When Cyril Frankel first flew to the Kigezi district of Uganda in 1952, it was to produce a Crown Film Unit documentary, commissioned by the Colonial Office, entitled Soil Erosion. Frankel, who admitted this ‘his knowledge of Africa at that time was mainly from Tarzan films’, travelled alone to places ‘where the people had never seen a white man before’ (Sight and Sound, Spring 1987, 80, Frankel, 55). The film was intended to highlight the work of John Purseglove, who as a District Agricultural Officer in South-West Uganda, had initiated a resettlement experiment which between 1944 and 1951 moved more than 16,000 members of the Bakiga tribe to unoccupied fertile areas. Funded by the British taxpayer through the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, the move was presented as a case study of British development within African agricultural society. The new area produced cash, as opposed to subsistence, crops, practised modern agricultural methods (using terraced strips) and included newly developed roads, built ‘by the Africans, under European checking’. The experiment highlighted that tribal resettlement ‘can be done’ and was held up as an example of population control within Africa (The Times, 9 February 1951, 5).

On his return to Britain, Frankel completed the treatment for his documentary, but plans for the film were scrapped when the Conservative government announced that it was closing down the Crown Film Unit. Frankel was then approached by John Grierson, who asked him to produce the film for his state-funded commercial film company, Group 3. Grierson arranged for Frankel to meet with the writer Montague Slater to produce a screenplay, before Frankel put together a unit of six to work in Uganda. The British crew was assisted by Seperia Mpambara, who subsequently became Minister for Trade in Uganda, while Grierson remained closely involved throughout, sending telegrams upon viewing the rushes; ‘camera action performance excellent… like reserved degree of nakedness…’ (Frankel, 57,58). 

John Grierson discussed the making of the film in 1954, and praised the Colonial Office for allowing him to produce it free of their intervention. ‘I told them it was time for the African to speak for himself and to the devil with the “White Father” stuff’, he wrote, ‘I find it a lesson for government authorities. Trust breeds trust and film-making becomes free and exciting again. This liberalism of attitude is implicit in the film’. Grierson emphasised the historical significance of the film – ‘the first ambitious, dramatic all-negro film’, ‘the film presents a new sense of negro capacity’ – and concluded that ‘for me, it is a new vision of the negro people, and that is why I think the young director, Cyril Frankel, has done one of the most important works since Flaherty and one in the best documentary tradition’ (Films and Filming, October 1954, 14). Frankel also noted that ‘we knew we had done something no one had done before. We had presented these African people as they really were at that time. Before that time, a black man in films was usually either a comic or a servant’ (Sight and Sound, Spring 1987, 81).

Published alongside Grierson’s article in Films and Filming was a review of the 74-minute film. The reviewer concluded that ‘it is difficult to say if the film will succeed commercially. In a shortened version it might have a chance with people who like films of travel’ (Films and Filming, October 1954, 14). These words seem prescient as Michael Balcon, the director of Group 3, rejected the film, as did the British cinema chains, instead showing a severely truncated travel film drawn from the material. Today’s Cinemareviewed the ‘much abbreviated version’ (with a running time of 44 minutes) and described it as a ‘documentary designed to show how Africans are learning to manage their own affairs in British colonies’ (Today’s Cinema, 25 November 1955, 6). Kinematograph Weekly recognised that ‘much meat has obviously been removed from the original script’, and concluded that ‘drastic cutting prevents it from flaring into a thought-provoking let alone thrilling, white paper. Completely lacking in showmanship, it’s more suited to the classroom than the kinema’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 1 December 1955, 18). Monthly Film Bulletin was similarly dismissive, arguing that ‘this drastic re-editing has inevitably reduced the story to a confused muddle. Any assessment of the film’s original intentions becomes somewhat difficult to arrive at, for one is left with a variably photographed African travelogue with social overtones, rather awkwardly acted and directed’ (Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1956, 3). Grierson, Slater and Frankel all removed their names from the credits.

Man of Africa had cost £38,000 and was one of 22 films produced by Group 3 between 1951 and 1956 (Frankel, 59; Dyer MacCann, 168). Set up by the Labour administration as an attempt to bolster an ‘ailing and internationally uncompetitive post-war film industry’, Group 3 struggled for effective distribution and exhibition, its films invariably appearing on the bottom half of double bills (Popple, 1996, 131). By the time of its closure it had lost ‘nearly half a million pounds of government money’ (Popple, 1996, 136). In considering Balcon’s rejection of Man of Africa, Frankel argued that his work was too far removed from the image of Africa widely presented in commercial cinema. In particular, Frankel compared Man of Africa to Balcon’s series of films made with Harry Watt in Kenya (Where No Vultures Fly and West of Zanzibar), which ‘were not about Africans, but featured British actors with Africans in the background’ (Frankel, 58). Former Grierson colleague Watt was a noted critic of Group 3, labelling its films ‘notably old fashioned, snobbish and second-rate’ (Popple, 1996, 138).