"Come Back, Africa"

Every film is some­how cir­cum­scribed, if not defined, by the con­di­tions of its mak­ing, and of course by the con­di­tions of its makers. A big part of what makes Lionel Ragosin’s 1959 Come Back, Africa so enga­ging and fas­cin­at­ing has to do with the mul­tiple factors that cir­cum­scribe it. Rogosin, a white American with a pas­sion for social issues, had made his first pic­ture, 1956’s On The Bowery, at least in part as a kind of rehearsal/training ground for this sub­sequent pic­ture. Bowery is a rich, raw, and some­times almost sem­ingly delib­er­ately clumsy explor­a­tion of alco­hol­ic misery that has pre­ced­ents in both Brecht and early Rossellini. Come Back, Africa would use a sim­il­ar strategy under far more risky con­di­tions. For after scout­ing their loc­a­tions and per­formers, Rogosin had to wrangle offi­cial per­mis­sions to film in Johannesburg, and he cer­tainly would­n’t get it from the gov­ern­ment by telling it the truth about what he wanted to do. So he pitched it as a music­al doc­u­ment­ary about “happy nat­ives.” And truth to tell, there’s an awful lot of music in the fin­ished film, all of it wonderful—a favor­ite bit has a group of busk­ers on a side­walk play­ing Elvis’s “Teddy Bear” in an exuber­ant township-inflected ver­sion. But it sure isn’t about “happy nat­ives.” Rogosin and com­pany con­cocted a nar­rat­ive con­cern­ing one par­tic­u­larly unlucky black from Zululand. Zacharia is bounced from job to job, hassled by racist white employ­ers, men­acing town­ship gang lead­ers, papers-demanding cops, and more. He goes from mines to domest­ic work to des­ti­tu­tion try­ing to hold his small fam­ily togeth­er. He finds occa­sion­al solace in late-night drink­ing and talk ses­sions with angry town­ship artists and intel­lec­tu­als, and it’s dur­ing one of these even­ings that a young woman named Miriam drops by and favors the guys with a couple of songs.

Miriam is, of course, Miriam Makeba, and it’s bra­cing and a little sur­pris­ing to see her in this con­text, before she was elev­ated to the pos­i­tion of the music­al con­science of South Africa. While ever a won­der­ful, illu­min­at­ing, and enga­ging per­former, here she has an earth­i­ness and a a sen­su­al­ity that was some­what sub­sumed, in sub­sequent years, by the mes­sage of her music. Because the seg­ments of Come Back, Africa that treated the film’s actu­al theme had to be shot in secret, and because its “act­ors” were in sub­stan­tial part not per­formers at all, there’s a kind of pro­vi­sion­al feel to the act­ing in the film that both under­scores the film’s didact­ic (and I mean that word in the best sense) mis­sion and also adds to its emo­tion­al power—you get the feel­ing that pretty much every­one involved is act­ing on behalf of his or her own life. Which of course is the case. 

And that’s even more awe-inspiring, when you think about it, than the film’s time-capsule value, which is con­sid­er­able. Rogosin’s indi­vidu­al images of dusty Soweto and the teem­ing mines are strik­ing and poignant, but the views of the cen­ter of work­day Johannesburg are the most dis­arm­ing and, finally, unset­tling. The cars, the clothes, all very indic­at­ive of a com­pletely up-to-date met­ro­pol­it­an loc­ale. One big movie theat­er­’s show­ing The Prisoner of Zenda, anoth­er is show­ing Fiend Without A Face. It’s almost nostalgia-inducing, until you remem­ber that this is Johannesburg…apartheid cent­ral. And then it hits you that, lack of par­tic­u­lar sky­scrapers aside, the place does­n’t look all that much dif­fer­ent than pic­tures of New York City in the same peri­od. And that’s terrifying.

Come Back, Africa plays at New York’s Film Forum through February 7. Go see it if you can, and look for the Milestone release in an art­house near you. I’m sure a DVD is forth­com­ing. Martin Scorsese speaks the truth when he calls this “a hero­ic film.”