Die Voortrekkers

From cinema's birth in the last decade of the 19th century, films about Africa were dominated by European and American projections of Africans as childlike, superstitious and uncivilised. Filmmakers of the early 20th century inherited notions of Africa based on Rider Haggard-style myths and fantasies of the Dark Continent. South Africa's first homemade history-adventure epic, De Voortrekkers (1916), was virtually the template of such values. Inspired by the success of D W Griffith's Hollywood white supremacist extravaganza, Birth of a Nation , I W Schlesinger, the head of African Film Productions, decided to give similar treatment to a crucial slice of local history. US film director Harold Shaw was flown in to work with Afrikaans historian Gustav Preller to come up with something "stirring". De Voortrekkers would tell the story of the Great Trek, culminating in the Battle of Blood River. Controversy surrounded the film from the outset - and the filming of the battle itself was a fiasco. At the given signal, hundreds of black extras attacked the laager, but when the director signalled for them to recoil and fall dead, they ignored him and continued charging. Mounted police had to intervene, forcing the extras back. Some escaped by swimming across the river and one man drowned. At the subsequent magisterial inquiry it came to light that while the black extras were charging, the white extras within had fired shots. The "Boers" had carried on shooting even as the "Zulus" withdrew.