The 1937 British-Gaumont adaptation of King Solomon’s Mineswas the second film version of H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 bestseller, following a South African production in 1918 (Cameron, 24-26). Subsequent productions included a box-office hit of 1950-51 featuring Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger, a 1985 flop starring a youthful Sharon Stone and Richard Chamberlain, and a 2004 television mini-series starring Patrick Swayze. Haggard’s enormously successful novels have been credited with inventing Africa for several generations of British readers. They seem especially to have stirred the fervour of young men for distant travels and exploration while simultaneously producing geographies of anxiety about what might lurk in those worlds beyond (see Stiebel, 1-36). An early Haggard biographer claimed that “[f]or many Englishmen, Africa became the Africa of King Solomon’s Mines” (Morton Cohen, cited Stiebel, 54). Haggard’s ‘Africa’ was crucial to cinematic representation of Africa, inspiring numerous films from the 1910s and marking most films of the colonial period even when Haggard’s novels were not the formal narrative foundation (see Cameron, 17-32).

The 1937 film directed by Robert Stevenson belongs to one of two ‘imperialist trilogies’ from the 1930s which set the stage for British perceptions of Africa in the run-up to the Second World War and, ultimately, positioned British interests in the continent as significant enough to fight for, not only during the War but in the subsequent three decades of decolonisation. The second, to which King Solomon’s Mines belonged, were produced by Michael Balcon for Gaumont-British and included Rhodes of Africa (1936) and Great Barrier (1936) (see Richards ([1986] and Dunn). The black-and-white production of King Solomon’s Mines resembles most British films of this era in that its ‘location shooting’ was limited to a second unit’s work (led by Geoffrey Barkas) which served as a backdrop for actors back home in the studio. Film historian Jeffrey Richards has argued of the cinema of this decade, which saw attendance at the cinema rise from 18 to 23 million weekly visits, that “[f]or ordinary people, the Empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure” ([1986] 141-43). Most importantly, for the urban working-class audiences of this era, the quarter of the globe that was ‘coloured red’ was ‘ours’ ([1986] 143). Richards noted that films of this period moved away from representing the Empire as “the White Man’s Burden” – emphasising ‘hard work, self-sacrifice, duty, and death –  in favour of a new jaunty version of an Empire of adventure and benefits, what he terms ‘produce imperialism’, demonstrating the positive benefits of Empire, such as the Gold Coast’s cocoa or Malaya’s rubber. Diamonds from South Africa are on Richards’ list of the products that British cinema-goers of the 1930s were encouraged to welcome ([1986] 147). Unlike the 1950 Hollywood production of King Solomon’s Mines with its nearly incidental treasure hunt and its rewards not reaped by the Europeans, the 1937 version centers on the quest for this imperial produce and makes much of the protagonists’ success in obtaining it.

The Gaumont-British film featured one of the era’s best-known American actors, bass-baritone concert singer Paul Robeson (1898-1976), who achieved stardom with Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones on Broadway in 1924 and later reprised the role in a successful but censored Hollywood production (1933) before making the Universal hit Show Boat where his version of ‘Ol’ Man River’ became so imprinted on the American imagination as to become his trademark song. After graduating from Rutgers University and Columbia Law School, he had gone to London to study African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He made most of his 1930s films in England, including Sanders of the River (1935) and King Solomon’s Mines. His political activism from this era well into the post-war period made him an object of fascination as well as a heroic figure for many leftists in the USA and abroad, but it also brought constant harassment: he was obliged to flee Europe in the late 1930s because of Nazi threats; the McCarthy era found him bullied repeatedly in interrogations and by the Press; in the 1950s the US government restricted his travel (see Boyle). Robeson’s interest in Africa in the 1930s, forged in part through his doctoral study and political activism, focused on destroying stereotypes about Africans. Having declared to the British press of 1934 that he had ‘seen all the African films...that have been made… and found them wanting’ (cited Musser, 414), Robeson and his wife Eslanda Goode Robeson engaged in several projects designed to undo the fantasies of ‘savage blacks’ propagated by fiction and documentary film alike. After the embarrassment of Sanderswhere he was cast as a disingenuous and sycophantic underling to a British district officer (see Duberman, 178-82), Robeson sought projects that would honour Africans. Claiming disgust with a film that he described as showing blacks “as Fascist States desire him – savage and childish” (cited Duberman, 180), Robeson turned to the documentary My Song Goes Forth(1937) and to the role of King Umbopa in the fictional King Solomon’s Mines. It is hard not to see these roles as complete opposites: in the former, Robeson plays himself, singing movingly and narrating an introduction about the important contributions of native blacks to South Africa (see Musser, 413ff); in the latter, he performs a role long embedded in the imaginations of British audiences as the king of a lost tribe who regains his birthright with the help of European friends he has befriended on his journey home. Yet both roles were part of Robeson’s revelation that American blacks should take the lead in ‘uplifting Africa’ by encouraging Africans to be true to their own culture and values (Duberman, 173ff). Playing Umbopa was about reclaiming his own birthright through that of the King with the snake on his belly.

Robeson reportedly was excited about how this film would let him rise beyond his usual image since there was a ‘definite part taken out of a book’ (Picture Show, 1936, cited Editors of Freedomways, 78), but almost as soon as the film was in production, its clichés about Africa were evident. The film boasted ‘twenty-seven thousand natives in ‘authentic’ animal skins! grass huts! erupting volcanoes’ (Duberman, 207). However, it did not deign to employ Americans for many of these roles and it sneakily cast a white actress in blackface, Sydney Fairbrother, as the witch Gagool while omitting her name from the credits. The film’s ethnographic sequences may have been marketable in 1937 as ‘authentic’ to a British audience who, in H.G. Wells’s words, knew about as much about Africa as about the Italian Renaissance (cited in Richards [1986] 143-44), but today they appear staged and even exploitative. The Africans are not individualised or identified by tribe or location. There are even bare-breasted womenplaced among crowds without any motivation for their presence. Only the Europeanised and quite obviously American Umbopa is treated with much respect – and barely that. Umbopa’s claim to the throne is depicted as comical by the aristocratic Captain Good who remarks, ‘You don’t get a snake on your stomach for nothing, you know’.

King Solomon’s Mines did not deliver the colonial message as successfully as Sanders and pleased crowds and critics proportionally less. It was initially required by the British censors to tone down its violence (Richards [1984] 149), lessening some of the excitement of the much-vaunted battle sequences. Robeson’s centrality diminished the surprise revelation of his identity: one guesses from the start that he is not really the servant he agrees to become. Further problematically, his singing derailed a plot audiences knew well from a novel which promised adventure – not serenades to the ‘Mighty Mountain’. British critics complained he was given ‘the silliest lyrics ever escaped from the limbo of postwar song scenes” (cited Boyle, 353). One periodical even suggested he was hypocritical in his putative interest in Africa since he had failed to set foot on the continent: Picture Show sniped that Robeson “has had Africa brought to the studio for his convenience” (cited Boyle, 354 n65). The American press was even less enthusiastic, with the black Pittsburgh Couriercomplaining that Robeson was made ‘to sing childish lyrics to dreary tunes in the most unlikely circumstances’ (cited Duberman, 207). Reviews on both continents were lukewarm (Editors of Freedomways, 78-79), though the film was reasonably successful’ in Britain even if it did not rise into the top ten for 1937 (Reid, 168).

No account of this film would be complete without following its star beyond the 1930s into the era when a new film version of Haggard’s novel in 1950-51 would draw millions at the box offices of North America, Britain, Australia, continental Europe, and even Japan. After playing Othelloin the early 1940s in the longest-running Broadway production in history, Robeson found himself under investigation by the House Un-American Committee and under surveillance by the FBI, CIA and British Intelligence agencies. In August 1950, just months before the premiere of the Hollywood remake of King Solomon’s Mines, Robeson was deprived of his passport and prohibited from travel until 1958 (Duberman, 388-90; Borstelmann, 67). Chillingly, while Americans were being invited to dream of something approximating a real Africa through one of the most ambitious location shoots in the history of cinema, one of the world’s most important voices on behalf of racial equality was being nearly silenced.

Whereas the film in which Robeson had starred in 1937 let him save the white Europeans whom he began by pretending to serve, it gave little sign of knowing that the country from which they started their journey was the Cape Colony. By 1950 when Robeson’s career as an international political activist had been shackled, the new film would likewise forget the name of the country where it was taking place: ‘Africa – 1897’ was the best it could do for a setting. In contrast, Robeson chose to remember – and loudly so – the country his wife had visited just before King Solomon’s Minesstarted filming. In 1948, during political appearances in London, Robeson made public attacks on South Africa’s institution of apartheid, and he continued to attack separatist policies at home and abroad throughout the next decades (Duberman, 340). While he had been willing in 1937 to play-act a munificent ruler who awards diamonds to the colonial invaders, in 1945 he was wiring President Truman to urge “support [for] the principle of full freedom with [a] specified time for all colonial peoples” (cited Duberman, 297). The diamonds he envisioned by the time the State Department took his passport away were no longer cinematic but political, social, and economic. And he argued that they belonged with those whose rights had been denied.