Edric Connor, giving a dignified performance as the Galana Chieftan, Ushingo, constantly defers to white game warden, Bob Payton (Anthony Steel), for authoritarian advice in his tribe’s major decisions.  And Ushingo’s son, Bethlehem, closes the film saying ‘there must be room for us to grow up and live in peace,’ adding they have to ‘walk before we can run’.  The parent-child discourse dominant in Payton’s relationship with the Galana does fracture occasionally:  In a rare moment of insight the incongruous relationship between the British Empire ex-pats and the African tribes is acknowledged as Payton is dismissed as a ‘government man’ by a youthful tribesman.  But the film depicts this as naïve insolence; a disingenuous comment given the good work that Payton is trying to do.  West of Zanzibar cannot admit to the colonialist’s responsibility in displacing and infantilising the African tribes of its colonies

Worse still, the film shamelessly blames others.  Mombasa, the city where the Galana settle, brings with it the problems of economic survival, criminal temptation and exploitation.  In explaining the swift degeneration of his tribe’s young men into drink and their ease in joining criminal poaching gangs, Ushingo is verbose in quashing the stereotype of the African savage, pointing out that his people are unused to city life.  He berates the judgemental attitude that damns his people but fails to reprimand the criminals who tempt his people in the first place.  West of Zanzibar attempts to redress this balance, presenting the Galana as an innocent people whose ‘savage’ behaviour is influenced by organised criminal gangs.  However, it fails to address the fact that the cities, economic situation, tribal displacement and growth in criminal gangs have developed because of colonial expansion.  Moreover, the film displaces any Empire guilt in its creation of the racist Dhofar (‘the black man is doomed to be slum savages’).  The real problem with East African indigenous populations, West of Zanzibar seems to say, is not the British colonialist who originally displaced them, but the Arab exploiters who take advantage of them. 

This deeply problematic view is typical of the ‘liberal dilemma’ faced by British films attempting to address colonialism and race in the 1950s (Geraghty, 112).  Watt aimed to make a film ‘with the idea of improving race relations’ and was reportedly surprised at the Kenya Board of Film Censors decision to ban it (Daily Worker,28 August 1954).  But as the Kine Weekly’s contemporary review  reveals (it describes the film as having a ‘simple, yet comforting, philosophy’), the British cinemagoing public was not yet ready to stomach a more honestly critical depiction of the British Empire and its role in indigenous displacement.

Dylan Cave