A Camera in Johannesburg

Come Back, Africa (Lionel Rogosin Films) is a timely and remarkable piece of cinema journalism: a matter-of-fact, horrifying study of life in the black depths of South African society. Filmed in secret by a 36-year-old moviemaker named Lionel (On the Bowery) Rogosin, who worked in constant danger of arrest and deportation, Come Back, Africa is necessarily crude in craftsmanship. But Rogosin's camera looks deep into the private nightmare and social desperation of a man and a people.

Lured off the land with false promises of big pay, Zachariah Mgabi (the character is named after the man who portrays him) spends several months of hard, unprofitable labor in the mines and then wangles a better job in Johannesburg: houseboy to a baas. But the mistress of the house soon loses patience with a "damn fool Kaffir" who can't tell mushroom soup from slops. She fires him, and Zachariah wanders thereafter, like a bug in a garbage pail, through the vast black slums of Johannesburg. He gets two jobs in succession and is fired from each for no particularly good reason. After a long layoff he allows his wife to take a temporary job as a domestic servant, and one night he stays with her in her quarters. The police break in and carry him off to jail as a trespasser. Home a few days later, Zachariah finds his wife dead--murdered by a tsotsi (gangster, Zulu style), who strangled her when she refused to lift her skirts for him. The End.

Dramatically, the end of the film is false, but statistically it is true; rape and murder are commonplace in South Africa's black ghettos. Indeed, Director Rogosin's reading of the facts is conservative. He is scrupulously fair to the whites, and the camera leans over backward to avoid some of the more unpleasant aspects of life in the Johannesburg slums: the open sewers and the unchecked disease. But Rogosin shows enough squalor to stun the average comfortable North American, and to prove beyond rebuttal one of his main points: that under the Nationalist oppression, black men are forced to live, as they often have to die, like dogs.

Nevertheless, Rogosin finds beauty in South Africa, too, most of it in the vital faces of the Negro population, in their sunburst smiles and roars of laughter, in the explosive imagination of their dances, and above all in the sheer demonic genius of their music. All Rogosin's candid-camera work is done with impressive skill and sensitivity. Where the director has trouble is in the acted action. Almost all his players are amateurs, and he has obviously tried to make them relax and act natural; but except in one exciting bull session among Negro intellectuals, most of them seem stilted; Rogosin thinks that they felt awkward speaking English. Zachariah Mgabi, a Zulu office worker whom Rogosin spotted one day in a railroad station, is an exception. At times he plays with a wild, shy, serious charm that is irresistible. At times his natural, gentle face suggests a black St. Peter.

Moviemaker Rogosin, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer (Beaunit Mills), made Come Back, Africa (the title is a translation of an African National Congress slogan) mostly at his own expense, and the film altogether cost close to $70,000. He entered South Africa as a tourist, lived there for almost a year before he felt ready to roll his cameras. In April 1958 he applied for government permission to make "a musical travelogue." After two months of palaver with six suspicious federal bureaus, Rogosin got his permit. He dashed off his script in less than a week, then shot for three months with scarcely a day off. The police were always watching, and Rogosin could never relax security. He carefully concealed the true nature of the story from his actors; even Zachariah was not quite sure what it was all about.

Released in Europe, the film has earned good reviews and a modest amount of money. But in Manhattan, though several exhibitors liked the picture, they had no theater for it. Nothing daunted, Moviemaker Rogosin took a three-year lease on the Bleecker Street Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where Come Back, Africa has now been running for two weeks to small but steadily growing audiences.

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