START 10:59:20 Scenes at Kisumu, Kenya's main harbour on Lake Victoria: timber is unloaded onto the quayside by a steam-driven dockside crane from a Lake steamer and African troops from the Belgian Congo embark on board the SS Rusinga, another vessel built exclusively to navigate Lake Victoria. Scenes on board Sergeant Wernham's vessel as it heads out into Lake Victoria and its arrival at Mwanza in Tanganyika (?). Sunset over Lake Victoria.

11:01:33 Canadian military pattern 3-tonners and commercial Chevrolet trucks carrrying Congolese soldiers motor along a road in Tanganyika between Mwanza on Lake Victoria and Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika. A stop on the journey for refuelling. Scenes at a railhead near Tanganyika's border with Burundi, a Belgian colonial possession: a Belgian steam locomotive, Congolese soldiers washing themselves in shallow pools of water lying between the railway tracks and collecting boiling water in mess tins from a cylinder valve on the steam locomotive. A view over Kigoma, Tanganyika's main port on Lake Tanganyika.

11:02:49 A signpost outside Kigoma pointing the way to Ujiji, site of the famous meeting between Scottish missionary David Livingstone and American journalist and explorer Henry Stanley in 1871. Scenes in Ujiji, a sleepy-looking African village. Views of the obelisk and the metal plaque put up by the Royal Geographical Society in 1918 to mark the very spot Livingstone and Stanley met on 10 November 1871. Nearby, next to an old mission school building (?), a plaque fixed to a plinth informs passersby in English and Swahili (?) that from this spot Livingstone set off on what proved to be his last African journey in August 1872. The Baobab tree where Livingstone used to hold meetings.

11:05:54 Scenes at the Roan Antelope copper mine at Luanshya (?) outside Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) showing the modern pithead tower and African miners at the beginning of their shift standing by the lifts that will take them deep underground. Waggons filled with copper ore in an underground mine gallery. African miners at the end of their work shift queue at a lift that will take them back up top and stream out of the lift once they reach the surface.

10:08:35 Scenes at the mine where conveyor belts carrying copper ore demonstrate how it is ground down into smaller and smaller lumps and washed clean of impurities. At a copper processing plant, the ore turned into red-hot streams of molten metal during the refinement stage. The end product consists of slabs of oxidified copper plates inscribed with the initials 'MUI'.

END 11:11:50

Steam navigation on Lake Victoria, a military road convoy, the meeting place between Livingstone and Stanley on Lake Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia's copper-mining industry.

Notes

Summary: John Wernham recorded audio commentary over this film on 14 May 1992, DVD Reel 2 "Reel 25" from 8.15 to 16.38.

Approximately 30,000 Africans were employed in Northern Rhodesia's Copperbelt during the Second World War. The creation of an African labouring class to work the copper mines produced the first generation of local political leaders whose demands, initially rooted in securing fair wages and decent working conditions, would ultimately include majority rule and independence.

Remarks: This material, together with the rest of Wernham's film record of his time in central and eastern Africa, constitutes a valuable and possibly unique pictorial record at this time in the region's colonial history.