Lionel Rogosin died on December 8, 2000, and was buried in the Forever Hollywood cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, in Los Angeles. He would have appreciated the irony: film-maker Rogosin was never a part of Hollywood, never wanted to be, and was anathema to just about everything that Hollywood stands for.
A pioneer of what later came to be called docudrama, he was suspicious of glamour and sentimentality. Among his subjects were alcoholic deadbeats in New York City and exploited woodcutters in Mississippi, the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli conflict. In South Africa, he will be best remembered for his classic portrait of the life of a migrant worker, Come Back, Africa.
Rogosin’s first film, On the Bowery, received wide acclaim, in America and internationally. In this story of New York’s skid row, he established his trademark of using non-actors in natural settings for dramas of social realism. It was his way of giving a voice to the oppressed, and he used it in a masterly fashion in South Africa.
When Rogosin came to South Africa in 1958, he was looking for a story. He told Daniel Riesenfeld and me, when we were making our documentary In Darkest Hollywood, “We had defeated fascism in World War II, but I didn’t feel that it was defeated … I thought it would re-emerge and continue in different forms. So I was alarmed at what was happening in South Africa.”
At this time, the only serious attempt in cinema to look at problems of race in South Africa had been Cry, the Beloved Country, the Korda film from 1951. Powerful as this film was, it repeated the flaws of Alan Paton’s book in seeking solutions to South Africa’s massive problems in a return of Africans to the countryside, and in Christian epiphany. Rogosin neatly avoided this mistake by doing the unheard of – he went to black South Africans, and asked them to tell their own story.
Rogosin made contact with a group of writers associated with Drum magazine, men whose names have since achieved near-mythical fame — Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi. Because he was willing to listen to them, ask their advice, value their judgements, he earned their respect. As Nkosi said, “Suddenly there was a rapport.”
Rogosin had a vague outline of what he wanted: “A very simple story from the point of view of an African, to show simply what life was like for an African, what pressure he’s under, what humiliations, what pain, what suffering Africans have under apartheid.” He got together with Nkosi and Modisane, and in one brainstorming afternoon the three of them talked the story through. As Rogosin said, it was “a piece of cake”.
The “piece of cake” was the story of a migrant worker who comes to Johannesburg to look for work. To find the chief actor, Rogosin and Modisane went to bus queues, pulling astonished men out for a screen test. He was looking for a particular face, and he found it in the migrant worker Zachariah Mgabi.
Ironically, for his white characters, who play employers who are bullying, mistrustful, or vaguely sympathetic, he went to what he called “progressive” whites. These turned out to be the anti-apartheid left – Communists and fellow-travelers, often Jewish — for these were the only ones willing to lend themselves to an anti-government project.
Rogosin takes his migrant worker Zachariah through a series of jobs — mine-worker, house-boy, hotel cleaner, auto-mechanic – that constitute a microcosm of the African experience during the past century, not limited to South Africa, of the movement of people off the land and into the cities.
Drawing on Modisane, Themba, and Nkosi’s intimate experience of township life, Rogosin
gave us the first, and probably the greatest, depiction of the confrontation between unskilled labour and industrial society, the breakdown of traditional values, complicated by the trauma of apartheid. Everywhere, in his job-seeking odyssey, Zachariah is tyrannised by the doom of the pass laws. To this film, Rogosin gave the title of the great rallying cry of the Fifties, Come Back, Africa – Mayibuye iAfrika.
Rogosin filmed in Sophiatown at a time when it was being torn down around their ears, and it constitutes the only record we have of what life was like in the township that has since achieved legendary status. The vital street life, the crime, the impassioned conversation of the shebeen, the very personalities of Modisane, Themba and Nkosi, the first screen appearance of Miriam Makeba, are here captured in a document beyond value. Come Back, Africa is an essential part of South African history.
Of course, Rogosin had to get permission to film from the authorities. His cover was that he was making a musical. When the completed film started to appear on screens throughout the world, it had tremendous impact. One British reviewer wrote that it “makes me ashamed of being white”. The South African government embarked on a massive campaign of vilification, tarring Rogosin with the Communist brush, and even “liberal” newspapers were offended. Julian Neale, film critic of the Rand Daily Mail, wrote that the film “is lopsided: a selection of facts, carefully screened to present a grim, ugly picture, with all hope removed.” “There is only stark misery,” said the Sunday Times.
Like much of Rogosin’s work, Come Back, Africa did not receive the attention in his home country that it received in Europe. In a situation that is probably even worse today than it was then, he could not find a distributor. Rogosin was not a man without means — he came from a well-to-do Jewish family — so he purchased the Bleecker Street cinema in New York’s Greenwich Village, which for years has made available an alternative cinema beyond Hollywood. By a coincidence, the film opened in New York close to the date of the Sharpeville massacre; after that, no-one could claim that Come Back, Africa was an exaggeration.
What distinguished Come Back, Africa from every other fiction film – certainly from every film out of Hollywood – up until the time of Mapantsula, was Rogosin’s willingness to place black people at the centre of the apartheid experience, to speak for themselves and not through the voice of well-meaning whites. For decades, Come Back, Africa served as a valuable anti-apartheid learning tool. Since the fall of apartheid, it has been re-discovered as a record of black South Africa’s “lost culture’, and its images are in constant demand.
Although Rogosin made other films after Come Back, Africa, this film is undoubtedly his classic contribution to cinema. He made films into the Seventies, but could not make any inroads into what should have been his natural outlet, television, which was becoming increasingly politically conservative. He spent many years in exile in London, where he was gathering material for a book about a number of South African Jews who had made a contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. He was largely an unjustly forgotten figure in the United States, but continued to be honoured abroad – in Britain, France, Holland; maybe it is time for South Africa to show its appreciation.
Rogosin called me a few weeks ago, and we chatted about the political situation in the US. He told me of a conversation he had had with a young woman at a local bar. The woman had remarked, “America is a capitalist society.” “Oh,” replied Lionel, “I always thought it was supposed to be a democratic society.” There are not many Americans left who can appreciate that distinction.