The State, Citizens and Control: Film and African Audiences in South Africa, 1910–1948

Abstract

The period between Union in 1910 and the inception of apartheid in 1948 was an important stage in building a South African nation and national identity. In the context of racial segregation, this South African nation and national identity was white: ‘Boer and Brit’, to be more precise. Film was an important component of building English–Afrikaner national identity and unity. Black people in general and Africans in particular stood outside this nation-building project, on and off screen. In fact, cinema for Africans positioned them in such a way that their exclusion from any putative South African ‘nation’ seemed a ‘reasonable’ decision. Through the widespread and effective control of cinematic production, exhibition and censorship, Africans were framed simultaneously as visually unsophisticated, mischievous and criminal, and therefore unable to assume the role of responsible citizens of a modern nation. State control of all three aspects of cinema was never fully centralised; instead it was widely dispersed throughout the various provinces and state departments which exercised a degree of autonomy in the granting or withholding of exhibition licences to private operators. It is precisely this decentralisation and dispersion, however, that made control so much more effective, because the ideological framing of Africans as criminally credulous audiences remained a consistently shared vision among the key players in the state and among the white citizenry.