Come Back, Africa

EN

“Come Back, Africa is the first authentic cinematic record of the system of apartheid in South Africa. Only the reckless daring of a man who had the conviction to film On the Bowery could have risked so much to make Come Back, Africa. Lionel Rogosin dug deep to find his story, penetrated the squalor of the locations to feel the heart-beat of the Africans. He went into the shebeens, and listened as his subjects spoke, sometimes with bitterness and at times with humour, about the injustice, the misery, the poverty that marked their lives. He got drunk with them, and I remember that one evening we dragged him through a ceremony and made him an honorary Zulu, and taught him to do the Zulu war dance. By the time he was ready to shoot his film we had conditioned him to see black, to feel black and to react black. But for Lionel Rogosin to be black meant he had to adopt all the problems that attend that colour, and it never occurred to me that morning when he showed up at the office where I worked that I was to be enmeshed in a gigantic fraud, in a colossal challenge that was to lose me my job and earn me a friend for life.”

Bloke Modisane1

Eric Breitbart: Could you tell me about your background? 

Lionel Rogosin: I was born in New York City; but when I was fairly young, we moved to Port Washington. It was suburban, but there was the Bay and the Sound. I did a lot of fishing and boating. When I became a film person, I changed my interests from nature to cinema.

Do you see nature and cinema as opposites?

No. I see them as very close. For me, cinema is a way of seeing nature. It’s like being a painter. It’s just that I don’t see landscapes – I see people. I’d love to make a film about the sea, though. That’s one of my dreams, but I’ve never come close to it. It’s such an incredible subject for cinema.

When you were growing up, did you think you would become a filmmaker?

No, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I had seen Flaherty’s Man of Aran when I was very young – about 12, I think – and I was very excited by it. The film inspired me. I would say that was the beginning, though I wasn’t conscious of it. It’s interesting that the film is about the sea. Of course, it’s also Flaherty. He was an important filmmaker for me.

When you started making films, were you conscious of being part of a documentary tradition?

Yes, though I don’t like the word documentary. It’s an inaccurate word. I don’t know why Grierson ever used it. To call a documentary “the creative expression of reality” just doesn’t make sense. Creative expression of reality is not documentary, which means document, or fact. Even cinema-vérité, which is not my kind of film, is a better choice of words. It’s not so deadening as “documentary.” Let's just say that when I started, I was working in Flaherty’s and De Sica’s “direction.” I’d seen the neorealist films after the War, and what I was aiming for was to fuse the two genres – Flaherty’s poetic films and the fictional narratives of the neorealists – which is what Come Back, Africa is, hopefully.

Lionel Rogosin in conversation with Eric Breitbart2

“It’s always astonishing when you think about Come Back, Africa and you wonder why it had to take a white American from New York City to make a film like that. To come and see what was going on in our lives. That certain people do not see what is there, not because they cannot see it if they wanted to, but because they refuse to see it. So that someone coming with a certain kind of ideological equipment, not in any concrete way, but in wanting to tell the truth about certain experiences can suddenly see what has always been staring people in the face. And you wonder why they never come up with those experiences. And this is the sense of exclusion that always amazed me. 

It is indicative of Lionel’s approach that in the end he was able to get away with a whole lot of things because the bureaucrats could not believe that he would make a certain kind of film. That is why, when he told them he was making a travelogue film full of dancers and so on, the officials actually believed it. Because the people who controlled self-expression when it concerned black people were white artists, and what Lionel Rogosin represents is a shift from white people trying to express a vision for blacks and allowing blacks to express themselves, to be in control of their own discourse, if you wish. And it is not as easy as saying the Africans now become filmmakers. But there is an alliance between progressive artists and the black people who want to say something legitimate about their own experiences.”

Lewis Nkosi3

“Oh, if we could just sit, open- eyed, completely noncritical, and be anti- art, anti- cinema for ten minutes, going through a sort of Actors’ Studio “seeing” lesson – we might start a revolution in ourselves. The other day, my friend Leo Adams, who is a sort of Zen master and lives on Lake Erie, came in to see Come Back, Africa. His New York host, a city mouse, still unenlightened and full of ideas about art, walked out on one long discussion scene, totally bored. ‘Shame on you,’ said Leo, ‘I thought you were beyond art,’ and he sat through the scene, getting things from it that only he knew –  completely happy, absorbed, taking the right things for the right things and the wrong things for the wrong things, as only a Zen master could.”

Jonas Mekas4

“Still on the iconographic plane, Come Back, Africa uniquely displays a positive image of Africans on the screen from beginning to end. It does not offer a romanticization or distortion of black imagery but concretizes Black cultural forms. From the first appearance of Zacharia, the chief protagonist, among a group of workers, to the closing moments of the film, when crying in despair at the death of his wife, he bangs the table, we sense the film is attempting to convey the sense and structure of South African history. The film equally attempts to draw attention to the tension between city and country, the latter supposedly the center of traditionalism and the latter the locale of cosmopolitanism. In the famous shebeen scene, if Zacharia represents the force of traditionalism, then Lewis Nkosi playing himself represents the pole of cosmopolitanism. Can Themba in the film represents anarchism; no doubt, Miriam Makeba represents spirituality. In other words, the film is a rich tableau of representations, of historical and iconographic contrasts. The true significance of Come Back, Africa is that since its making thirty years ago, and its first appearance on the public screens today back at home, it poses one fundamental question: What ought to be the nature and structure of an authentic South African national cinema?”

Ntongela Masilela5

• 1

  Bloke Modisane, cited in Lionel Rogosin, A Man Possessed. Come Back, Africa (Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2004), p. 133. 

• 2

  Eric Breitbart, “Who’s Who in Filmmaking: Lionel Rogosin,” Sightlines, vol. 21, no. 1 (Summer/Fall 1987): 23.

• 3

  Lewis Nkosi, cited in Lionel Rogosin, A Man Possessed. Come Back, Africa (Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2004), p. 132. 

• 4

  Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal. The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 22.

• 5

  Ntongela Masilela, “Come Back Africa and South African film history,” Jump Cut 36 (May 1991): 61-65.