While some films were produced under Government auspices(e.g. Colour in the Colony 1947] or Southern Rhodesia – Is This Your Country? [1947]), others were instructional or educational films in classic Gaumont-British Instructional mode, and were occasionally sponsored by third parties. From Fear to Faith falls into the latter category. Directed by Jack Swackhammer (also responsible for Colour in the Colony), From Fear… was sponsored by Religious Films Ltd., J. Arthur Rank’s 16mm distribution company for religious films intended for use in churches, an off-shoot of the Religious Film Society project that had been Rank’s first foray into cinema (Macnab, 1993, 11-14; Wakelin, 1996, 41-62). It was one of two films on missionary activity that GBI produced in Southern Rhodesia (the other being Pitaniko [1948]), and it seems to have originally been entitled Shoniwa– the name of the film’s protagonist – as indicated byan article on GBI’s Rhodesia engagement that featured in the spring 1948 issue of Sight and Sound (the text describes the content of From Fear…accurately and cites Swackhammer as director, but gives Shoniwa as the film’s title; Connelly, op. cit., 8). On release in 1949, it was available for hire from Religious Films (15s., 17s. on weekends) (Monthly Film Bulletin, 1949, 17).

Mashonaland, the area where From Fear… was filmed (Connelly records the location as being near Umtali, present day Mutare) was first evangelized in the 1890s by a combination of Methodist and Catholic missionaries. The British South African Company had actively encouraged missionary work, generously granting land for mission stations. Such stations always included a mission school (often the same building used as a church on Sundays), and occasionally boarding accommodation for children from distant villages (it was also ‘deemed wise to remove pupils from their home environment’, in order to foster Christian values (Peaden, 1970, 8). Until the first government school for Africans opened in 1921, the only education service available to African children was through the missions, and in this way they wielded a substantial amount of power and influence, arguably becoming ‘the real rulers of large areas of Mashonaland’ (Blake, 1977, 161). The missions openly conceived of their education programmes as  the most effective way of evangelisation. ‘When I first came I walked from kraal to kraal and found it useless unless we started schools…Start with the children’, testified one missionary in 1925 to the Commission of Native Education  (ibid., 8). It was also regarded as  the best way to eradicate African cultural institutions, such as polygyny, ­that were seen as antithetical to the successful uptake of Christianity.

These standard missionary procedures and activities, reproduced in one form or another by Christian missionaries all over the Empire, had evidently not been subject to any dramatic rethink by the mid-1940s. The presidential address to the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference of 1944, given by the Venerable Archdeacon S. J. Christelow, baldly illustrates the importance accorded to the active dismantling of African life and custom. Having spoken with disappointment of ‘the backward development and low standards of life and intelligence of the Africans’, the Archdeacon goes on to outline in no uncertain terms the continuing project for missionary workers in Southern Rhodesia: ‘The present African home and family life and resources are a poor foundation for security and individual development. … There must be broken down at an accelerated rate the domination of ignorance, superstition, disease, and poverty. There is an emergent minority, but the majority of Africans are making only a small contribution to the country’s good, either spiritually or materially. For their own sake and for the country’s this cannot be allowed to go on’ (Proceedings of the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, 1944, 31).