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Film Image by Lionel Rogosin
We
meet our protagonist Zacharia as he arrives in Johannesburg city among the many black workers who enter the city from their respective homes as labor for white interests. Zacharia is headed to the mines where he is contracted to work.
Mining
life is hard and lonely, Zacharia can barely support himself with the funds he receives there. We
are let in on his desire to find alternative work in Johannesburg. The other mine workers discourage Zacharia's pipe dream, mentioning the near impossible task an African native has of receiving a permit to work in the city.
These men are meant to work and stay on the mine site, and once done, return to their homelands. There seems to be no means for the African laborer to advance their lives and improve their circumstances. Zacharia though is unrelenting in his plans and heads to Johannesburg to work and live.
As
soon as he arrives, he begins t feel the burdens of unfair pass laws and restrictions enforced by the government on Africans. He undergoes the arduous process of being shuffled from one job to another, unable to find steady work. He struggles to endure the emotional violence enacted upon him and is easily dismissed by employers who consider black workers disposable.
Missing
his family and frustrated by his work situation, Zacharia finds solace in a vibrant tavern in the township.There, black thinkers, mavericks and musicians gather to have beers and share ideas.
Zacharia's fate remained troubled throughout the film, expressive of the realities of apartheid. Yet, the highly resilient and dynamic spirit of the African is ever present in Come Back, Africa.
Director Lionel Rogosin teamed up with two black South African writers who could help craft the script to truly relay the injustices that burden the black body under white supremacist regimes.
Come
Back, Africa makes use of non professional actors who are from Johannesburg's landscape, and insists on adopting a semi documentary mode for this fiction piece. Using this hybrid perspective makes possible the ability to access raw history as it happens by showing the milieu of the time.
The
blurred boundaries straddled between what is conjured in the world of the film, and what is happening in the lived world releases the film from too much manufactured reality. Both the fictional elements merge seamlessly with actual life, archiving a significant moment in time, encased in this film document.
Film stills courtesy
Rogosin,
L. dir 1959. Come Back, Africa. South Africa
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