William Sellers served for twelve years before the war as a medical officer with the Nigerian Government, before founding the Colonial Film Unit in 1939. In a paper he delivered in 1953 entitled ‘Making Films in and for the Colonies’ Sellers stated that ‘in 1926 during a serious outbreak of plague in Lagos I made a film for the purpose of encouraging the people to co-operate in reducing the rat population’ (Sellers, Royal Society of Arts Journal, 16 October 1953, 830). In an earlier article Sellers suggested that he began making films in 1929, and a number of historians – including Megan Vaughan, James Burns and Rosaleen Smyth – argue that the original version of the film dates from 1929. Burns suggests that Sellers had spent three years ‘observing audiences’ and ‘studying the reactions of Africans to British documentaries’ before making Anti-Plague Operations in Lagos (Burns, 2002, 39). While it is possible that shots of the slums and methods of rat catching date from 1926, subsequent sequences of the Lagos Town Planning Scheme – introduced in 1928 – appear to date from 1929. The final sequences of the Lagos Health Week are from 1937.

The composite nature of this film, with the apparent merging of these three different sequences, prompted Megan Vaughan to describe the film as a ‘conceptually and visually elaborate film’ when compared to ‘many health education films of the period’. The ‘elaborate’ narrative development shifts from rat catching, to town planning, to Lagos Health Week (which Vaughan noted was the subject of a separate Sellers film) and finally to the new housing area and so brings together a variety of health and welfare issues. The film also contained shots that Vaughan noted would later be regarded as ‘confusing’ and unconventional – for example moving from an aerial shot of Lagos to a close-up of a rat – and Vaughan suggests that this film is distinct from Sellers’ subsequent productions, such as Yaws and An African Hospital (1933) which ‘were less ambitious and more single-minded in the conveyance of their messages’ (Vaughan, 1991, 189).

Sellers would subsequently emphasise the different filmic requirements for African and European audiences, promoting, in a series of lectures and articles, the need for a separate film language for ‘primitive peoples’. James Burns argued that Sellers’ films ‘influenced a generation of colonial filmmakers’ (Burns, 2002, 40), as he promoted simple film techniques – ‘show a horizontal “panning” shot of buildings to an illiterate and he will tell you he saw the buildings rush by’ – and emphasised what he perceived as the specific requirements for African audiences (Sellers, Documentary News Letter, September 1941, 173). This is illustrated in two oft-quoted stories. Sellers remarked that after screenings of Anti-Plague Operations, ‘the illiterate members of the audience’ would often refer to the appearance of a chicken within the film. Sellers was unaware of the creature’s appearance but on reviewing the film discovered a chicken at the base of the screen in one scene. From this he determined that ‘illiterate people do not use their eyes and look at the screen in quite the same way that educated people do’, further arguing that ‘they fasten their gaze on to any movement in the scene to the exclusion of everything else in the picture’. Sellers thus reasoned that films for African audiences would have to rely on simple action, with few characters or props. A further story related to a film Sellers made on malaria, which featured microscopic close-ups of mosquitoes. ‘The people became alarmed’, he wrote, ‘and enquired about the country where the people had to contend with such wicked looking monsters and remarked that they themselves were very fortunate to have mosquitoes which were quite small and comparatively harmless’ (Sellers, Royal Society of Arts Journal, 16 October 1953, 831).

James Burns suggests that Anti-Plague Operations In Lagos was ‘perhaps the first motion picture created specifically for a colonial audience’ (Burns, 2002, 39), while Rosaleen Smyth argues that ‘this was one of the first occasions on which film had been used as a medium for information and education in any African colony’ (Smyth, 1988, 286). Sellers had previously used lantern slides to illustrate his lectures on health in Nigeria, but Femi Okiremuete Shaka suggested that this film was used as a ‘visual aid’ as part of an ongoing government campaign against plague in 1929 (Okiremuete Shaka, 2003, 157). Sellers received a grant for his work from the Colonial Development Fund and made a further fifteen films over the next seven years. He organised a health propaganda unit, which toured the colony giving exhibitions ‘in schools, in halls and out-of-doors’, and in his 1941 article ‘Films for Primitive People’ he explained that these films were presented using Cinema Vans and Travelling Projection Units (Smyth, 1986, 286). An interpreter would often get the attention of the audience – ‘the technique used to reduce the level of the noise is to ask the audience a question to which the obvious answer is yes; such a question might be ‘Are you proud to be British?’ – while further questions may be asked during the projection ‘in order to check up if the audience are following the story’ (Sellers, Documentary News Letter, September 1941, 174).