A history of Botswana cinema Part 1

| Friday September 21, 2007 00:00

In this part 1 of a 2 part series on the history of cinema in Botswana from the 1940s, he follows the story of Botswana's early film-makers.

This lecture comes at an interesting and perhaps even exciting time in the growth of cinema in this country. It marks the completion last week of shooting in Gaborone of a Hollywood feature film, The No1 Ladies Detective, not the first feature film shot in Botswana, but the first one with human actors. Previous films have featured wild animals, namely Whispers starring elephants with human voices, and Roar starring lions. Other films, that may have claimed to have been shot in Botswana, were not. The Gods Must Be Crazy was filmed in the Limpopo province of South Africa and in Namibia.

The first cinema show in Africa was in May 1896, just a few hundred kilometres away from here. There was briefly a cinema during the First World War over the border in Zeerust, run by a Greek trader-cum-part time juggler.

But there were no cinema shows for the masses in Botswana until the 1920s. Then the great Setswana playwright and African nationalist Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje toured major centres like Kanye and Serowe, and neighbouring parts of South Africa, with his so-called Travelogue and Coloured American Bioscope. He showed silent black and white educational films made for African Americans, and actuality or news films notably a British film shot at Serowe in 1913. However, given the current levels of impoverishment, Plaatje's travelling bioscope soon went bankrupt. He remarked: it is a profitless job, but when I see the joy, especially of the native kiddies& it turns the thing into a labour of love.

Botswana had been impoverished since the beginning of the twentieth century. Income from the passing wagon trade with Zimbabwe had been removed by the railway built in 1896. And from that date African wages in the gold mines of South Africa were being progressively reduced, while diamond mining at Kimberley dwindled until it closed down in 1913. The prices of livestock and grain tumbled after the Boer War ended in 1902. Cattle exports were virtually halted by disease epidemics, and after 1921 by discriminatory export restrictions favouring white South African cattle barons. The colonial administration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate also put a stop to African traders competing with local white companies.

Batswana labour migrants saw heavily censored film shows in the mining compounds of South Africa during the 1920s and 1930s. Charlie Chaplin was an especial favourite all over Africa. There were very few films made in and about Africa. The first filming in Botswana seems to have been a film made in 1905-06 about travel on the railway from Cape Town to the Victoria Falls. I believe that the pioneer cinematographer in Botswana was Kgosi Molefhi of Bakgatla, who made and showed his own home-movies to the public at Mochudi probably on an 8mm camera. Unfortunately, neither his camera nor his films seem to have survived. (The Knobel family of Afrikaner traders at Molepolole may also have been making wildlife films at about the same time).

By the end of the 1930s, a few educational films began to be made for Africans in South Africa. The most notable film was Two Brothers, made by the Red Cross in collaboration with Britain's new Colonial Film Unit. One brother gets treated for syphilis by a hospital doctor (and survives), and another by a traditional doctor (and dies).

At the same time the cinema-going habit was catching on across the world. Trading stores and hotels in Bechuanaland, including Riley's Hotel in Maun, occasionally showed films in the open-air to the masses, or in closed rooms for whites and possibly chiefs only. Students who went to Tiger Kloof and Lovedale in South Africa, among them a young Seretse Khama,  were shown films at school. The young Seretse Khama regularly slipped out of Lovedale and Fort Hare to the local cinema.

The Second World War changed everything in Botswana. The two most powerful diKgosi, Tshekedi Khama of the Bangwato and Bathoen of the Bangwaketsi, who had led resistance to the colonial administration up to 1937, had been won over by a remarkable new British senior administrator resident commissioner Charles Arden Clarke.

In 1939, when Bechuanaland automatically declared war on Germany with Great Britain, the Union of South Africa initially refused and therefore became potential enemy territory. Hence Tshekedi offered Britain troops to crush any uprisings in South Africa or South West Africa.

Back during the First World War, some Batswana had served overseas in France with the unarmed South African Native Labour Contingent, and had bad memories of the experience. Tshekedi's father, Kgosi Khama III, had completely boycotted recruitment. Hence there was chiefly and popular resistance, in early 1941, when the call went out again for such unarmed 'native' labourers to join the South African detachments fighting under the British Army in Egypt. Instead, Tshekedi and Bathoen were very willing to provide men for the British Army to be given firearms training as well as providing labour.

The result was the formation of Bechuana, Basuto and Swazi companies for an African Pioneer Corps within the British Army with about 10,000 men from Bechuanaland, about twice that number from Basutoland, and about a third of that from Swaziland.

Training began at Lobatse in July 1941, and was filmed by Miss Murch, the matron at the Athlone Hospital at Lobatse. Much was one of those rare individuals who had a 16mm film camera and access to silent Kodakchrome film stock which played at 18-20 frames a second rather than the 24 frames of 35mm film. She recorded the arrival of recruits (obviously re-enacted); their being equipped with uniforms, their being basically trained in disciplined marching with firearms, housed in tents, and fed; and their marching band originally recruited from Serowe. After inspection by the Resident Commissioner and a passing-out parade; the men left for the coast by train in September 1941.

Men from Bechuanaland did not only go to work in the Middle-East and Italy but to South African mines as well.

In the 1940s during the war Britain's only allies were overseas, in its Empire and Commonwealth, and potentially the United States.

British colonies were expected to be self-sufficient economies and to contribute men and money to the cause. The impoverished Bechuanaland colonial administration invested what it could in disease control and livestock improvement, and required the chiefs to boost agriculture with compulsory mass labour on masotla.

A travelling cinema and radio, largely used for public information dissemination, was launched by the administration to spread progressive ideas on health, agriculture and animal husbandry and general adult education.

Thus by the end of the war there was a regular cinema circuit touring district headquarters every six weeks with a new programme a feature film, a newsreel, and a documentary or short instructional film. Films gave people glimpses of the war, and gave them some idea about where their men had disappeared to.

The troops were always worried about their families back home, especially if their women were receiving the money known as allotments  that they sent back home.

In the latter part of 1944, the British Army engaged a Johannesburg film-maker named Graham Young to tour and make silent Kodakchrome films of the three High Commission Territories (Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland). These films traced the journeys of the few soldiers from overseas who won the right to home leave by lottery.

About three hours of film were made on Bechuanaland, of which two hours have survived in Botswana. The surviving film shows troops arriving by train at Mafeking, Lobatse, Gaborone, Pilane, and Mahalapye, and their subsequent journeys to Barolong Farms, Peleng, Kanye, Tsabong, Ramotswa, Tlokweng & Gaborone Village, Molepolole, Mochudi, Mahalapye, and a little bit of Serowe.

The film emphasizes government sanitation measures, the provision of clean water, inoculations and nutritional monitoring, police and public works training, and livestock improvement and marketing. Special attention is given to the increased harvests produced on the masotla, that fill up the new granaries that have been built in tribal centres. Among the chiefs, Kgosi Bathoen is singled out as a promoter of progressive agriculture: using livestock fertilizer and producing vegetables that feed the schoolchildren of Kanye.

The troops overseas were reassured that all was well at home not only by this film but also by their adult own education units and a Setswana language newspaper. Together they trumpeted ambitious plans for post-war development in health, education, agriculture, veterinary work, and forestry.

Professor Neil Parsons is a lecturer in cinema and history at the University of Botswana. This lecture was delivered on the 7th of September at the Little Theatre, National Museum.