Tropical Harvest is in many respects typical of the many sponsored documentaries produced in Africa, but it offers some attractive photography of a West African industry which, unlike the cocoa industry for example, is rarely seen on film. Furthermore, it suggests a gradual shift in the representation of a West African workforce, as the film encompasses both traditional representations and a more progressive image of autonomous African workers.

The film offers many traditional ethnographic-style shots of the African workers – for example carrying the baskets on the heads – and emphasises the continuing traditions as the ‘native craftsmen’, all descended from ‘one family’, produce the casks ‘entirely by hand’. The film depicts the workers as contented and social, with upbeat local music playing as they gather at the factory. Some of the final lines within the film further reiterate this traditional, romanticised image of West African workers, as the commentator states that ‘over the roar of the surf, there is the sound of native voices singing in time with their paddles until the last barrels are on their way to the ship’.

However, the film also offers a modern and progressive image of an African industry as it emphasises the responsibility and control seemingly exercised by the Africans at all stages of the industrial process. The commentator explains that the lime plantations ‘are all owned by Africans’ and depict African men behind desks organising the workers’ wages, and in shirt and tie noting the transfer of barrels onto the surfboats. Even the task of rowing out to the ship is recognised as a job that ‘requires great skill’.

Although this is a British company operating in West Africa, the film makes no mention of this and there is no evidence of any British involvement within the industry until a sample of the lime juice is brought to a European man in a laboratory. The European here represents science and development and later shots also depict Europeans watching the loading of casks onto the surfboats. One of the European men also travels on one of the surfboats, as the African workers row out to the ship. However, this European involvement is certainly not prioritised or noted within the commentary. Indeed, it is only with the film’s final line, which explains that ‘the fruit of another West African harvest is on its way to Britain’, that this industrial process is brought directly into an imperial and British context.

Tom Rice (February 2009)