LCINEMA Mayibuye Africa!
By Benita Teper
1960The NewsletterBenita Teper Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
In the struggles of the early thirties, to the tune of ‘Clementine’, the people sang ‘Mayibuye Africa’—Let Africa Return, or Come Back Africa. The film which bears this title is a tribute to the sincerity of its makers, headed by Lionel Rogosin, and to their guts, for much town to Meadowlands. We glimpse this power only obliquely, in the brilliant shots when the men descend to work in the mines, or crowd in their hundreds of thousands from the trains to labour in the golden city.
In his day-to-day struggle for life, the African may appear to be a slave of outside forces. And this we are shown, poignantly and protestingly. But the film fails to stress the potential of the African people to abolish their exploitation, and this is central to the reality of South Africa.
Perhaps because of this weakness the African intellectuals . whom we see, while bitter and cynical of white liberalism— that South African twin to phoney Fabianism—are either not
conscious of, or are uninterested in involving themselves in the struggle. There are other coloured intellectuals who drink less, think more purposefully and act more decisively. forget. He makes us remember. New horrors threaten men. We must remember, and ‘we must act. In the tortured bodies and broken morale of the inmates, there is a terrible image of defeat. Possibly this film was coupled arbitrarily with ‘Come Back Africa’; yet it has links. For despite suffering,