COME BACK, AFRICA

[4 stars]
"A WORK OF AMAZING GRACE AND A FORGOTTEN TREASURE!"
– Sam Adams, Time Out New York

"POETIC AND ELECTRIFYING! A movie whose very existence seems a miracle...
its artful despair is matched by its raw immediacy."
– New York magazine

(1959) Time capsule of Johannesburg, 1959: crowds hurrying down urban streets, pouring out of commuter trains arriving simultaneously at the same station, lining up for The Prisoner of Zenda at the Metro; while pint-sized penny whistle virtuosos attract a mixed-race downtown crowd and a chanting Methodist procession and a bride under a white parasol parade down the dusty streets of Soweto. And from out of the crowd Zacharia Mgabi, straight from Zululand in desperate search for a job, moves from the gold mines — where a gang boss turns a shovel technique exercise into a line stomp — to mushroom soup problems as a houseboy, joy-riding problems as a car washer, nutso customer problems as a waiter, to day-laboring on the roads, while sitting in at a late-night bull session, where the then-unknown Miriam Makeba (pictured below) drops in for two songs. Rogosin’s second feature following On the Bowery, Africa was shot with an all non-professional cast in a South Africa still under apartheid — right under the noses of the authorities, who thought he was shooting a musical film about “happy natives.” When he couldn’t find a theater or distributor for its U.S. opening, Rogosin opened the Bleecker Street Cinema and premiered it there himself, resulting in TIME proclaiming Africa as one of the year’s 10 Best. Approx. 85 minutes.

Click here to listen to Michael Rogosin, son of director Lionel Rogosin, Harry Belafonte, and Robert Downey, Sr. discuss Come Back, Africa on WNYC'S Leonard Lopate show.

REVIEWS

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"Rogosin shows a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come... His films are to be treasured for imprinting vanished worlds in celluloid... Miriam Makeba performs two songs that show why she'd soon become an international name."
– Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice
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"Presents this time and place in all its vibrancy and sorrow through atmospheric scenes of real daily life and labor... Despair and long-suppressed anger not extinguished, but made bearable by song and other forms of physical self-determination, from child penny-whistlers in the streets of Soweto to improvised drumming jams around strolling newlyweds... From a garage owner snarling about the African National Congress to a mixed-race crowd, together but with subtly different reactions, watching busking boys dance on a Jo'burg sidewalk, Come Back, Africa was the first film of its kind to bear witness to the hypocrisies of this riven country, particularly to audiences in segregated America."
– Bill Weber, Slant Magazine
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"A VITAL DOCUMENT! Filled not only with the sounds of Miriam Makeba’s mellifluous vocals but also those of the bands of boys in short pants and newsboy caps playing penny-whistles and the street buskers plinking out '(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear'... Yet no audio in Come Back, Africa is as piercing—or unshakable—as the keening heard in the closing minutes."
– Melissa Anderson, Artforum
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"Engaging and fascinating. Rogosin's individual images of dusty Soweto and the teeming mines are striking and poignant, but the views of the center of workday Johannesburg are the most disarming and, finally, unsettling... Lack of particular skyscrapers aside, Johannesburg doesn't look all that much different than pictures of New York City in the same period. And that's terrifying."
– Glenn Kenny
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“A HEROIC FILM! A film of terrible beauty, of the ongoing life it captured and of the spirit embodied by Rogosin and his fellow artists. Like On the Bowery, Come Back, Africa was meant to look directly at life lived under intolerable conditions, but it is also a precious record of a time gone by — in fact, the area where Rogosin filmed was in the process of being leveled. The musical culture of the townships at this time was completely new to most of us around the world — the Kwela, or penny whistle, street musicians; the gumboot dancing; and most of all the electrifying appearance of Miriam Makeba singing ‘Into Yam.’... This picture opened the eyes of many people to Apartheid — myself included.”
– Martin Scorsese

"You can feel the faith and energy of the film's argument... Shooting during the continent's first great wave of postcolonial independence, Rogosin depicts the outlier apartheid system in ways both fiery and subtle—a straightjacket of forcible ignorance, made all the more heartbreaking by the despair it creates in its victims."
– Steve Macfarlen, The L Magazine
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“The sound of the beating of the consciousness of a waking Africa.”
– Jonas Mekas, Village Voice

"Looks widely at shifting urban design and life in Johannesburg. These shaky, poetic images illustrate a city that’s both booming economically with commerce and sagging from moral deterioration... Rogosin didn’t claim to solve apartheid, but he did expose it to the world. Take notes, viewers.”
– Ryan Wells, Cinespect
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"Captivating. The Sophiatown district was being torn down even while Rogosin was shooting, so the film has been a time capsule from the moment it was released, but the dissection of racial frictions haven't aged as much as we'd hope."
– Vadim Rizov, GreenCine Daily
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“A TIMELY AND REMARKABLE PIECE OF CINEMA! Shows enough squalor to stun the average comfortable North American... Nevertheless, Rogosin finds beauty in South Africa, too, most of it in the vital faces of the Negro population, in their sunburst smiles and roars of laughter, in the explosive imagination of their dances, and above all in the sheer demonic genius of their music. All Rogosin’s candid-camera work is done with impressive skill and sensitivity... Mgabi, a Zulu office worker whom Rogosin spotted one day in a railroad station, plays with a wild, shy, serious charm that is irresistible.”
– TIME

“Its strength is the same as Rogosin’s previous picture On the Bowery. That is its candid, forceful and often poignant pictorial quality — its distinction of catching the image in sharp and relentless terms.”
– The New York Times