In 1945 the Southern Rhodesian Government arranged for Gaumont British units to visit the area, with a view to producing films primarily designed to attract tourists (for example Colony in Colour) and to address potential immigrants (Southern Rhodesia – Is This Your Country?). Between 1946 and 1949, approximately 40,000 European immigrants arrived in Southern Rhodesia, and the majority of these came from Britain. Partially in response to this growing influx, Gaumont British (Africa) Pty., Ltd., was formed in South Africa by the end of 1946, but in addition to educational and instructional films, Gaumont British units also produced films on mission life, such as Shinowa, a film in which a mission-educated African returns home (Sight and Sound, Spring 1948). Pitaniko charts the opposite journey, into the Cyrene Mission, and differs from many other Gaumont pictures, as it was sponsored by The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and thus served primarily as a fund-raising film that was not directed by the needs of the Southern Rhodesian government. At this time, the government was beginning to take over African education from the missions, and the missions, often now without government funding, needed to reassert the importance of their work to external funders.

Pitaniko was certainly aimed at a predominantly British audience. This is evident both from the formal structure of the film, and also from contemporary reports. In this respect, Pitaniko differs from the early films of the Central African Film Unit, which were produced specifically for African audiences. The Central African Film Unit, which was created in 1948, endorsed the notion, held by many colonial observers, that Africans and Europeans ‘possessed differing cognitive abilities’ and thus encouraged directors to use simple camera angles, with minimal editing and character movement (Burns, 2002, 59). Pitaniko, particularly in its use of close-ups and editing, targeted a non-African audience, and this is also borne out by contemporary reports. The Times stated in January 1949 that two religious films, Pitaniko and For Times Like These, had been shown privately in London (The Times, 26 January 1949, 8). The paper further noted that Pitaniko‘illustrates the manner in which the camera can come to the aid of the pulpit’, while Sight and Sound suggested in 1948 that as Pitaniko is essentially a religious film, it will ‘probably only be circulated among religious societies’ (Sight and Sound, Spring 1948).

Pitaniko was shot at the Cyrene Mission, an Anglican mission station near Bulawayo that was visited by Queen Elizabeth during the Royal tour of Rhodesia in April 1947. Canon Edward George (Ned) Paterson (1895-1974) had founded Cyrene in 1938 and his work should be positioned alongside that of other missionary movements in Africa. P. J. Devlieger argues that Paterson’s ‘career as a clergyman and art teacher was, in part, the extension of a tradition of British social activism by religious figures in colonial Africa’ (Devlieger, 1998, 712). Paterson’s emphasis was on human development, promoting the social function of art, both as an opportunity to rehabilitate, and as a way of keeping families together and ‘men away from beer and brothels’. Paterson stated in 1954, that since its inception, Cyrene ‘has undertaken the rehabilitation of forty-five cripples’, but Cyrene was also an internationally recognised art centre which laid the foundations for the modern art movement in Zimbabwe. Indeed, for all its emphasis on inclusiveness and rehabilitation, Paterson was not ‘keen at all to see that the film centres on the boy Samuel Songo, who is most dreadfully crippled’. However, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel emphasised the film’s documentary credentials, claiming that Pitaniko represented a ‘permanent record of life at Cyrene’, and that ‘The Story of Pitaniko, the heathen cripple boy who owes everything to Cyrene, is based on fact’ (Devlieger, 1998, 714).