Sight and Sound, in considering the work of the Government Film Production Unit in 1948, commented that the nearly-completed Still Waters:  the Menace of Bilharzia ‘coats the pill of warning against Africa’s worst disease with the sugar of an appealing story pleasantly acted by local talent’. The article explained that ‘the film will be shown widely in the Colony, and also to would-be immigrants overseas’ (Sight and Sound, Spring 1948, 8).

However, Geoffrey Mangin, who assisted Frank Goodliffe in the production, noted that ‘the local cinemas would not show’ either Still Waters or a concurrent production on the perils of malaria. ‘According to the regional director of the cinema group’, wrote Mangin, ‘their patrons “paid to be entertained, not educated”, and anyhow “their agreements with their overseas distributors did not allow them to screen films from any other source”’. The government instead had to show 16mm prints of Goodliffe’s films ‘in clubs, schools and by means of the mobile cinema’ (Mangin, 1998, 18-19). The film had its British premiere ‘before a distinguished audience at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’ on June 30 1949 and was subsequently available from the Public Relations Office of the Government of Southern Rhodesia in London (Lancet 2, 20 August 1949, 335).

An editorial in the medical journal, The Lancet, discussed Still Waters and suggested that ‘it cannot fail to be well received and to be effective propaganda among the residents of Southern Rhodesia who can understand it’. The editorial was evidently implying that some sections of the audience – specifically the Africans – would not be able to comprehend the film, and this notion was supported by Goodliffe (Lancet 2, 20 August 1949, 335). As films officer in Southern Rhodesia, Goodliffe showed Still Waters to a class of African schoolchildren in 1948 and ‘asked them to answer questions about what they had seen’. A Rhodesian Herald article explained that he sought ‘to ascertain whether the African mind is receptive to the conventions and techniques of modern film production especially as applied to propaganda’ (Burns, 2002, 96).

The experiment was ‘pronounced a failure when only 64 per cent of the children successfully answered the questions put to them’. This conclusion supported the popular opinion within much of white Rhodesian society and amongst influential filmmakers such as William Sellers that Africans and Europeans possessed different cognitive abilities. According to W. D. Gale, an officer of the Southern Rhodesian Public Relations Office, ‘the Department, after years of experience, is well aware that a film for European consumption is not necessarily suitable for Africans, who need a simpler technique’ (Burns, 2002, 96).

In contrast to another bilharzia film, The African Schistosomiases, which was for medical audiences, Still Waters was intended for ‘lay audiences’, and predominantly, it would seem, white people (Journal of the Royal Institute of Public Health v. 12 (1949), 321). Yet, bilharzia was far more prevalent amongst black Africans. Lancet, in writing about Still Waters, claimed that ‘a fifth of the population of Southern Rhodesia is now believed to be infected’, but earlier records from the Public Health Department in Southern Rhodesia had shown that 8% of the European population was infected, compared with 35% of the African population (African Affairs, July, 1945, 135-136). This division was probably even greater as diagnosis – as well as treatment – was far less common amongst black Africans.

John Farley has argued that tropical medicine was ‘fundamentally imperialistic in its basic assumptions, its methods, its goals, and its priorities’. Treatment was dictated by the demands of white inhabitants and investors, so that, according to Farley, the health needs of the Africans ‘became a priority only when their diseases were felt to threaten the health or profits of the white man, or when imperial policies demanded that the health needs of the indigenous populations be addressed’ (Farley, 1991, 4).