Introduction

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, a native uprising, and a frontier romance, The Rose of Rhodesia had been directed by Harold M. Shaw and shot at a Sea Point studio in Cape Town and on location in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. It tells the story of a fugitive diamond thief whose arrival in a remote Rhodesian settlement sets in motion a train of events that ultimately reconciles black Africans to white rule. In the process, a rebellious chief converts to Christianity, the thief is apprehended by a detective, and the film’s two romantic leads fall in love and wed. (For a detailed plot summary, see Appendix A.)

Shaw was an established American filmmaker whose numerous credits ranged from one- and two-reelers for the Edison Company to full-length adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The House of Temperley and George du Maurier’s Trilby.[1] (For Shaw’s filmography, see Appendix E.) He had moved to South Africa together with his wife Edna Flugrath in order to work on De Voortrekkers / Winning A Continent (1916), a historical epic that proved an immediate commercial success and, with time, emerged as a central text in the political mythology of the country’s Dutch-speaking white Afrikaners. Shaw must have been taken aback by The Rose of Rhodesia’s disastrous reception among Cape Town audiences. “We produced the biggest flop in the Cinema world,” the film’s local distributor recalled: “We thought there was going to be a riot as the Public wanted their money back.”[2]

The film fared better the following year in Britain—its primary market, as with De Voortrekkers / Winning a Continent (Tomaselli 1986, 43n)—where it was shown at trade screenings in London, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, and Liverpool alongside Thoroughbreds All (1918), a racing comedy (now lost) that Shaw brazenly advertised as “a response to D. W. Griffiths’ [sic] Intolerance” (The Bioscope, 25 September 1919, 21).[3] Advance notices promised a “remarkable picture” and described The Rose of Rhodesia, whose cast included “an African Chief and an African Prince”, as “sufficiently out-of-the-ordinary to command special attention” (The Kinematograph Weekly, 23 October 1919, 86). Reviewers were generally positive, showing marked enthusiasm for the film’s African actors and outdoor footage of cliffs and a high waterfall:

[T]he gorgeous African landscapes against which, for the most part, it is set, invest the plot with an interest it would not otherwise possess, whilst the native element is as novel as it is charming…. The Rose of Rhodesia is a decided novelty. (The Bioscope, 6 November 1919, 99)

The story is entirely pleasing, both as a whole and in detail. The native character is shown in a pleasing light. Even the black thief saves his victim’s life by giving him water. The acting both of Chief Kentani and Prince Yumi as the Chief and his son is extraordinarily good. (The Kinematograph Weekly, 6 November 1919, 116)

The Rose of Rhodesia’s history becomes obscure at this point. What is certain is that for many years the film was thought lost; no copy is known to exist in any archive in South Africa, Britain, or the United States. In 1985, however, an intact print with German intertitles—somewhat ironically in that Shaw, according to Neil Parsons, was deeply anti-German—was donated to Nederlands Filmmuseum as part of a Dutch private collection comprising around forty films, almost all short documentaries from the late 1910s. Not until 1995, according to archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, was this nitrate print screened by a curator, who noted that it warranted more research. Another ten years passed before Trevor Moses, curator of the South African National Film Archive, mentioned its existence to an editor of the present essay collection. In 2006, the film was restored by Nederlands Filmmuseum and copied onto polyester stock at Haghefilm Conservation. In June 2007, it premiered at a special event at Slottsbiografen cinema in Uppsala, Sweden. The streamed version of The Rose of Rhodesia that can be viewed with this issue of Screening the Past has been digitized by the Filmmuseum with the support of Images for the Future, The Swedish Research Council, and The Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation, and is the first in a series of films which will be made available at the Filmmuseum’s website later this year.

The surviving five-act print of The Rose of Rhodesia is around forty minutes shorter than the eight-thousand-feet-long film in seven acts that was advertised in The Cape Argus on 23 March 1918 (see Appendix C). As well as having German intertitles, the surviving print also seems to differ from the version shown to professional exhibitors in Britain in 1919, since The Kinematograph Weekly’s review includes a photograph from a sequence that has not survived. Captioned “A Scene in ‘Rose of Rhodesia’”, it depicts a pith-helmeted white man holding a piece of paper while two black servants stand next to a carriage (Kinematograph Weekly, 6 November 1919, 115). Mystery also surrounds the German intertitles. For whom were they intended? We have no evidence that the film was ever screened in Germany, Austria, or the German-speaking colonies of Cameroon, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and South-West Africa (now Namibia)—or, for that matter, in the United States, the Netherlands, or Rhodesia itself (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), whose authorities, always fearful about cinema’s subversive potential, were especially anxious around 1918 (Burns 2002, 1-36; Ranger 1970, 1-44).

On several counts we can be reasonably certain that the intertitles in the surviving print (see Appendix B) are translations from an English original. The phrase “Nachrichten aus der Heimat” (Intertitle 86), used in the context of a newspaper, is clearly a rendering of the English expression “home news”. Likewise, the film’s heroine, Rose Randall, reads about a fictional character called “Beate Beetle” (Intertitle 81) whose real first name can only be Betty, one of the most popular English girl’s names of the day. There may also be a revealing mistranslation behind the penultimate intertitle: “Hier endet die Herrschaft des Schwarzen Häuptlings, bis die Zeit ihn weiß macht und bis er sich würdig gezeigt hat, über das Land zu regieren, wie der große weiße Häuptling” (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). In an earlier scene, a sympathetic missionary gives Chief Ushakapilla a Bible with the words: “‘Du, mein Freund, wirst “Der Weise” genannt. Nimm dies Buch der Heiligen Gesetze und studiere es. Dieses Buch enthält die Weisheit aller Zeiten’” (“You, my friend, are called ‘The Wise One’. Take this book of holy laws to study. This book contains the wisdom of the ages”) (Intertitle 106). Since Ushakapilla is holding aloft this Bible as the end of his reign is announced, it would be far more logical if his future prospects in fact depended upon his becoming not white (weiß)—an absurd precondition if meant literally—but wise (weise), that is to say, a docile Christian subject.

Similarity of name suggests that the actor playing Ushakapilla (Kentani) hailed from the village of Centane, in the Butterworth district of the Eastern Cape where most of the film’s “Rhodesian” sequences were shot (see maps in Appendix F). If so, he could have helped Shaw to scout suitable locations and recruit African extras, including what the film’s advance publicity touted as “a real witch doctor” (The Bioscope, 25 September 1919, 21). Yet this alone does not explain Shaw’s decision to shoot the film there, which was presumably also influenced by Centane’s proximity to the Bawa Falls, a four-hundred-foot cascade into a breathtaking gorge (see Fig. 1.1). Shaw was not the only filmmaker who grasped the cinematic appeal of South Africa’s dramatic natural scenery. The Blaauwkrantz Bridge spanning the Kowie River, also in the Eastern Cape, figures prominently in The Bridge (dir. Dick Cruickshanks, 1918), and most of The Voice of the Waters (dir. Joseph Albrecht, 1918) was filmed against the Howick Falls in KwaZulu-Natal “with the scenes being so set that the falls themselves were constantly seen through a window” (Gutsche 318; Coan 2008).

Interestingly, Shaw appears to have amended the screenplay during the shooting of The Rose of Rhodesia to incorporate local folklore relating to the Bawa Falls. The lurid publicity claim that Ushakapilla’s ancestral stone was a real place from which victims had been “dashed to death on the rocks below” (The Bioscope, 25 September 1919, 21) sounds like a canard. Yet its veracity has been confirmed by a local tour operator, Tony Ewels, who has identified it as a feature known as Execution Rock from which accused witches were reputedly once thrown.

By the time Shaw began work on The Rose of Rhodesia, Rhodesia had been the subject of numerous films. Diverse in range, they included news “topicals” such as Funeral of the Right Hon. Cecil Rhodes (Warwick Trading Company, 1902); ethnographic and zoological “scenics”, a common adjunct to scientific expeditions, such as Emile Lauste’s travel features for the Charles Urban Company’s Africa Expedition, Life on the Zambezi River (1908) and Amongst the Central African Natives (1908); propaganda intended to promote the colony to investors and settlers, such as the British South Africa Company-commissioned Rhodesia To-Day (Alfred Kaye and R. C. E. Nissen, 1912); and general interest shorts such as Frank Butcher’s Native Industries on the Rhodesia Railway (1911), Gold Mining in Rhodesia (1912), The Rhodesian Tobacco Industry (1912), and The Wonders of Rhodesia (1913). In 1912, a plantation owner named Fred Nottage recorded a multi-reel film about the topography, anthropology, and natural history of North-Western Rhodesia that included scenes of “quaint native industries” (Roberts 1987, 193).

Since all these were documentaries, The Rose of Rhodesia has the distinction of being the first representation of Rhodesia in a fiction film.[4] And yet, as can be seen from a reviewer’s recommendation that “preliminary titles should be added to stress the genuineness of these scenes” (The Bioscope, 6 November 1919, 98-9), the boundary between fiction and documentary was anything but clear-cut at this time. The Kinematograph Weekly’s comment that “‘The Rose of Rhodesia’ has the qualities of an educational and of a ‘scenic’” (6 November 1919, 115) illustrates the paradox that early feature films could also be valued for their factual authenticity.[5] Indeed, in the private collection donated to Nederlands Filmmuseum, The Rose of Rhodesia had been grouped with travel features such as The Bavarian AlpsWindsor CastleJapan Today, and Sarajevo, The Capital of Bosnia.

Conversely, The Rose of Rhodesia also incorporates formal elements found in earlier, non-fictional films about Rhodesia. The sequence in which Ushakapilla dreams about his ancestors fighting resembles the Ndebele warriors in Savage South Africa: Attack and Repulse (1899), the Warwick Film Company’s dramatic footage of the “Savage South Africa” show staged by Frank Fillis at Earl’s Court in London.[6] The scene aboard a train in which audiences are presented with views of the “Rhodesian” veldt echoes Lauste’s A Trip on the Rhodesian Railway (1908). And The Rose of Rhodesia’s panoramic shots of the Bawa Falls recall several films about the colony’s best-known tourist attraction: The Great Victoria Falls (dir. Emile Lauste, 1907); Victoria Falls and the Zambesi (dir. Cherry Kearton, 1911); Holiday on the Zambesi (dir. Frank Butcher, 1911); and Victoria Falls and the Zambesi Gorge (dir. Walter Tyler, 1911). Perhaps with these cinematic precursors in mind, The Kinematograph Weekly’s reviewer declared confidently that “much of the grand scenery (crags, precipices, and waterfalls) is of a kind which could only be taken in Rhodesia” (6 November 1919, 115).

To judge from the diversity of opinion among contributors to this special issue, it will remain a matter of debate as to how accurately The Rose of Rhodesia represents Rhodesian society and topography—indeed, whether the film should be thought of as representing Rhodesia at all. Most obviously, there is a glaring anomaly in the mention of “the white Governor” (der weiße Gouverneur) (Intertitle 4) in the surviving print of The Rose of Rhodesia. Unlike crown colonies such as Nigeria and Hong Kong, which answered to the British Government through its representative Governor, Rhodesia was a chartered colony ruled directly by the British South Africa Company through Administrators whom its Board of Directors appointed.

At first glance, the discrepancy looks like carelessness or ignorance on Shaw’s part. But Shaw knew Rhodesia too well to make so elementary a mistake about its political status. As Neil Parsons has discovered, he had unsuccessfully pitched the idea of a Cecil Rhodes biopic to the Administrator of Southern Rhodesia while passing through Bulawayo in June 1916.[7] Moreover, the following year, while filming The Symbol of Sacrifice(1918), an epic about the Zulu victory over the British at the Battle of Isandhlwana, he had become acquainted with Johannes Colenbrander, a colonial adventurer and Rhodesia expert who had served as Native Commissioner of Matabeleland and assisted at Rhodes’s fabled meeting with Ndebele chiefs in the Matopos Hills on 21 August 1896 (Rotberg 1988, 567-71).[8] The proposition that the term “Governor” only appeared in the German version is strengthened by a plot summary in The Bioscope’s review that describes Ushakapilla as planning to wage war “if the ‘Great White King’ will not grant his tribe a desired concession of land” (6 November 1919, 98). It would have been understandable for German distributors to downplay the film’s Britishness, and The Bioscope’s summary makes a subsequent reference to “an enormous diamond, intended for presentation to the King”, indicating that a patriotic subplot in the original may have been similarly redacted for a German audience.

Its survival may be due to serendipity but The Rose of Rhodesia is far more than just a historical relic. Engaging and provocative, it constitutes a significant work of art in its own right as can be appreciated from its extensive use of spectacular location settings, its casting of African non-professionals in leading roles, and, above all, its emulating of the innovations in narrative technique that had recently been pioneered by Shaw’s idol, D. W. Griffith.[9]  This is not to deny that the film contains some awkward transitions. For example, when the diamond thief returns home with his booty, a scene ostensibly set in a South African town, viewers are given a brief shot of Ushakapilla lounging in his kraal in distant Rhodesia. It’s unclear which of several possible functions the shot was intended to perform: prolepsis (the diamond will shortly be in Ushakapilla’s hands); suspense (inviting viewers to wonder how the theft is connected with Ushakapilla); thematizing greed (Ushakapilla also desires the wealth of mine-owners, albeit for different reasons); or, more generally, a device for sustaining the parallel storylines. Yet the fault, if fault it be, is one of narrative openness rather than inconsistency or incoherence, and, like the other minor inconsistencies in this film, attributable at least in part to drastic cutting of the original and to the fact that editing as a technique had not yet been thoroughly codified.

On the whole, the film’s integration of its three discrete storylines is highly successful—strikingly so, given Shaw’s budget constraints, limited film stock, and reliance on amateurs, as well as the sheer practical challenges of filming in rural Africa in 1918.[10] Its narrative ambition is particularly evident in the layers of meaning that accumulate around the organizing leitmotif of a rose.

The circulating gemstone at the heart of the plot, the Rose Diamond,[11] is first stolen by a white overseer before passing to a black mine-worker and thence to Ushakapilla. The chief ultimately gives the diamond to Rose Randall, who restores it to the Karoo Diamond Mining Syndicate and receives a reward that enables her to marry her sweetheart, Jack Morel. Meanwhile, a second sequence of events involves an actual rose. In front of her house Rose has planted a white rosebush in memory of her deceased mother, and gives Jack a flower from it as a token of her love. Joining them in the garden, Ushakapilla’s son, Mofti, smells the rose and, evidently ignorant of the flower’s romantic connotation for Europeans, begs Rose for a bloom for himself. After Jack nods approval, Rose and he present Mofti with another rose from the bush, to the latter’s great delight. Later, after Mofti’s death in an accident, Rose and Jack plant a cutting from the rosebush by his grave. Finally, in a dense conflation of symbols and real objects, Ushakapilla declares to Jack: “I have known both the Rose Diamond and the white rose that blossoms on the grave of my son. But you, O young friend, possess the most beautiful rose in all Rhodesia … a faithful, loving wife” (Intertitle 114).

The rose, in other words, moves upwards in a process of increasing abstraction, from singular object of sensory appreciation (whether diamond, flower, or pretty girl) through various stages of synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor, before finally emerging as a racially coded emblem of Rhodesia itself—a precious white flower, nurtured by the sacrifices of its pioneers and by the bonds of loyal friendship between settlers and colonial subjects.

As a film centred on “conflict between the interests of the natives and those of imperialism”, The Rose of Rhodesia impressed The Kinematograph Weekly’s reviewer with having “carefully avoided the danger of giving offence to partisans of either side” (6 November 1919, 116). Such ideological ambivalence is doubly remarkable when juxtaposed with the racism and crude propaganda of Shaw’s previous film, De Voortrekkers. African village life is compared favourably with the habits of white settlers such as Rose Randall’s father and his rowdy drinking companions. In presenting intransigence on the part of the Rhodesian authorities as a root cause of colonial instability, the film implicitly recognizes the legitimacy of Ushakapilla’s claims for land—a political subtext whose significance in 1918 can hardly be overestimated. Sentimental and idealized it may be, but the friendship between Mofti and Jack is nonetheless presented as sincere and requiring no explanation. The tableau of Mofti dying in Jack’s arms (Fig. 1.2)—a still of which accompanied The Bioscope’s review on 6 November 1919—is clearly modelled on the “Pietà”, one of the most powerful icons of sympathy in Christian art (Fig. 1.3). There is no anti-colonial uprising (in fact, no fighting whatsoever), the real villain is a white man, and the missionary James Morel, who mediates between an unsympathetic colonial administration and its unhappy subjects, bears a passing resemblance to Arthur Shearly Cripps, a real-life missionary who sought to redress the grossest injustices of chartered company rule in Rhodesia (see Shearer 2004).

Despite being neither a landmark of cinema history nor a commercial success, The Rose of Rhodesia has an extraordinary importance today by virtue of the scarcity of silent-era films, some eighty percent of which are estimated to have been lost. The rate of attrition is even higher among the thirty or so features made between 1916 and 1919 during what has been dubbed South African cinema’s “short-lived golden age” (Tomaselli 1989, 32).[12]  Of these, only Horace Lisle Lucoque’s King Solomon’s Mines (1918) and Shaw’s own De Voortrekkers have survived largely intact.[13] The recovery of this lost film thus adds considerably to the slender archive of early South African cinema, allowing scholars to frame new questions about the latter’s technical, aesthetic, and ideological range as well as its relationship to cinematic developments elsewhere in the world, especially Hollywood. The Rose of Rhodesia’s complicated production history promises, too, to illuminate the role of key individuals and companies in South Africa’s fledgling film industry. Not least, this filmic treatment of an unequal struggle for land and sovereignty serves as a salutary reminder of the role played by racial ideology and cultural representation in colonial-era as well as present-day Zimbabwe.

In recognition of The Rose of Rhodesia’s historic significance as well as the absence of any previous scholarship on the film, the editors of this special issue have invited essays from scholars working in an array of fields—early cinema; African and imperial history; South African film history; Zimbabwean culture and politics; postcolonial and English literature—as well as commentaries by a prominent filmmaker and a distinguished composer of silent film music. Contributors have been invited to reflect upon what they see as The Rose of Rhodesia’s relevance for their field, to indicate how their own disciplinary perspective shapes their reading of the film, and to point students and general readers towards further works of interest. By keeping jargon to a minimum and including appendices suited to classroom use, we have sought to provide a body of critical arguments that can be tested—and disputed—using the streamed film itself. It is our hope that this collective experiment, far from giving the final word on The Rose of Rhodesia, will serve as a stimulus to continued investigation of this exciting cinematic discovery.

In the first section, “Production and Reception”, Neil Parsons and James Burns examine The Rose of Rhodesia in the context of early South African filmmaking and exhibition practices. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, Parsons traces the career of Harold Shaw, his involvement with African Film Productions, his break with South African media mogul I. W. Schlesinger, and the subsequent production of The Rose of Rhodesia under the aegis of Shaw’s own film company. Parsons evokes a panorama of commercial competition, volatile personal relationships, tensions over land ownership, and wartime politics in order to reconstruct the history of The Rose of Rhodesia as industrial product and creative collaboration. Taking up the story with the film’s premiere in Cape Town, James Burns similarly marshals an array of primary sources in order to describe the complex of race politics and economic interests that underpinned the city’s vibrant cinemagoing scene.

In the second section, “Cinematic Perspectives”, three film historians examine The Rose of Rhodesia in relation to the evolution of silent cinema as narrative art, the protocols of performing “race”, and the visual coding of colonial ideology. Giving a broader introduction to the innovations in film aesthetics during the 1910s, Vreni Hockenjos discusses the emergence of “classical Hollywood cinema” and how it affected The Rose of Rhodesia’s reception in Britain. In a detailed analysis of the two very different performance styles of the film’s lead actors, “histrionic” for Africans and “verisimilar” for whites, Ylva Habel traces the imprint of contemporary discourses on “race” in silent cinema. Examining the film’s use of mise en scene, framing, and camera movement, Jacqueline Maingard argues that The Rose of Rhodesia presents viewers with a colonial gaze which effectively reduces Africa and its peoples to an ethnographic spectacle.

Each of the contributors to the third section, “Political Perspectives”, situates The Rose of Rhodesia within a particular ideological matrix. Noting that attitudes to empire were determined more by functional considerations than by racism, Bernard Porter finds that the film’s politics, when they can be disentangled from the flux of imperial discourses at the time, most closely resemble those of missionaries and liberals in Britain. In a timely reconsideration of the connections between anti-colonial rhetoric, natural resources, and the postcolonial state, Nhamo Mhiripiri argues for The Rose of Rhodesia’s relevance for the ongoing struggle, economic as well as symbolic, over diamonds in contemporary Zimbabwe. And the film’s engagement with real historical events again provides the focus of Ashleigh Harris’s analysis of The Rose of Rhodesia in relation to representations of Rhodesia, the Ndebele people, and the Matopos Hills in the British press during the turbulent 1890s.

The penultimate section, “Literary Perspectives”, opens with a review of colonial romance tropes in The Rose of Rhodesia by Stefan Helgesson, who argues that its narrative should be seen less as giving voice to imperial ideology than as a kind of utopian resolution of class tensions in white South African society at the time. Also reading the film as expressive of social change, Stephen Donovan shows how The Rose of Rhodesia, by incorporating a popular magazine romance about Rhodesia, tapped into a contemporary vogue for the colony among women readers and cinemagoers in Britain and the United States.

In the concluding section, “Commentary”, filmmaker Peter Davis reflects on why diamonds have proven so extraordinarily compelling a subject in films about Africa made for audiences overseas, while composer and musician Matti Bye gives a fascinating glimpse into the often overlooked musical dimension of so-called silent cinema.

Collectively, it is hoped, these essays will make a strong case for the importance of The Rose of Rhodesia, not only as a new resource for early South African film but as a text that offers modern viewers, as Zimbabwean scholar Nhamo Mhiripiri eloquently writes in his essay, “an imaginative space for rethinking (post)colonial history, the use of violence in forging national consciousness and narratives of legitimacy, and the shaping influence of material resources on contested historical memories.”

Illustrations


Fig 1.1. The Bawa Falls in 1918 and 2007. Photography courtesy of Maryann Shaw.


Fig 1.2.


Fig 1.3. Michelangelo, La Pietà (1499). Photograph by Stanislav Traykov, 6 March 2008,http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Michelangelo%27s_Pieta_5450_cut_out_black.jpg(accessed 15 March 2009).

Works Cited

The Bioscope (London).
Botha, Martin P. 2006. 110 Years of South African Cinema (Part 1). Kinema (2006).
http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/botha061.htm (accessed 15 March 2009).
———. 2006. 110 Years of South African Cinema (Part 2). Kinema (Fall),http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/botha061.htm (accessed 15 March 2009).
Burns, James. 2000. Biopics and Politics: The Making and Unmaking of the Rhodes Movies. Biography 23, no. 1 (Winter): 108-26.
Burns, J[ames] M. 2002. Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.
Cameron, Kenneth. 1994. Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White. New York: Continuum.
Coan, Stephen. 2008. On Location in KZN. The Natal Witness, 17 March, http://www.witness.co.za/?showcontent&global[_id]=5158 (accessed 15 March 2009).
Convents, Guido. 2009. Africa: British Colonies. Encyclopedia Of Early Cinema,http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/africa-british-colonies-tf/ (accessed 15 March 2009).
Davis, Peter. 1996. In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Gunning, Tom. 1991. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Cinema: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gutsche, Thelma. 1972. The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895-1940. Cape Town: Howard Timmins.
Hees, Edwin. 2003. The Birth of a Nation: Contextualizing De Voortrekkers. In To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa, ed. Isabel Balseiro and Ntognela Masilela, 49-69 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).
The Kinematograph Weekly 
(London).
Maingard, Jacqueline. 2007. South African National Cinema. London: Routledge.
Powell, Hudson John. 2002. Poole’s Myriorama: A Story of Travelling Panorama Showmen. Bradford on Avon: ELSP.
Ranger, T[erence] O. 1970. The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1930. London: Heinemann, 1970.
Roberts, Andrew D. 1987. Africa on Film to 1940. History in Africa 14: 189-227.
Rotberg, Robert I. 1988. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Savage South Africa: Attack and Repulse 
(Warwick Film Company, 1899), British Film Archive,www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/725486 (accessed 15 March 2009).
Shearer, Owen. 2004. The Dust Diaries. London: Faber.
Shepard, Ben. 2003Kitty and the Prince: A Victorian Tragedy. London: Profile Books.
Stage, Cinema and South African Pictorial (
Johannesburg).
Taylor, C. T. C. 1968. The History of Rhodesian Entertainment, 1890-1930. Salisbury: Collins.
Tomaselli, Keyan. 1985. Popular Memory and the Voortrekker Films. Critical Arts 3, no. 3: 15-24.
———. 1986. Capitalism and Culture in South African Cinema: Jingoism, Nationalism, and the Historical Epic. Wide Angle 8, no. 2: 33-43.
———. 1989. The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film. London: Routledge.

Endnotes

[1]  In 2000, the Library of Congress selected Shaw’s The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912) for inclusion in the United States National National Film Registry. Shaw appears to have used his middle initial when in the United States but dropped it when in Britain.
[2] Harry Fisher to Thelma Gutsche, 24 February 1940, University of Cape Town Library, Manuscripts and Archives. Many thanks to Emma Sandon for providing this reference. On Shaw’s falling out with the Fisher family, see Neil Parson’s essays in this collection.
[3] Super Cinema, London, 28 October; Unity Picture Palace, Sheffield, 16 November; Cinema Exchange, Leeds, 17 November; Imperial Theatre, Newcastle, 19-20 November; Cinema Exchange, Manchester, 25 November; and Imperial Theatre at the Palais de Luxe, Liverpool, 27-28 November (The Bioscope, 23 October 1919, 126, 13 November 1919, 117-18, 20 November 1919, 133-4, 27 November, 138, 4 December 1919, 116). It is not known where or when general audiences in Britain saw the film, which receives no mention in the following local publications during November-December 1919: Yorkshire Evening News (Leeds), The Manchester Entertainments and Pleasure ProgrammeSheffield Weekly TelegraphSheffield Weekly News, Sheffield Sunday NewsYorkshire Telegraph and Star (Sheffield), The Biogram (Cardiff), Scottish Cinema(Glasgow), Entertainer and Scottish Kinema Record (Glasgow), and Films (Birmingham).
[4] King Solomon’s Mines, which was partly filmed in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, premiered at Cape Town on 26 December 1918 (Stage, Cinema and South African Pictorial, 14 December 1918, 12). A near-complete copy has been preserved at South Africa’s National Film, Video and Sound Archive.
[5] De Voortrekkers had received similar praise for “native scenes … wonderfully true to life” (quoted in Maingard 2007, 26).
[6] Another sequence, titled The Sensational Dramatic Scene from the Matabele Risings, was screened at the Empire Theatre in Bulawayo, Rhodesia in April 1903 (Shepard 2003, 154; Taylor 1968, 181). In the mid-1890s Joseph Poole had thrilled British audiences with his moving panorama images of “War in Matabeleland” and “Heroic deeds in Matabeleland” (Powell 2002, 165).
[7] On Rhodes in film, see Burns 2000.
[8] On Shaw’s involvement with The Symbol of Sacrifice, see Maingard 2007, 35-45, and Neil Parson’s essays in this collection.
[9] On Griffith’s narrative innovations, see Gunning 1994.
[10] Practical limitations on reshooting scenes can be detected at several points in the surviving print. As she climbs onto the back of Yumi (playing Mofti), Edna Flugrath (playing Rose Randall) unintentionally drops her hat and has to pick it up. When brought to the brink of a precipice, Marmaduke Wetherell (playing Jack Morel) recoils in unfeigned fright and hastily sits on a rock.
[11] An ambiguous name. If referring to a pinkish colouring, it would denote a gemstone of extraordinary rarity, worth many times more than an ordinary diamond of comparable size. Shaw could also have been thinking of the trade term “rose cut diamond”, although this variety of finishing confers no special value on the gemstone. However, the film’s “Rose Diamond” is clearly uncut.
[12] For useful chronologies, see Gutsche 1972, 162-4, 195-7; Tomaselli 1989, 261; Cameron 1994, 211-29; and Davis 1996, 191-200. On the history of South African cinema, see Gutsche 1972, Botha 2006, and Maingard 2007.
[13] On King Solomon’s Mines, see Cameron 1994, 25. De Voortrekkers is now the subject of a substantial body of criticism, e.g. Tomaselli 1985; Davis 1996, 13-14, 135-41; Hees 2003; and Maingard 2007.

Created on: Tuesday, 18 August 2009 | Last Updated: Sunday, 30 August 2009

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Stephen Donovan and Vreni Hockenjos

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