This extraordinary 1918 fiction film is based on the unrest then current in Rhodesia and centers on an African chief and his decisions regarding his dignity and legacy, as well as the destiny of his people in a time of invasion by more powerful forces.
Link to the silent film
This film will be livestreamed on Sunday, 2/26/23, at 2 pm Eastern Time, and will be viewable for 6 months after that date, as per our license agreement with the EYE Filmmuseum in the Netherlands. For a link to the livestream and recording, please subscribe ($5 ticket/$10 subscription with added content). I will make a final check at noon on Sunday 2/26 for new subscribers who wish to join us live; after the livestream the recording will remain available.
The Book
There is no book, per se, behind this film. Instead, the story depicted is based on current events. Following the death of Cecil Rhodes, after whom Rhodesia is named, many of the promises that he had made to African chiefs with whom he had discussed plans for sharing land and power were ignored by his successors. This led to a period of terrible violence – violent uprisings brutally suppressed; a pattern all too familiar in the rise of European colonization around the world.
Harold Shaw, the producer and director of The Rose of Rhodesia, was a white American director with an established penchant for filming subjects involving marginalized people. (One of his early one-reel films, The Land Beyond the Sunset, was an early choice for preservation by the National Film Registry.) While working in England, where he spent a significant part of his directorial career, he agreed to travel to South Africa to direct a film, De Voortrekkers, produced by I. W. Schlesinger.
De Voortrekkers was one of several white supremacist propaganda films made during this time following in the footsteps of D. W. Griffith’s all-too-successful Birth of a Nation. After finishing the film he was contracted for, and during filming of the next (of similar ilk), Shaw broke completely with Schlesinger and set up his own studio. There are many reasons for this breakup, but it is telling that the two films Shaw made using his own money look at colonialism through a markedly different lens.
In The Rose of Rhodesia, the two Black African main characters are presented as distinct individuals, protagonists as complex and as central to the story as their White counterparts, and as exercising their own agency, individual and cultural. Chief Ushakapilla consults both an African priest diviner and a Christian missionary for advice regarding his dream of seeing his son, Mofti, become the chief of all Africa through military conquest, and their answers (echoed by Mofti himself) are the same. Ushakapilla acts as he sees fit throughout the film, and is accorded the dignity of his position and the decisions he makes.
The dramatic conflict of the obligatory romance between White characters is muted by contrast. Rose, the female lead, must choose between two suitors, one the son of the missionary and the other a man she speculates could be a runaway aristocrat like one she reads about in a lurid serial novel the audience gets to read bits of through her eyes. In fact the man is a runaway diamond thief, so her decision is more important than she knows. In the end it is Chief Ushakapilla and his son who bless and also enable her marriage.
There is in fact something of a book attached to this film. In 2009 La Trobe University in Australia screened the film, and dedicated an entire issue of its online film journal Screening the Past to writings about the film by historians of film, political history and music. Their viewpoints are diverse, and it is important that the reader begin with the Forward by Terence Ranger, who gives much-needed perspective on the setting of the film.
The Movie
The Rose of Rhodesia could not have been made, or even viewed, in Rhodesia in 1918. The dramatic setting of the film – the violent uprisings by the Ndebele tribes of the Matopos Hills against the White settlers who were taking their land – were still so much a present danger in the eyes of the White government that all filmmaking and nearly all film presentation – and certainly any representation of Africans on film – were prohibited. One audience that never saw The Rose of Rhodesia was Rhodesians, of any color.
In fact, the film was seen by almost nobody in South Africa. Because of the enmity between Shaw and Schlesinger (whose ambition was to control all film distribution – and own every film theater – in South Africa) the film opened in Cape Town and Johannesburg only in the City Hall (a standard venue for large concerts and, less often, film extravaganzas), and the opening was a failure. I would suggest that this was likely due to the treatment of the subject matter.
De Voortrekkers, which glorified the martyrdom of a small band of White Boer settlers followed by the triumph of their conquering avengers, was a great success among the Boers to whom that film was particularly targeted. A film with a small cast about British colonialism in another country would have been a disappointing followup, however morally uplifting the story may have been. The friendship depicted between Jack and Mofti (and the fact that Ushkapilla was divinely rewarded with land for his tribe) were surprisingly anti-racist and pacifist themes in a time (the middle of WWI, which is not referenced in the film) when nationalist and colonialist sentiments were running high.
And most of the Black audience (important in the Cape Town film economy) would not have seen the film at all, though theaters were not yet formally segregated in Cape Town in 1918. The ticket price would have been too high to tempt low income people, and ritzy City Hall would have been a less welcoming venue to potential Black viewers than their neighborhood bioscope (as film theaters were called there). It is even an open question how Black South Africans would have responded to the film if they saw it. The land grant at the end might have seemed so improbable as to be insulting, and the fact that the actors playing the Ndebele tribespeople were actually M’Fengu refugees (known for supporting the British against the Ndebele resistance in return for preferential treatment) would not have gone unnoticed, particularly given Mofti’s openly pacifist stance.
The film is essentially Shaw’s dream of a world in which consequential decisions are considered and made by Black leaders in accordance with their own beliefs and preferences, respected by their White neighbors. We follow the same dream today.
There is a great deal more to say about this film! Please check back to this page after the livestream, since I will be updating it. And I will be interested to hear any comments people may have.