In outlining the Government’s wartime intentions for the Kenyan people, War Came to Kenya prioritises the importance of volunteers, of women and of farming and production. In doing this, the film also emphasises the ‘solidarity’ of the British Empire, the unity of Africa and the continued benefit of British involvement in Kenya.

One of the film’s functions is to recruit and encourage volunteers. The film constantly reiterates the voluntary work performed by the public: ‘the young men of the land become the Kenya Defence Force’, we are told, ‘the housewives and the typists have become voluntary assistant nurses’, and ‘the senior naval officer was a coffee planter, his first lieutenant a solicitor’. The film depicts female workers – on the farm, as nurses, in canteens – but still endorses traditional gender identities as ‘alone each woman manages hundreds of acres, yet remains the mother of her family’. The emphasis on white female workers, repeated throughout the film, was particularly significant as European women were urgently needed to assist production and assume the jobs vacated by men going to war.

Yet, the film’s emphasis on exclusively white female responsibility also highlights one of the film’s paradoxes: this is a united Africa, but one clearly divided by race. The commentary states that ‘This war has proved the solidarity and brotherhood of the British commonwealth of nations. It has also shown a united Africa’. Wendy Webster claimed that the film was re-titled ‘War Comes to Africa’ for distribution in England, which further promotes this notion of a united African response to the War (Webster, 2005, 31).

It is however clear that the film sets up a division between the Africans and the Europeans, both in its formal structure and in its representation of the respective groups. In the first reel, despite mentioning ‘a vast land where twenty thousand Europeans and forty-five thousand Indians live in the midst of three and a half million Africans’, there are virtually no black Africans featured. The film shows a young white girl eating, and white boys playing cricket, as it talks – seemingly in reference to the wildlife - of ‘a land where the savage and the civilised live in harmony’. A further sequence, outlining how troops have arrived from countries throughout Africa to support ‘the colony’s European, Indian and African manpower’, depicts only white Africans.

Although the film ostensibly follows a chronological path, it is also structured in racial terms. The second reel begins with a consideration – from a white colonial viewpoint – of the black African experience. The film then cuts from the tribal Africans, who are depicted in traditional head dresses and described as nomads ‘subsisting on a diet of milk and blood’ who fight lions ‘with a spear as their only weapon’, to a shot of convalescing white soldiers playing cricket, which is widely used on film as a signifier of ‘civilised’ England. A later section depicts the work of African naval volunteers, but again this sequence is at a remove from the sections featuring white volunteers.

While the film does reveal cultural and racial divisions, it still seeks to highlight the loyalty of the local Africans and, in asserting that British and Indian troops arrived from overseas, the continued value of colonial rule. Consistent with other government propaganda, the film depicts local tribes donating to the cause and states that no one has ‘proved more loyal, more generous or more wholehearted in their support of the Empire’s war effort than the African tribes of the colony’. The historical validity of these claims, and the subsequent notion that many of the tribes ‘volunteered’ for military service, has been challenged by much recent scholarship. Yet, the commentary describes the donations as a ‘magnificent gesture for a small tribe who were once German subjects’. This serves to highlight the local loyalty to the Empire, while also reiterating previous British successes over the Germans.

The film’s conclusion illustrates the continued war effort in Kenya, even though the ‘combined forces of Africa have left Kenya’. The film prioritises the need for production and closes, as it begins, with a romanticised shot – akin in music and image to Gone with the Wind – of the land, emphasising once again the essential role of farming and production in the Kenyan war effort.

Tom Rice (March 2008)