In a statement before the company’s Annual General Meeting in December 1948, the chairman of Roan Antelope Mines reported that, in conjunction with the other Northern Rhodesian mining companies, ‘we have sponsored the production of four films made by G-B Instructional Ltd’. ‘The first two are technical films’, he explained, ‘which we believe will prove of interest to mining and metallurgical men throughout the world and will be of value and assistance to professional associations and technical colleges. The third film is in colour and deals with general living and working conditions on the Copperbelt, while the fourth is a documentary film’ (The Times, 29 November 1948, 8). A speech given by the Chairman of the Rhokana Corporation a year later, in December 1949, noted the progress of these films and explained that ‘the fourth film has been publicly exhibited under the title Chisoko the African and depicts the beneficial effects of the coming of the industry on the life of an African in Northern Rhodesia’ (The Times, 14 December 1949, 9).

The film was produced by Gaumont-British (Africa), which was established in South Africa at the end of 1946. An article in Sight and Sound explained that in 1945 the Southern Rhodesian Government had ‘arranged for Gaumont British units to come to the Colony to film various aspects of life, primarily from the immigration and tourist points of view’. As well as producing Government-sponsored films, the unit also produced films for Children’s Entertainment Films and for other commercial sponsors (Sight and Sound, Spring 1948, 7).

In his 1965 book, Assignment Africa, the film’s director Donald Swanson explained that he was offered the opportunity to work in Africa or Antarctica. He recalls meeting with a producer in England who told him ‘it’s a big film, the biggest documentary we’ve ever tackled. All about the fabulous copper mines in Northern Rhodesia… the benefits, the prosperity that industry and civilisation has brought them [Africans]… Dramatic stuff… Big stuff… Opportunity for you to make a real winner’. Swanson thus flew to Africa with the specific purpose of making Chisoko the African. He first met ‘Johannesburg-based senior officials of the mining companies who were sponsoring the film’ and spent two or three weeks in Johannesburg as the financial and administrative aspects of the picture were arranged. He writes at length about his experiences in the Copperbelt, highlighting both the camaraderie (and drinking) amongst the European bosses, but also the racist attitudes of the compound managers. While distancing himself from these views and noting that this was ‘before the winds of change blew through Africa’, he quotes a number of the managers, who described the workers as ‘just like children’, ‘raw – like monkeys straight out of trees – that’s how we got most of them’, while another remarked ‘they’re good boys really… just have to watch ‘em and know their ways’ (Swanson, 1965, 2, 17, 18).

Swanson’s account is filled with anecdotes from his trip that are based on the cultural differences between Europeans and Africans. He recalls, for example, his difficulties in filming a new-born child in the hospital as many of the locals ‘have a deep rooted superstition that if you point a camera, it is a sort of evil eye that will take away their spirit’. ‘We took the required shot and within twenty-four hours the child was dead’. It was, Swanson noted, ‘strange and inexplicable’. He also noted the difficulties of filming the ‘bush’ sequences, explaining that he had to pay an extra sixpence to get the local women to appear bare-breasted, even though he had ‘noticed no marked modesty amongst the village ladies until then’. The women then collected their money, rolled down their tops and queued again. ‘It was impossible to identify them all personally. So many contrived to get paid twice’ wrote Swanson. ‘To our untrained European eyes, they all looked much the same. And, no doubt, to their eyes, we Whites also looked identical – identical suckers’ (Swanson, 1965, 32, 44).

Swanson is best known now for his hugely influential ‘all-African’ urban dramas – African Jim (often known as Jim Comes to Jo’burg) made in 1949 and The Magic Garden (1951) – both of which centred on African characters and offered a ‘liberal perspective on black experience and identity’ (Maingard, 2007, 78). These films are now largely established within African cinema history, but much of Swanson’s concurrent work – for example, Chisoko the African – has been almost entirely overlooked.

Chisoko the African was initially released theatrically in England through the Gaumont circuit. It played as a ‘B movie’ alongside a cartoon entitled The Ostrich, on a programme headlined by the 1948 David Niven film Enchantment, and was, according to Louis Nell of the Central African Film Unit, ‘widely shown in British cinemas during 1949-1950’ (Eyles, 1996, 190, Nell, 1998, 196). The film was subsequently distributed non-theatrically through the large commercial library Sound Services Ltd, who advertised it as a film for ‘teaching history’ (Williams, 1962, 52). Indeed, a review in Today’s Cinema upon the film’s theatrical release suggested that it would play ‘surely, in the school rather than in the cinema, for the film is probably more educational than entertaining’. The review argued that the mining scenes would offer ‘some educational value for adolescents’ but are not ‘the sort of thing the average patron expects in his entertainment programme’. It did however note the ‘unaffected native portrayal’ and the ‘authentic African backgrounds’ but suggested that the images of African village life were already familiar to cinemagoers (Today’s Cinema, 29 April 1949, 7).

The film may also have played to African audiences and, in particular, to the mineworkers of the Copperbelt. Historian Charles Ambler, in his analysis of colonial audiences in Northern Rhodesia, outlined the establishment and growth of film shows on the Copperbelt, from their first public showing in 1928. Ambler shows that by the late 1930s film shows ‘were a well-established feature of life in the copper-mining towns and company compounds’ (Ambler, 2001, 82). In 1944 approximately 17,000 Africans saw films each week in the established municipal and mine-company cinemas, while Ambler further notes that ‘at the Roan Antelope Mine in the mid-1950s, two thousand or more would gather for weekly film shows that were social events as much as entertainment’ (Ambler, 2001, 88, 95).

Chisoko the African outlines an established history of the copper industry, which was widely repeated within many of the industry’s sponsored books, but it also indicates an increasing emphasis on worker welfare, which was evident in post-war company reports. For example, a statement by the Consolidated African Trust in 1949 outlined that ‘our policy of raising the living standard of our African employees and of providing healthy living conditions is being consistently pursued’ (The Times, 22 November 1949, 8). Historian L. J. Butler examined labour relations in the mines during the 1940s and noted the development of trade unionism ‘assisted by the colonial state’ after the war (Butler, 2007, 135). The African Mineworkers’ Union was established in March 1949, and helped secure a pay increase for African workers during the year, although demands for greater equality continued. European employees, represented by the Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers Union, also confronted the companies in 1949 over the issue of working hours. By 1949 there were 4,746 Europeans and 38,140 Africans employed in the mining industry in Northern Rhodesia, which was comfortably the biggest employer for both races (Annual Report, 1949, 12).