The Western in the Global South

MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, Dayna Oscherwitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138843127
• eBook ISBN: 9781317551065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre's impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and Post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. re-appropriations of the Western genre.

Part I
Colonial Circulations of the Western in the Global South

1 The Western in Colonial Southern Africa

James Burns

This chapter explores the reception of American Westerns in Southern Africa during the colonial era. From the arrival of the first moving images in Johannesburg in the late 19th century until the decline of the cinema industry in the 1960s and 1970s, African audiences – in rural areas, in mining compounds, in cities, and on large farms – consumed a steady diet of American Westerns. By the end of the colonial era it was the dominant film genre across the continent. To many Southern African people the Western was synonymous with the movie, and the cowboy was synonymous with Americans. Westerns became so popular in part because they were cheap and plentiful and were seen as an anodyne form of entertainment that pleased censors, distributors, and audiences alike. Long after audience enthusiasm for the genre had waned in the West, the cowboy aesthetic lingered on in Southern Africa.

Southern Africa’s cinema history began in the late 19th century, when a travelling magician named Carl Hertz brought movies to the South African Republic as a part of his act. (Hertz 1924). Hertz and the itinerant entertainers who followed him were drawn to the Union of South Africa by its dense urban populations. This meant South Africa and the territories connected to it by the railway became exposed to movies a generation earlier than much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. These pioneering picture-show men screened short films initially in hotels and rented auditoriums. In the early years it was mainly an entertainment for white urban elites. Gradually entrepreneurs brought movies to smaller towns and villages in rural areas. At the same time, businessmen in cities began building new theatres or adapting existing structures to the showing of movies. The first cinemas in South Africa were music halls and vaudeville houses that gradually converted to showing movies exclusively.¹ By 1913 Cape Town had several venues devoted exclusively to showing movies while Durban had eight theatres, Port Elizabeth had twelve, and most small towns had “at least one picture house” (The Moving Picture World 1913). Johannesburg had the most dynamic cinema-going culture, with tens of thousands of people seeing the most popular movies weekly by 1920 (Stage and Screen 1920).

From there, the cinema followed the rail line north to Southern Rhodesia, where entertainment halls were advertising nightly film shows in the major cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo by 1913 (Rhodesian Herald 1913). Farther north, in Blantyre, Nyasaland, the first cinema advertisements appeared in the Nyasaland newspapers in 1917 (Nyasaland Times 1917) while in Northern Rhodesia, the local press advertised the screenings at the Grill cinema by 1920. To the West, the Bechuanaland Protectorate built its first cinema in 1913, (Parsons 2004) while by 1914, German South West Africa, a territory that would be absorbed into the Union of South Africa after the World War I, had opened its first movie house (Gordon 2005).

When evaluating the influence of the Western in colonial Southern Africa, it makes sense to treat the region stretching from Cape Town to Northern Rhodesia in the north, and from Zimbabwe in the east to Namibia in the west, as a single cultural zone. This vast British territory was linked by the continent’s largest rail system, which connected the Cape of Good Hope in the south to the copper mines of modern Zambia two thousand miles to the north. Mining dominated the regional economy and encouraged the creation of a transportation infrastructure that linked these areas. Migrant labor was and remains an important component of social and economic life in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the modern nations that comprise southern Africa. The shared cinema history of all of these countries is reflected in the continued use of the term “bioscope” for both the technology of moving pictures and for the location where they are screened. The use of the term hints at the early date at which moving pictures arrived in Southern Africa, as it went out of common parlance in the U.K. and the U.S. by 1910. Bioscope was unique to Southern Africa and was not used in French or Belgian colonies; nor is it found in British West Africa, where the cinema arrived much later (Georg 2007).

The history of the Western, and film culture in general in southern Africa, must be understood within the context of the system of racial segregation associated with South African apartheid. This was a program of geographical separation of the races in the Union of South Africa undertaken by the National Party after their narrow electoral victory in 1948. Apartheid, which means “separateness” in Afrikaans, racialized all spaces in the Union, including movie theatres. It was a policy rooted in the assumption that European and African cultures were fundamentally incompatible. Thus its defenders claimed to be protecting Africans from Western cultures that would prove corrosive to their traditional way of life. But though apartheid was the most apparent manifestation of settler segregation, to a large extent it codified racial policies that were already in place in many regions of Southern Africa at the dawn of the cinema era. To be sure, segregation practices were a patchwork throughout the region, dictated by local history, custom, demographics, and economics. But though colonists in Northern and Southern Rhodesia claimed to practice less severe discrimination than the Union of South Africa, racial segregation of public spaces in all of these regions during the colonial era meant Africans living in these colonies rarely saw films in the company of white patrons. Segregation was most effectively achieved in the smaller towns and villages of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia where settler elites were able to police segregationist traditions and policies. Within the cities of the South African Union itself, segregation frequently broke down in urban areas, where the lines of racial identity became blurred in neighborhoods like District Six in Cape Town. Thus while cities such as Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, or Johannesburg, South Africa, might have rigidly segregated audiences, theatres in poorer neighborhoods of Cape Town experienced a relatively high degree of ethnic and racial diversity.

Film distribution in the region was dominated by the Schlesinger Company, which purchased films from American and British companies and circulated them the length and breadth of South Africa, Botswana, and the two Rhodesias. I.W. Schlesinger was an American businessman who arrived in South Africa in 1894 virtually penniless. Within ten years he had made his fortune in the insurance business and real estate. In 1912 he acquired the bankrupt Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. From this beginning, he built Africa Consolidated Theatres, which embarked on an aggressive program of purchasing cinemas throughout the Union. By 1914 he held a near monopoly on the cinema business, which allowed his company to dominate film distribution as well. When, in 1917, Schlesinger created a film production company (African Films Ltd.), he controlled all three aspects of the movie business, making him a pioneer of vertical integration several years before Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures accomplished the feat in the United States. The Schlesinger Company enjoyed almost complete dominance of the cinema business in Southern Africa until the 1950s. Though Schlesinger never made Africans a focus of their marketing, his control of distribution meant his company determined what they saw at the movies.

Cinemas for non-Europeans in Southern Africa were few and far between before the 1930s. Though a theatre for “Coloureds” appeared in Natal in 1908, economics dictated that most movie houses catered to the relatively affluent settler communities. The greatest concentration of cinemas for “non-whites” was found in Cape Town, where highly diverse neighborhoods like District Six boasted several “mixed” theatres by the 1920s. Beyond the major cities, during the silent era there was a handful of cinemas in African townships and some “European” venues held occasional screenings for Africans. But for the most part, Africans saw movies on plantations, in social-welfare halls, and especially in mining compounds.

The expansion of the movies from being the preserve of the settler elite to a mass phenomenon in Southern Africa coincided with the ascent of the American Western as the most popular Hollywood genre. Indeed, the first film advertised in South Africa in 1895 was a film of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (Reynolds 2005, 401). By the eve of World War I, the Western was making inroads into local markets all over the globe. For example, in 1912 The Straits Times of Singapore announced the people of the colony “are getting tired of seeing Cowboys and American dramas” (1912) while in the Caribbean, the Jamaica Gleaner complained of the incessant local showing of American Westerns (1913). And in Central America it was reported that in the early days of the cinema, people in Honduras assumed from the movies that all Americans were cowboys (Bottomore 1996, 14). After the war, as Hollywood carved out a commanding share of the global cinema market, the flow of Westerns across the world became a flood. In South Africa, by the end of the 1920s the Western was firmly established as the genre of choice among African audiences. As an official at the American consulate in South Africa explained: “American western pictures, with their intense activities, appeal particularly to the natives” (Vasey 1997, 149).

We can get a sense of the growing reach of the Western in the region by examining movie advertisements for theaters in the Rhodesias. Since the films advertised originated in Cape Town and made their way throughout the theaters of the region, we can assume a film showing in Southern Rhodesia would have been screened widely throughout Southern Africa. Already, on the eve of World War I, Westerns were beginning to appear on local programs. The Rhodesia Herald on June 6, 1913 advertised the showing of The Ranger and his Horse at the Electraceum cinema. The film was one of several features being advertised in town, though it was the only Western (1913). Ten years later, the Bulawayo theaters were advertising a bill of almost entirely Western programs, including Pinto (1920) and True Blue (1918), which was advertised with the description “Why should a prince of cowpunchers and king of the range abandon his Arizona realm to be an English Earl? William Farnum in ‘True Blue’ gives us the answer in typical American word and action” (Bulawayo Chronicle 1923).

Southern Rhodesia’s major cities had strictly segregated cinemas by 1918, and few Africans would have been permitted to view these Westerns in theaters. But the African audience for movies in Southern Rhodesia and throughout the region would expand dramatically in the decade following World War I. Some of the earliest African audiences for the movies appeared in the mining compounds of Johannesburg, where during World War I, an American missionary named Ray Philips began showing movies to the migrant laborers. Philips had been tasked by the owners with finding forms of entertainment for the miners, who lived in all-male compounds, which would discourage them from drinking, fighting, or participating in other behaviors that were antithetical to the smooth operation of the mines.

Philips was the first of many colonial agents who would weigh the potential dangers and opportunities that cinema posed to African communities. While the movies promised a salutary alternative to the drinking and “faction fights” that plagued the mining industry, it was unclear what effect this new medium would hold over these audiences in the long run. To Phillips, a well-censored show proved an invaluable asset to mine-owners. He later recounted the effect of showing movies to the miners:

The result was immediate and gratifying. The thousand gathered around the screen and showed their appreciation by filling the compounds so full of joyful sound that outsiders often decided that a riot was going on. With amazed delight the happy crowds went off on trips on the modern magic carpet to other lands (Couzens 1982).

As labor historian Charles van Onselen has written of these mine shows:

For a largely illiterate audience, films, as a form of cheap mass entertainment, readily suggested themselves to mine managers. Not only was the cost moderate but if screened at peak drinking hours on a weekend evening they also had the beneficial effect of making inroads into the total cases of Monday morning hangover. Further, and again unlike alcohol, films were unlikely to lead directly to violence (van Onselen 1976, 89).

Other mine managers followed Philips’s example and by the end of the decade, movies were becoming a fixture of life in mining compounds across Southern Africa.² During the 1920s a few permanent theaters for Africans emerged in urban areas. According to scholar David Coplan, by 1920, blacks in Johannesburg “could get an idea of how American show people dressed and acted from film shows at the BMSC or the Good Hope and Small St. commercial ‘bioscopes’” (Coplan 1985, 124). In the Southern Rhodesian city of Bulawayo, local authorities had unsuccessfully tried to establish a movie theater for Africans in 1913 (Bulawayo Chronicle 1913). But immediately after World War I ended, they renewed their efforts, and after much debate, by the end of the decade there was a permanent bioscope show in the African social hall. By 1929 there was a fixed venue for movie-going for Africans in most large towns and cities. While some members of the public protested against the opening of these theaters, the Police Superintendent for Southern Rhodesia supported them, arguing, “There is nothing wrong in a well-conducted bioscope” (Zambian National Archives/ZNA 13 January 1930). Indeed, it was apparent to authorities in Southern Rhodesia that the popularity of the cinema had grown to such an extent among black workers that it would be problematic to try to discourage it. As the Superintendent of Native Affairs put it: “I doubt … whether we can stop these performances” (ZNA 10 January 1930).

In new theaters in towns and on the mines, African audiences developed their enthusiasm for Westerns. From the inception of the shows run by Philips, the Westerns were a staple of mining-compound programs. Writing in 1946, South African cinema historian Thelma Gutsche observed that the one constant in the movie-going habits of Africans over the past generation was their “affection for ‘Wild Westerns’” (Gutsche 1946, 379). “Twenty years of film exhibitions on the mine circuit failed to cure the ‘boys’ of their affection for a mythical cowboy called ‘Jack’ (no matter what his real name) and his always successful deeds of daring” (Gutsche 1946). Her observations were born out by colonial officials throughout southern African in the post-war era (Parsons 2004, 7).

The movies supplied to these venues were the same ones the Schlesinger organization had circ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface: “Coming back to bad it up”: The Posthumous and the Post-Western
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Western in the Global South
• Part I Colonial Circulations of the Western in the Global South
• 1 The Western in Colonial Southern Africa
• 2 Cassava Westerns Theorizing the Pleasures of Playing the Outlaw in Africa
• 3 The Italian (Southern) Western From colonial cinema to spaghetti western
• 4 From Django to Django Unchained Love narratives in the global south
• Part II The Western in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean
• 5 In the Crossfire Africa, Cinema, and Violence in Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako (2006)
• 6 Trashing the Western's Revenge Narrative in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt
• 7 Cowboys and West Indians Decolonizing the Western and Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1973)
• Part III The Western in Australia and Asia
• 8 Aboriginal Cowboys? On the Possibilities of the Western in Australia's Far West
• 9 Tears of the Black Tiger The Western and Thai cinema
• 10 Tamil B Movie Westerns The Global South and Genre Subversion
• Part IV South American, Mexican, and Borderlands Westerns
• 11 An Imperfect Genre Rethinking Politics in Latin American Westerns
• 12 Landscaping the Western Ciro Guerra's The Wind Journeys (2009)
• 13 Carlos Bolado's Bajo California Crossing Borders and Dislocating the Western Tradition
• 14 Disinterring the Western in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men
• Contributors
• Index