“In this project, I approach the emergence of state regulation in South Africa, examining early censorship as an instrument of racial governance. Drawing on censors’ reports, censored films and debates that led to the drafting of the first national Censorship Act in 1931, I trace how censors assumed a custodial role over cinema, racially codifying images, spaces and audiences. I argue that this early regulatory apparatus provided a template for official censorship and laid the bureaucratic groundwork for segregation of public leisure several decades before apartheid,” said Iso Lomso fellow Fernanda Pinto de Almeida of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University.
Pinto de Almeida said that the arrival of American and European silent films at Cape Town’s port and the building of cinema theatres in the early 20th century inaugurated a new medium of popular entertainment. However, its popularity was soon met with widespread anxiety about the potential immorality of moving images and the uncontained publics they drew. These early concerns prompted the formation of South Africa’s first Board of Film Censors in the Cape Province in 1917.
Pinto de Almeida started with an example – the film footage of a boxing prize fight in 1910. Dubbed the ‘Battle of the Giants, ’ the match that took place in Reno, Nevada, was between the first African American world heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and the previously undefeated white champion James Jeffries, who was defeated by Johnson in the fight. Besides the spectacle, the match was highly significant in the history of race relations in the US, leading to so-called race riots in which more than 20 people died, and many black young men were assaulted by white men.
“The film came to Cape Town, offering a new kind of spectacle with huge interest. But there was trepidation about race riots from the authorities, which was seen as a possible effect of showing the film in the Cape,” said Pinto de Almeida. “It was believed it would attract large, illiterate crowds and affect what was perceived as ’good race relations’ in the Cape. But there were no real legal mechanisms in place to control these screenings, so the film screenings stopped, and the film was banned – becoming one of the first to be banned in many provinces in South Africa.”
Pinto de Almeida sees this as the beginning of systematic screen censorship in South Africa, which helped to lay the groundwork for the later centralised regulation during apartheid.
She explained that this led to questions about which authorities should control what people could watch, and who could watch films and where. It also prompted public debate about how cinema regulation should be managed in the public arena. The moral panic moved towards a more articulate censorial regime. And the police force shifted from defending borders to managing everyday life, including work and leisure.
“I’m asking how censorship not only prohibited, cut, and removed scenes and experiences but produced knowledge of race, class and gender in the country and influenced or shaped public order and social control? When and under what circumstances did censorship become the basis for new arenas of state and police intervention? And also, how initial public control later came to justify racial experiments in disciplinary fields like psychology and medicine before and under apartheid?”
“Cinema was a medium thought to reach everyone, whether or not literate or trained. It also led to a new kind of sociology concerning images, mass media and public experience,” she added.
She explained the censor and census shared their etymology in the word censere − to assess and to judge or appraise − with the censor embodying both the state authority to register citizens and secure their power to regulate public conduct. In the Cape, the Censor body came in the wake of the early census, which classified inhabitants in the Cape according to distinct racial and ethnic groups.
In that sense, the censors saw cinema, as much as the Cape’s new urban order, as uncharted territory – Cinema disturbed racial and social categories as a sign “of worldliness and class and racial mobility and a profitable new market avenue, but was also seen by some as a source of ’sensation’, evil and inciting crime. It was too mobile and not linked to one class, age, gender or race. The authorities feared that the social and racial hierarchies would be disturbed and new social relations would be formed around the medium.”
Initially, it was the police force that responded to complaints about indecency with charges levelled against cinema proprietors. White media denounced such films and argued that crime had increased since films came in, while black newspaper editors asked for films specifically for Africans, and for more control and censorship.
She also emphasised that the important role of cinema was emphasised by many black editors, writers, politicians and intellectuals. “Sol Plaatjie – the founding member and first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress, which became the African National Congress − wrote about racial depictions of Africans in film and toured with his own bioscope,” she said.
“However, the mobile nature of cinema meant that physically segregating people was not enough,” Pinto de Almeida said. “Authorities, including the police and the censors, quickly realised the need for a regulation apparatus to physically manipulate films and remove what they didn’t want shown.” They also wanted to prevent the exportation of ‘objectionable’ films and thought their impositions would contribute to turning the new medium into a respectable one.
The establishment of the first censor board in the Cape followed, and the banning and cutting of thousands of feet of film commenced. “The board brought together a coalition of social reformers, trade unionists, teachers, magistrates, religious leaders and representatives of women’s suffragist organisations and children’s welfare societies,” she explained. “By the early 1920s, these ‘minor servants of moral orthopaedics’, to use Foucault’s phrase, sought to legitimise their authority in the national arena by imposing a twofold approach: the first was a focus on films and the suppression of ‘objectionable’ images, including pictures of racial mixing, violence and sexual innuendo, directed at women, children and black audiences. Banning films or excising objectionable scenes was supplemented by the second approach, which concerned the regulation of the cinema house and the segregation of audiences. The board’s activities extended beyond its censorial role, helping to redefine the relationship between police, the cinema and leisure in the country for almost a century.”
“The board was particularly worried about obscene subjects, crime and suicide, sensationalism, marital infelicity and religious subjects; as well as fights between black and white.”
With increased censorship, the censors pushed for new and more specific legal apparatus to legitimise their work and the work of the police. There was a push for more legislation, including the Entertainment Ordinance of 1926, which changed punishment to criminal and entrenched the police as enforcers who could walk in and arrest people; followed by the National Censorship Act of 1931 and the Entertainment Act, which demanded that all cinematic material be cleared before exhibition and included a long list of criteria according to which films could be banned.
Regulation went in the direction of age bars, permit systems for different audiences and increasing racial categorisation, with films being deemed immoral for certain races.
Pinto de Almeida noted that this resulted in an entirely segregated film industry, which returned with a vengeance during apartheid. “The Film Bureau formed under apartheid was manned by the military, and the Afrikaner Nationalists imagined a cinema ‘in service of the nation’. The New Afrikaner ethos of cinema captured the second half of the 20th century.”
In the discussion, she emphasised that she hopes to understand in detail why the Cape and its strict board became an important epicentre of these early censorship moves. While in Johannesburg, the police had an important role in censoring films for Africans, the Cape censors discussed films deemed morally harmless to white and coloured audiences, drawing a coloured elite into the censor board, as well as representatives of the working class. The idea was not only that coloured masses but also literate elites were qualified to appreciate films and to frequent cinemas,” she said.
“The Censor Board was telling people which films they could see, but at the same time there were attempts to make films circulate more than before,” she added. “What excites me is how those initiatives run at the same time. Cinema was a potentially universalising medium but was being streamlined and contained in many different ways.”
Article: Michelle Galloway
Photo: Supplied