Nairobi concludes with the events of the last two days of March 1950 when Nairobi was granted a Royal Charter and became a city. Yet 31 March 1950 also represents the day on which the Colonial Film Unit’s East African operations were closed down. Although two units were left in Tanganyika and Kenya to continue 16mm production until December 1950, 35mm production – as seen here – finished at the end of March, seemingly with the filming of this Royal event.

The East African Unit, consisting of ten technicians under the control of H.L. Bradshaw, had begun in February 1949 with a 35mm unit stationed in Nairobi. Finance was secured under the Colonial Development and Welfare Act for a year, with the hope that local governments would subsequently assume responsibility. However, Rosaleen Smyth indicated that there were problems from the outset, suggesting that the demise can be credited, in part, to the political climate in East Africa. With the increasing tensions between white settlers and African nationalists – barely two years before the Mau Mau uprising – there was, she suggested, ‘not the same impetus to accelerate African development as there was in West Africa’. White officials and filmmakers derided the notion of training African filmmakers, while a proposed training school, similar to that established in Accra, was deemed ‘beyond the capacity of African trainees’ (Smyth, 1992, 170, 174).

The Colonial Office’s Annual Reports offered further information on the work of the Colonial Film Unit – ‘producing films on behalf of the Kenya Government’ – during 1949 and 1950. In 1949 it noted that four films and a newsreel had been completed, with the same number in production, while four mobile information units had given 917 shows throughout the year to a total of 1,118,088 Africans (Annual Report, 1949, 106). In 1950 it explained that in addition to five mobile units, ‘films were distributed to missions, estates, schools and private projector owners, through a library service of films made locally and obtained through the Colonial Office’ (Annual Report, 1950, 86).

Colonial Cinema reported in June 1950 that ‘the entire staff of the C.F.U. in East Africa’ had returned to the United Kingdom (Colonial Cinema, June 1950, 28). Given this rapid demise, it is unclear whether Nairobi was widely distributed. The film was very briefly reviewed in Colonial Cinema a year later in June 1951, but it would appear likely that the final sequences were originally intended for newsreels (Colonial Cinema, June 1951, 48). Rosaleen Smyth noted the widespread production of newsreels by C.F.U. teams in East Africa and footage from the Royal ceremony filmed by the East Africa Sound Studios did feature in an edition of British Movietone News on 13 April 1950. Indeed, this material also appeared at the end of Kenya Capital (1950), a film produced by East Africa Sound Studios under the supervision of local settler officials, sharing much in common with Nairobi.

The Royal Charter for Nairobi was widely celebrated within the British press during 1950 as an indication of British imperial progress and expansion. The Times reported the event under the sub-heading ‘From Swamp to City within the Span of a Lifetime’. ‘Nairobi is really what it is’ the article concluded, ‘because British men and women came to make permanent homes in East Africa. In its municipal Government they have admitted the other races to membership but they have always kept a European majority because neither Asian nor African has the British tradition, without which local government as it is to-day could not have emerged’ (The Times, 30 March 1950, 7).

However, the ‘celebration’ met with strong opposition from local groups. The East African Trade Union Congress (EATUC) led a boycott against the celebrations in protest at the ‘racial and anti-trade union policies’ of the government, and urged far-reaching social, economic and political reforms (Agyeman, 2003, 88). Makham Singh, the founder of the EATUC, argued that ‘if people will not attend, the King’s son will observe that Africans are not happy in these celebrations…that there is slavery and that there are slaves’ (Clayton and Savage, 1975, 329). Singh subsequently wrote, in a book on labour history, that ‘the workers cannot be pleased by the Nairobi of the rich. By their boycott they wish to demonstrate that the so-called “progress” is not the progress of the millions of toiling people but of a handful of capitalists’ (Singh, 1969, 254). Indeed the Kikuyu, who had already been forced to relocate to the city in large numbers, viewed the charter as an indication of further urban expansion and expropriation of their lands. Furthermore, shortly after the boycotts Makham Singh was arrested and there followed in May 1950 a nine-day general strike within Nairobi. The response to the granting of the charter was thus evidence – however well concealed by the colonial government – of escalating tensions within the city, which would ultimately climax in the Mau Mau uprisings.