No 1 East African Entertainment Unit depicts the unit entertaining members of the 11^th East African Division in South East Asia. The 11^th East African Division had formed in February 1943, and had arrived in Ceylon during the summer of 1943, where it trained until June 1944. The Division – which included fourteen King’s African Rifles Battalions – would make its combat debut two months later, in August 1944, when it relieved the 23rd Indian Division (Jeffreys and Anderson, 2005, 57, 58).

Katrin Bromber suggested that much of the propaganda aimed at East African troops in Ceylon – including a weekly paper entitled ‘HESHIMA’, films, talks, and broadcasts – was initially used to ‘counter inactivity and boredom’, and to ‘secure the individual and collective discipline of the askari’ (Bromber, 1). The East African Entertainment Unit not only entertained African troops, but also toured British and Indian divisions, providing two distinct programmes for East African and British forces. The ‘dope’ sheet (cameraman’s notes) explains that the unit had given 350 performances in a year and had covered 60,500 miles in Ceylon, India and Burma.

The film shows Captain Jeff Seabrook, who was in charge of the unit, conducting the African musicians and later playing a version of ‘Sweet Sue’ on the harmonium. After the war, Seabrook would manage, and arrange the songs for, the enormously popular post-war group, Rhino Boys. It is probable that some of their members feature within this film, as Gerhard Kubik noted that most of the Rhino Boys’ members were ‘recruited into the entertainment unit of the Education Corps of the King’s African Rifles’. The group, Kubik added, ‘comprised musicians from Kenya and Uganda, but it became famous in the whole of East Africa after the war’ (Kubik, 1981, 92). Amongst the musicians performing in South East Asia was the hugely influential guitarist Funde Konde, who joined the King’s African Rifles band in 1944 and who was, according to an obituary in 2000, ‘posted to India to entertain African, Asian and European troops’ (The Guardian, 21 July 2000). The ‘dope’ sheet offers little information on the African musicians, but does note that the double bass was played ‘by a corporal from Uganda’ and was made in the jungle a few miles from Kalewa.

In his study of post-war popular music in East Africa, Gerhard Kubik charts the emergence of new musical styles within East Africa after the War. Although Kubik suggests that the music of the Rhino Boys shows signs of being a ‘foster music’ – ‘the new East African music could not immediately free itself from the control of European teachers and “musical experts”’ – new musical styles and rhythms, most notably Rumba music, became increasingly popular. ‘The military musical forms of the colonial powers no longer made any impression on the young people’, Kubik noted, adding that ‘after the war, musicians who had been trained in brass band instruments went increasingly into dance-music groups where they used the instruments in which they had been trained by Europeans for something quite different’ (Kubik, 1981, 92, 93).