The filmmaker Harold Smart was the first Agricultural Officer in British Honduras, serving from 1928 until 1938, when he assumed the post of Senior Agricultural Officer in Tanganyika. His amateur films record his work and life in British Honduras, along with some footage from Basutoland (his birthplace) and Nyasaland.

In 1929 the Empire Marketing Board published H.C. Sampson’s ‘Report on the Development of Agriculture in British Honduras’. Sampson’s report indicated the need to create and develop local agriculture, as at this time, he suggested, ‘timber is the colony’s main industry, and the inhabitants despise agriculture’. The Empire Marketing Board noted the appointment of Harold Smart, and recognised his role in showing ‘what crops can be profitably and successfully grown’ and in developing British Honduras as an ‘agricultural country’ (The Times, 8 May 1929, 15). The Colonial Office’s annual report in 1938 suggested that, on average, the value of forest products still comprised over 80% of the country’s total domestic exports between 1924 and 1937 (Waddell, 1961, 83).

In the aftermath of the First World War, British Honduras experienced a sharp economic decline. Trade unions emerged and a nationalist political agenda was launched. Historian Mark Moberg has noted the growing political and economic influence of the United States within the region, while the Great Depression of the 1930s further impacted on the local economy, particularly as British demand for timber plummeted (Moberg, 2003). This further highlighted the need, earlier noted by the Empire Marketing Board, to broaden the export industry.

By the 1930s the banana trade had been declining for many years. An outbreak of Panama Disease saw production fall between 1917 and 1931 from an annual peak of 886,881 stems to 78,867, and a severe hurricane in 1931 brought further devastation to the area (Moberg, 2003, 165). The Government’s relief efforts were heavily criticised and, with widespread poverty, unemployment and, in some areas, famine, opposition to the colonial system grew stronger. This was further exacerbated by the government’s failure either to introduce a minimum wage or legalise labour unions. In February 1934 a group calling themselves the ‘Unemployed Brigade’ marched to the Governor’s office and, over the course of the year, further demonstrations and riots followed. The demonstrations in British Honduras were, as Nigel Bolland noted, one of the earliest episodes of the major unrest that would shake the whole Anglophone Caribbean throughout the remainder of the decade (Bolland, 2004).

Certainly the film should be viewed within the economic, social and political context of the wider Anglophone Caribbean, but it can also be seen very specifically in relation to Harold Smart’s own writing on the banana trade in British Honduras. In November 1936 he published an additional report outlining the spread and causes of the Sigatoka disease on banana leaves. Smart reported that the disease, which had been first noted in 1935, had spread rapidly to affect 22,000 acres of British Honduras by November 1936. An article written in 1942 suggested that banana exports more than halved between 1930 and 1938 on account of the disease (Shaw, 1942).