communities; their sons, Frank and Mofti, talk, laugh, hug and hunt together in an entirely equal relationship (Jack, says Ushakapilla, was Mofti’s “best friend”, and we can believe it); Mofti and Frank both help Rose clamber over cliffs in a very physical way—no taboos here about black men touching white women; and so on. There are far more “bad” white characters in the film than there are bad black ones: white men seen drinking to excess, pawing over barmaids, stealing, and suchlike; such images of the “white race”, incidentally, would have been strictly censored out in most colonial situations a few years afterwards. (It undermined the white man’s authority.) Namba is a thief—and, as it happens, the only African dressed in European clothes: is this significant?—but he also revives Winters, the original thief of the “rose” diamond, and we assume saves his life. (In a symmetrical kind of way, and giving another stroke of moral ambivalence to the plot, Winters, though a thief, is also a protector of the virtue of women.)

I don’t think therefore that this is a “racist” film, in the strict sense of that term (which in my book requires a belief that ethnic differences are biological, and give rise to other significant differences). At the very least, it’s not as “racist” as it might be. That may surprise some people today, for whom racism and imperialism are inevitably conjoined—the one almost the expression of the other. In fact the correlation between them was often inverse: “liberal” imperialists needing to believe that their colonial subjects were “equal” to themselves in order to bring the fruits of “civilisation” to them (they tended to be culturally prejudiced, but that’s another matter), and the most arrant racists not wanting to bother with imperialism for the same reason. The same is so, I would argue, here.

For let us not be under any illusions: this is certainly (indeed obviously) an “imperialist” film. The whole structure is imperialist. For a start, there’s a “great white chief” hovering in the background as a kind of deus ex machina, which is how he turns out at the end. This incidentally is one of the things that is “wrong” if we see it as a “Rhodesian” film. Rhodesia at this time was mainly run by the (commercial) British South Africa Company, but dominated politically by settlers, who were to get “self-government”—for themselves—in 1923, and with a British Colonial Office representative they were supposed to be answerable to, but who was in fact very weak. Which of these agencies is supposed to have relented at the end and given Ushakapilla’s people their land is difficult to determine. But of course this isn’t Rhodesia. Secondly, there’s the assumption running right through the film, and consistently acknowledged by Mofti, if not by his “childish” father, that the imperial authorities were there to stay. (I suppose that makes Mofti an Uncle Tom.)

Or is that so? I have to say in this connexion that I’m puzzled by that narrative comment very near the end, when we last see Ushakapilla perched on the rock: “Here endeth the reign of the black Chief, until time make him white and he prove himself worthy to rule this country as the great white Chief does” (Intertitle 119). What on earth are we to make of that? Is he about to sacrifice himself, Golden Bough-style? It’s the “until time makes him white” bit that is puzzling. (This is a translation of the caption in the German-language print. If it is different in the original, now lost, English version, that might be significant.) Is “white” meant simply as a metaphor for “civilized” or “wise”? In which case—and if he is not about to fling himself off the rock—the message here would seem to be that he or his kind might be fit to supplant the colonial authorities in time. Maybe.

Thirdly, Morel, the missionary, is the representative of a “higher” civilization than the Africans’, which indeed overcomes the threat posed by African imperialism—Ushakapilla’s ambition for his son to become chief of all Africa—in a very Christian way: the sacrifice of an only son, renounce war and you will be rewarded, and so on. Cultural superiority is clearly implied here; but not in a way that demeans those who haven’t seen the light yet, let alone denies their capacity for it: for the whole point of this kind of “imperialism” is to “raise” them; and, as we have seen already from those drunken scenes in the pub, not in a way that includes any one racial group automatically. This is one sort of imperialism; but it’s a sort that requires notions of race equality, rather than the opposite. (Incidentally, the name “Morel” is interesting. It is an unusual—French—name, whose most famous bearer in real life at that time was the great liberal colonial reformist Edmund Dene Morel, who came to prominence in the 1900s through his movement to reform the Congo “Free” State, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. Was this choice of name deliberate?)

It’s at this point that I’d like to bring in my own theoretical approach, which is a materialist, even a sub-Marxist one. In fact in most colonial inter-racial situations, race attitudes (on both sides, but I’m concerned here mainly with the whites) depended far more on this kind of factor—on what the situation required, in practical, material terms—than on any “cultural” factors that may have played on them, and that you can divine from the broader literature of the time, for example, or even films like this; or, certainly, from any attitudes they learned back home in Europe and brought with them. These latter were nearly always superficial, easily altered when young Englishmen (and women) came out to the colonies, and often became unrecognisable from those that their stay-at-home compatriots retained, as is obvious from the culture shock these ex-colonial hands nearly all experienced when they came back to Britain after many years. (Look at all those deeply unhappy ex-Rhodesians living now in the Home Counties. Look at Kipling after he settled in Britain.)

Race attitudes were generally moulded by function: the reason why you were there among the “natives”, and what you needed or intended to do “with” them. This is why those attitudes varied so widely. They nearly always stemmed from this. (Of course, there were a few exceptions.) For example, if you were a simple trader on the west coast of Africa, with no great force to back you up, you generally got on well with the Africans, as you would with trading partners anywhere: though you might try to cheat them. If you needed their labour or land—settlers, plantation owners—you would be inclined to develop philosophies of racial difference that justified your seizure of their lands and enforced labour, even slavery: the “negro as a beast of burden”, that sort of thing. If you were a colonial ruler, with a job to keep the “natives” in order, you needed to believe that they were essentially meek and orderly; and to value the “loyal” ones, and dismiss the “uppity” ones, as a result. Beyond that, it depended what your plan for them was ultimately. Around 1900, a method of colonial government became fashionable called “indirect rule”, by which you valued “native” institutions and cultures, and ruled “through” them. Those who went along with that would get on better with genuine, “unspoiled” natives than with “educated” ones, or “WOGS” (Westernised Oriental Gentlemen). Missionaries, however, needed to change the natives’ cultures, and so favoured “wogs” more—but were more culturally prejudiced.

Lastly, people back home in Britain—untouched by significant non-white immigration before the 1950s—mostly needed to adapt their views of non-whites to a domestic discourse that was not essentially connected with those non-whites at all, except very historically and indirectly: the dominant discourse at that time of “liberalism”, which was overtly non-racist, had one of its roots in the anti-slavery campaigns of the early nineteenth century (“Am I not a Man and a Brother?”), and only accepted the British Empire on the understanding—though this was largely a self-deception—that the purpose of the Empire was to extend “liberty” to all. This was the big change that came over majority imperial sentiment after World War I.

In almost every colonial situation, I would argue, you will find racial attitudes mainly governed by one or other of these functional considerations. Most South Africans’ attitudes were probably dominated by the “settler”, land-and-labour-grabbing one; which is why white South Africans may not have liked The Rose of Rhodesia, with one possible exception, which I’ll come on to in a moment. In fact, the race attitudes exemplified in The Rose of Rhodesia seem to mirror more the last two “functions” I listed: the missionary and the British Liberal ones. The second of these was, as it happens, in unusually good shape at this time, in the sense that many people in Britain, and also at the relatively liberal Cape (of South Africa), had fairly high hopes of it still.

In the Cape, of course, there was a (partial) multi-racial parliamentary franchise. When the defeated Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State were given back their responsible government in 1906-7, and then united with the other two “British” provinces in 1910, the black franchise was not extended there, mainly on the grounds that the British had promised, by the Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the Boer War in 1902, not to force a multiracial franchise on them. Almost everyone in the British parliament regretted this—they were all, including Conservatives, multi-racialists then—but thought they had no alternative (they had given their word), and—and this is crucial—that it didn’t really matter in the long term, because ultimately Britain’s liberal way would prevail. This was how history worked. Of course it didn’t work out this way, at least in the medium term, with the rise of apartheid eventually doing away with even the limited Cape black franchise. The point is, however, that this “liberal” racial discourse was a particularly powerful one at the time this film appeared.

Having said all this, which I think makes the race attitudes displayed in this extraordinary film less unusual than they might appear otherwise, it still seems puzzling why Harold Shaw should have chosen this particular racial discourse for this film, out of all the others that we have seen were on offer to him; and especially in view of the fact that he seems to have chosen a very different one for his slightly earlier De Voortrekkers. Or is that so? Let me suggest here one way in which the race attitudes in De Voortrekkers and The Rose of Rhodesia might be reconciled. South Africa of course had two dominant European populations: the British, and the Dutch-origin Afrikaners, or Boers. The latter are conventionally supposed to have been more racist than the former, though that could be a convenient shield for some pretty racist Brits to hide behind, for example under apartheid. But they were also devout Christians, sober, family-minded, and tough pioneers; they saw the Africans as happy savages; and they loathed the British gold-prospectors (uitlanders) who featured so prominently in the run-up to the Boer war. In The Rose of Rhodesia, the white hero is a Christian missionary, Rose is the female pioneer par excellence (even shooting her own springboks); family values are lauded continuously (“may your kraal be blessed with many children”—and Rose’s certainly is!), as is—by implication—temperance; the Africans are essentially happy savages (which is why they aren’t more savage); the real villains are the uitlanders (the drunken gold-diggers in the pub); and it is God’s intervention (Mofti’s death) that puts everything to rights in the end. There are no Boers in the film, but perhaps Morel, Frank and Rose can be seen to stand in for them. This may seem far-fetched; but it fits. Whether Shaw had Afrikaners in mind as part of his audience we don’t know. According to James Burns they are unlikely to have seen The Rose of Rhodesia. (They weren’t great picture-goers, and the film was not screened extensively in the Afrikaner areas.) If they had, however, they might have related to aspects of it.

In Harold Shaw’s case he also had another discourse to go to, if he wanted. As an American at the peak of the notoriously discriminatory “Jim Crow” régime in the Southern States, he must have been aware of what is generally reckoned to be the much greater degree of racism to be found there than in Britain, certainly, and even in South Africa. Was this film a reaction to that? Or, on the contrary, could it be seen as an extension of the “Western” fictional genre that was beginning to be popular in America just then? (This in fact was an important influence on many British “imperial” films after this date, many of which were not indigenous—springing from a native British imperial discourse, therefore—but emanated from Hollywood. Shaw could be regarded as a pioneer here.) The other discourse he might have picked up in America was the “anti-imperial” one, which could explain his sympathy both for the Boers, in De Voortrekkers, and for Ushakapilla’s men in this film; and, perhaps, for “noble losers” in general. “Anti-imperialism” was becoming an important slogan in the US then, almost for the first time, under Woodrow Wilson; as well as in Britain. (World War I was an impetus here too.) So there could be an American dimension to this. And so we have a number of possibilities: British liberal, Cape liberal, Boer, American … and so on. Shaw could have picked up any of these very different contemporary discourses about “empire” and “race”, from his various (geographical and social) locations in the 1900s and 1910s.

So far as Shaw’s own material “function” was concerned, of course, it will have been different from any of the ones I’ve listed. He was predominantly an entertainer, wanting to please and sell, and willing, perhaps, to adapt his “message” to what he thought would be his most profitable audience. That would explain any ideological discrepancies we might still perceive between De Voortrekkers and The Rose. In the case of De Voortrekkers it was easy to flatter the Boers with this heroic American West-type myth of theirs; so that was what he did. With Rose it will have been more difficult. The film was clearly chiefly made with lower middle- and working-class audiences in mind, in Britain and South Africa. The researches of James Burns and Vreni Hockenjos, retailed in this collection, confirm this; but internal evidence inescapably points in this direction too. We know that British popular audiences for other media besides this one were impressed by sloppy love; seduction, usually by upper-class moustachioed Lotharios who then abandon their innocent young preys; crime; and “sensation”. That is what constantly fed the new “yellow press” of the day (such as the Daily Mail, modelled on the Hearst Press in the United States), and played continuously in the theatres of London’s East End. (The original Sweeney Todd is the most notorious example, but there were hundreds more.) The Rose of Rhodesia gets most of this in: the love interest provided by Shaw’s wife Edna; the upper-class seduction vicariously, in the fictitious Lord Cholmondeley; the crime, in the theft of the diamond (by a gentleman thief—another popular working-class type of hero); and the sensation, supposedly, in the exotic and savage settings. It is possible, too, that the drunken gold-diggers were designed to appeal to the workers’ anti-capitalist prejudices. These are much stronger themes in the film than the rather anodyne “imperial” or “racial” ones. “Rhodesia” was just stage scenery.

It was this however that may have given Shaw one of his problems. Rhodesia was there for the scenery; but it was supposed to be “savage” scenery, to cater to the plebs’ appetite for sensation. (The early promotion of the film in Britain makes this clear.) But it isn’t sensational. The landscape isn’t particularly sublime. The dramatis personae are hardly “savage” at all. The “native actors” are allowed to speak, intelligently, for themselves, and show no real sign of menace. Tales of exchanging diamonds for guns; a nasty look down from the sacrificial stone; one skeleton; and one or two shots of a little man with a spear jumping up and down in the air: it is difficult to see many of the early Bioscope audiences wetting themselves over that. There was much stronger fare on offer for them, at almost any East End theatre, at this time. One would have thought that Shaw could have done better, and so been more successful with this film. It would be nice to think that he held back from this because of his better, liberal feelings. Or it may have been because he didn’t want to scare his white South African audiences (or encourage any Blacks who might have crept in). Or, as James Burns suggests in his chapter, because he was anxious to attract a more up-market audience in Cape Town. Or because he couldn’t afford enough extras to make up a good impi. Or perhaps it was simply because he wasn’t a very good film-maker. (Opinions differ on this.)

For all these reasons, the final conclusion to draw from this remarkable if flawed film may be not to take it too seriously as a reflection of the mores of its time, certainly with regard to questions of empire and race. Its origin is so confused, its author so difficult to situate exactly, and its targets so diffuse and uncertain, that it was almost bound to be a discursive muddle. Similarly, its relative popular failure, in comparison with other contemporary media events, will have detracted from its likely influence, intended or not, on people’s attitudes towards empire and race. The Rose of Rhodesia is a remarkable film in many ways. Its message about “imperialism” and “race” is somewhat ambivalent. But even that might be regarded as reflection, not only of Shaw’s peculiar situation, but also of his and the film’s time; when no imperial or racial discourse was hegemonic, or even dominant, but varied according to the audience, and from year to year.

Suggestions for Further Reading

For historical context, the best short introduction to the history of the British Empire generally is Bill Nasson, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World (2004). Those wanting more information and analysis can then jump into the deep end via Judith Brown and Wm Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 1999), which has an excellent chapter by Shula Marks on Southern Africa, including enough about Rhodesia for the purposes of analysing this (non-Rhodesian) film. This should be supplemented by Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2006), published as a companion volume to the Oxford History. The best longer introduction to South African history is Hermann Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga, eds., The New History of South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg 2007). On race relations in the Empire there is no satisfactory synthesis, but Jane Samson, Race and Empire (Harrow: Pearson Education, 2005) is as good a starting point as any. The “functional” interpretation offered in this chapter is developed a little more fully in Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004 (4th edn.; London: Longman, 2004, 75-80 and 178-86). On the domestic British audience for “imperial” films, two very different interpretations are offered by John M. Mackenzie in Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), and Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2004). On Edmund Dene Morel, mentioned en passant in this chapter, see Catherine Ann Cline, E. D. Morel 1873-1924: The Strategies of Protest  (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1980).

Created on: Wednesday, 12 August 2009

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Bernard Porter

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Bernard Porter

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