“Mining” the Film Archive: South Africa’s Mining Industry and Film Production

This paper examines the relationship of film production and the mining industry in the forty years of the Union of South Africa, before the National Party came to power in 1948 and established its system of apartheid. It argues that the mining industry used the new technology of film to promote its exploitative system of African migrant workers, mobilized to extract the maximum natural resources of precious metals at the greatest profit. In South Africa in this period, film production and cinema exhibition were controlled commercially by the African Films Trust through its production company, African Film Productions, and its exhibition arm, African Consolidated Theatres. In the face of the rise of trade unions and collective bargaining, the Chamber of Mines commissioned African Film Productions to make documentaries, including instructional, topical, and propaganda films, from the 1920s until the 1940s. These were intended to counter overseas public criticisms of working conditions, health and safety, and racial segregation of workers on the mines. The Chamber of Mines also commissioned films to recruit African migrant workers through its recruitment agencies, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association and the Native Recruiting Corporation. These recruitment films were screened using mobile cinemas in villages throughout southern Africa. The film company made other publicity films, often co-produced with various South African government departments, to attract White settler immigration and investment by shareholders, and domestically aimed at allaying settlers’ anxieties about the growth of mass African labor systems. These films were exhibited in cinemas all over South Africa and overseas. Building on existing scholarship on the importance of cinema to the recruitment and regulation of African miners in southern Africa, particularly South Africa, this paper will excavate the intricate imbrication of filmmaking in the consolidation and expansion of mining during the first half of the twentieth century.