In his 1956 book, Africa, Land of Contrasts, filmmaker Ronald Haines records a 50,000 mile expedition he undertook across Africa with his wife Jean. ‘We visited Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, Swaziland, Basutoland, and the Union of South Africa’, he explained. ‘For a year we travelled around, noticing, photographing, listening and recording. Our purpose was to make a series of documentary films’ (Haines, 1956, 9).

Ronald Haines (real name W. G. Hutchinson) had established British Foundation Pictures in 1937, producing ‘documentary entertainment shorts’, which took advantage of the new quota regulations (Low, 1979, 96). His wife Jean, who also directed and served as an ‘expert saleswoman’ for the company’s films, explained in 1951 that over 15 years of ‘unbroken production, British Foundation Pictures have produced some 500 films in 35mm gauge alone, all of which have been released by major renters’ (Daily Gleaner, 20 December 1951, 10). Its films played internationally and were also often presented on 16mm for schools. The couple filmed ‘all over the world’, recording the ‘survival of Europe after the war’, producing films for the British Admiralty, as well as an annual series of propaganda films for the Government (Boxoffice, 29 January 1949, 103). When the Tourist Board in Jamaica, KLM Airlines and Trinidad Leaseholds Ltd commissioned Haines to produce a series of films from the Caribbean in 1951, they described him as the ‘largest maker of this type of general interest travelogue’ (Daily Gleaner, 20 December 1951, 10).

Ronald and Jean Haines filmed A Day in Nairobi in 1953. Haines explained that they visited Nairobi for two reasons. ‘First we wanted to visit the Game Reserve, as we considered that there the chances of obtaining pictures of lions should be reasonably good’. Haines outlined that his ‘interests are in studying the habits of big game by watching the animal, unaware of any human intrusion, forage for food, choose their mates, or stalk their prey by following instincts which have remained unchanged for thousands of years’. For Haines, filming in Africa ‘was a sporting adventure, with a large dash of pioneering’ (Haines, 1956, 112, 15).

Their second reason for visiting Kenya is potentially of more interest to colonial historians. ‘We hoped to photograph the Kikuyu tribe’, Haines explained, ‘some members of which were the backbone of the Mau Mau movement’. However, in his account of filming in Kenya, Haines makes virtually no other reference to the Mau Mau. He notes only that Colonel Mervyn H. Cowie, Director of the Kenya National Parks, was ‘more than fully occupied with defence matters connected with the Mau Mau disturbances’, and so had to arrange for an assistant to accompany them in the Nairobi National Park, and also comments, after staying overnight with some Masai tribesmen, that he hoped ‘we would not be missed in Nairobi, for people might think we had fallen into Mau Mau hands’ (Haines, 1956, 112, 113, 115). The lack of attention afforded to the Mau Mau is reflected in the completed film and also in the publicity surrounding it. Today’s Cinema, in reviewing this ‘colourful trip to one of Africa’s most Europeanised provinces’, referred to the Kikuyu tribes people only as a ‘much publicised people’, while Film Report wrote of the ‘simple and primitive way of life of the native farm workers’ (Today’s Cinema, 19 November 1955, 10, Film Report, 18 November 1955, 866).

Haines’ account of his time in Nairobi closely follows the tone and content of the commentary provided within the film. ‘As we neared Nairobi we looked down on an impressive landscape’, he wrote, ‘Here Africa relents for a space and one sees land where the struggle for life has become easier, where green coffee country and orderly farms proclaim a victory for good settlers’. His writing, as with the film’s commentary, presents a land of continued development under British rule, with virtually no reference to the extreme problems and opposition that European settlers faced. ‘A little over fifty years ago, a handful of adventurers, prospectors, traders, and hunters made their camp around the swamp of Nairobi.... Then lions drank the same water as men… Today Nairobi is the capital and administrative centre of Kenya Colony – a fine modern city, with wide streets, handsome stone buildings, and excellent shops’ (Haines, 1956, 111).