Hollywood’s White Hunters: Los Angeles in Colonial East Africa
Trader Horn was the best-selling 1927 memoir of a grizzled African ivory trader, a Scot named Alfred Aloysius Horn. Horn had been the advance agent of London-based trading companies, partially assimilating himself into tribal cultures (especially Igbo) in the West and Central African interior. He claimed to have “rescued” a white female captive, an orphaned European girl adopted and acculturated by the Isoga (Igbo) tribe and allegedly worshipped as a “White Goddess.” By the 1920s Horn had been working as an itinerant peddler in Johannesburg, where he was discovered by the South Afircan novelist Ethrelda Lewis. Lewis persuaded Horn to write out his reminiscences, and she patched them together into the book which was released with her as “editor.” [4] Alfred Aloysius Horn ultimately admitted the influence of Burrough’s Tarzan story on his own.[5]
Rescuing white women from dark savages was a favorite theme for the Hollywood culture industry. The book was a bestseller, so Louis Mayer and his production chief, Irving Thalberg secured the movie rights and planned a new kind of spectacular, using the imperial formula just tested in the movie White Shadows of the South Seas (1929). Their globe-spanning plan was to send a first-unit production expedition in 1929, thousands of miles from Los Angeles to film the pathpbreaking Trader Horn (1931).
Kenyatta remained in London for sixteen years, became a friend and protégé of American anti-colonial leftists, including Paul Robeson and C.L.R James, and wrote the anthropological classic Facing Mount Kenya (1937) under the tutelage of Bronislaw Malinowski before returning to assume leadership of the independence movement after the Second World War in 1945.[6] The M-G-M crew remained in Africa for almost a year, traveled 14,000 miles across five European colonies: Kenya Colony; the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan; the Protectorate of Tanganyika; and the Protectorate of Uganda; and the notoriously repressive regime of the Belgian Congo. They crossed the Equator seven times and built roads where none existed. Their three hundred African workers dragged a ten-ton electric generator and thousands of light bulbs to illuminate the “Dark Continent” for the European faces watching silver screens in Canada, the United States, France, Belgium, and Australia, where the movie was eventually released to enormous acclaim.[7] Ernest Hemingway credited this movie for his fascination with Africa. Trader Horn was the inspiration for the Tarzan movies (MG-M, 1932, 1935, etc) and the entire genre of jungle adventures, from King Kong (1933) to King Solomon’s Mines (British Gaumont, 1937; M-G-M, 1950), and even Planet of the Apes (1968). Generations of Europeans and North Americans experienced Africa from these Hollywood representations. Los Angeles appropriated the African landscape and became deeply implicated in the exploitation of Africans in Africa and of the African diaspora throughout the world, including Los Angeles itself.
By taking-up the subject of African colonization in the crucial years of global economic crisis, 1929-1931, Hollywood made itself a powerful reactionary force against the global struggles against racist injustice. While it never acknowledged its political role, the movie industry nevertheless had the power completely to drown out the conventional messages of the Popular Front. Hollywood’s “Africa” was first constructed in Africa and in Culver City in an audacious gambit by Irving Thalberg and Louis Mayer to achieve new levels of realism, by recruiting the native peoples of farflung regions to play themselves as Hollywood wanted them to appear: depraved and rebellious. It is no accident that the African people were just at this moment becoming very dangerous to the Empire. Hollywood’s African savages were the nightmare rendition of the independence movement itself, which would climax for Kenya in the Mau Mau Rebellion of 1952-1955 and complete independence in 1963, when Jomo (formerly Johnstone) Kenyatta became the founding president of Kenya.
As late as 1895 “Kenya” was “an overlapping patchwork of hunting, cultivating and herding peoples.” These peoples included the Kikuyu and Kamba farmers and Masai herders. The British, employing “violence on a locally unprecedented scale, and with unprecedented singleness of mind,” profoundly transformed the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape of East Africa.[8] One of the first tasks was to expropriate the richest farmlands, the high territory of the Kikuyu on the shoulders of Mount Kenya. In 1908 Secretary of State Lord Elgin pledged exclusive rights to these lands to the white settlers.[9] These segregated lands would now become known as the “White Highlands.” The creation of capitalist colonies in East Africa came at enormous material and human cost. “I gave orders that every living thing except children be killed without mercy,” Colonel Meinertzhagen wrote in his diary while suppressing the Nandi revolt in 1902: “Every soul was either shot or bayoneted.”[10] In 1904 and again in 1911 the Masai were “removed” from most of their grazing lands, which were turned over to the settlers. Tribes were taught to appreciate British domination though “punitive expeditions” such as those against the Gusii and the Taita prior to the World War. In the 1914 Giriama Rebellion alone, 250 Giriama were killed, 70 percent of all Giriama houses were burned, and 6,000 goats were captured.”[11]
The white settlers who filtered into Kenya, largely from South Africa, were the most aggressively racist element in the new colony. They sought domination not only over the Africans, whom they considered less than human, but also over the numerous Indians, who had settled for decades in the towns of East Africa, as railroad laborers and later as an intermediary, petty bourgeois trading and professional class. The settlers won approval in 1915 of the Crown Lands Ordinance, which declared all lands occupied by Africans to be the property of His Majesty the King, authorized 999-year leases, and gave the Governor the power to veto sales of lands between members of different races. Also in that year the white settlers won approval of the Native Registration Ordinance, which established the hated kipande system, whereby all African males over the age of 16 were required to carry identity documents and a work record in a tin container suspended from a necklace. A negative comment (“shiftless” or “lazy”) written into this record by the whim of any settler could make a man unemployable.[12] This system drove down wages and immobilized the workforce, providing the white settlers, and later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a labor force that came to be known as “the cheapest in the world.”[13]
As the M-G-M crew established their headquarters in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi and began to search for “native” labor, they entered a labor market of urbanized tribesmen whose “white” employers openly advocated forced labor. The anti-union cynicism of the Hollywood labor bosses fitted neatly with the white settlers whose compulsory labor program was openly discussed by Governor Grigg himself as “synonymous with slavery.”[14] An early MGM memorandum from Charles Clayton to Thalberg and Mayer recommended using meat to keep the hundreds of African porters and extras happy. He lamented that “previous to the World War a white man could go into the interior and commandeer all the native help he would require and in most cases the natives were never paid for their services.” But alas, he sighed: “Within the past seven years [i.e. the Twenties] the government has pampered these natives to the extreme.” Under pressure from several humanitarian and Parliamentary reports, the Colonial Office had set a minimum wage for Kenya Africans at ten cents per day.[15] Pampered indeed. The script of Trader Horn accepted without irony or comment both slavery and compulsory labor.
The script that Van Dyke shot in East Africa is nothing short of a genocidal fantasy. Black bodies drop like flies throughout Trader Horn. Thrown from cliffs, skewered by spears, burned while crucified head-down at the stake, fed to lions, and devoured by alligators, the Africans, stripped of names and all manner of dignity, are slaughtered on a genocidal scale. Of the scores of African characters in Trader Horn’s expedition, none survives the end of the film. All have been slaughtered by the “savage” hoards of African tribesmen encountered in the “interior.” African actors portrayed crimes against themselves of which the whites themselves were guilty.
Trader Horn’s violence is not limited to humans. A sickening number of beautiful large animals were killed on-camera, for-camera. It was, in short, an animal snuff film, giving viewers the carnal pleasure of watching a big animal die in agony. Van Dyke took special pride in the M-GM safari’s hunting armada. Wild animal footage was a major component of this movie project, so the crew spent as much time shooting big game with guns as they did with cameras. More significantly, they shot them with bullets and film at the same time. Guided by the four “White Hunters”—retired British soldiers who led aristocratic safaris from their base in Nairobi—and their African “gun boys,” the crew killed thirty-seven big game animals in a single day.[16]
Central to the script is the relationship between Trader Horn (played by Harry Carey) and his “gun boy” Renchero (played by Mutia Omoolu). Renchero is Horn’s unfailingly loyal lieutenant, and also his slave driver: he whips the expedition’s carriers as a matter of routine throughout the film. Nothing is known about Omoolu, except that he was from the Kamba (or Wakumba) tribe. Presumably he lived and worked in Nairobi, drawn into the urban orbit by the time Hollywood found him. To their credit, the producers gave Omoolu title credit. Omoolu’s charisma on the screen suggests that he won their hearts, actually destroying their racism, a condition they could not computer, so they gave him honorary white status, as we shall see below. Uncredited was another key figure, Riano Tindami, a Maasai who had served in the King’s African Rifles. Tindami played “Riano,” the lead carrier for the Missionary Edith Trent (played by Olive Carey), who is seeking her long-lost daughter, the White Goddess “Nina T.” (played by Edwina Booth). But Riano served the Trader Horn expedition in two roles. He was also the gun bearer for director Woody Van Dyke himself. Significantly, he was “Riano” in both roles, as a gun handler and as an actor.
Just as filming began, the political activities of the Kikuyu Central Association were generating a small panic among the settlers and colonial authorities. Labor shortages on farms were attributed by settlers to the “propaganda by Kenyatta.” Murders of white settlers were now viewed as political acts, and the Under-Secretary of State was questioned about the apparent growth of “crimes committed against the person of white people in Kenya Colony.”[17] The Governor’s secretary, Col. E.A.J. Dutton, penned urgent dispatches to the Colonial Office in London, passing along secret police reports about KCA agitators, one of whom allegedly told a crowd that if their demands were not met, they should “organize rioting against the Government,” and that “bands of twenty should surround out-lying farms and murder the occupants.”[18] A dominant theory emerged that the increase of crime in 1928-9 was, as Police Commissioner R.G.B Spicer stated it, “the accumulation of education, sophistication and detribalization of the African,” which had only reached a “superficial stage in the raw African mind.”[19] The theory was given its clearest expression by Governor Sir Edward Grigg himself, in long report to the Secretary of State, Lord Passfield, on the Kikuyu Central Association:
“The Association consists largely of the semi-educated, the members of the younger generation who know just enough to be discontented with the conditions of barbarism in which they were born but not enough to appreciate the difficulties of emerging in a moment of time from that state of barbarism to the assumption of all the concomitants of a highly developed Western civilization.”[20]
Grigg was a prosettler governor who enjoyed good relations with the leading settler, Lord Delamere, a longhaired, violent man described by Grigg himself as a man “with the racial ideas of the southern states at the time of the American civil war, who thought of old Virginia as the model.”[21] Lord Delamere was the leading representative Kenya’s the great aristocratic landholders, who had first expropriated the rich country of Kikuyuland. Elspeth Huxley’s two-volume biography Lord Delamere, an acclaimed best-seller which—like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind (1936) and David O. Selznick’s filmic adaptation (1939, Dir. Victor Fleming)—bears considerable responsibility for establishing a romantic vision of African settlers, was titled White Man’s Country.
But the spaces of Kenya Colony, while held generally in a state of subjection to London, were not fully controlled by any one social group or institution. An adequate account of agency in the story of colonial exploitation of East Africa requires recognition of a complex set of competing forces. White settlers, collaborationist tribal elders, a Colonial Office at odds with the goals of the settlers; humanitarian liberals in Parliament; Christian missionaries at odds with both the Colonial Office and the settlers; and most importantly, indigenous rights and independence activists such as Jomo Kenyatta and the Kikuyu Central Association. Kenyatta himself performed many of the “displacements” of the crucial period under consideration here.[22] A nationalist deeply influenced by the world socialist movement, he was schooled intellectually by Malinowski at the London School of Economics and politically by C.L.R James. Kenyatta was even reported by Scotland Yard as having joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).[23] But among his principal political issues was defense of the “traditional” practice of clitoridectomy, or “female circumcision,” a popular cause among the Kikuyu but sheer anathema to the Protestant missionaries and to feminists alike.[24] While the Trader Horn crew filmed their story about Central Africans worshipping a White European woman, Kikuyu women demonstrated in song and dance against Kikuyu who refused to undergo the circumcision rite and operation. A Colonial Office informer reported:
“Yesterday they had this dance at Kabuku and where abusing Yusufu, the teacher at Kabuku School, as this man married an un-circumcised girl. They were singing that any Kikuyu that will marry an un-circumcised woman...can even do illicit connection with his own mother.”[25]
At it turned out, the Labour Government directly confronted the Virginia-style settlers and issued the “Memorandum on Native Policy in East Africa,” which established the principle of “African paramountcy,” meaning, ostensibly, that the interests of the African Kenyans would take precedence in the final policy analysis. In practice, it meant that the Colonial Office could use the interests of the Africans to justify blocking settler paramountcy. The new tough line was delivered by the new Governor, Sir Joseph Byrne, “a strong man for a tough job” who was best remembered as a policeman during the “Troubles” in Britain’s oldest colony, Ireland. He did not appreciate independence movements of any kind. The policy was hated by the settlers, whose dream of an independent settler state was officially ended the year of Trader Horn’s theatrical release, 1931.[26]
The defeat of the extreme white supremacists in Kenya was, however, only a defeat on the pre-cinematic landscape of the Empire. Kenyatta would return to Mombasa in 1945 and mobilize the struggle for independence, operating in the interstices of power opened-up by this defeat. But the work of extreme white supremacy had already been transferred to a larger landscape. For, just at the moment when leftist, liberal, and humanitarian forces were beginning to undermine the moral authority of the colonial system, Hollywood spread throughout the globe a cruel landscape of injustice, wherein all of Africa was reduced to the very vision of the “White Highlands” settlers themselves.
Indeed, the script of Trader Horn bears such an uncanny resemblance to the worldview of the white settlers of Kenya, that we cannot avoid recognizing the their unity within concrete global networks of power, representation, and injustice. Central to the colonizing project, as with the American system of white supremacy, was the representation of “natives” as unreasoning murderers, so menacing that elaborate structures of coercion and punishment were justified. “One never knows what they will do next,” one white settler wrote to her sister during an armed confrontation in Kenya in 1912: “[and] once they think of killing they don’t know where to stop; neither can any of them tell what they are doing it for--At this moment we are surrounded by 20,000 fully armed warriors.”[27] Early in Trader Horn, the distant drums of the “ju-ju” menace the white trading party, as the vast and bloodthirsty population of jungle natives begin to pursue them, for no apparent reason. The naïve Peru asks: “Horn, what is this ju-ju?” Horn replies:
“Magic. God knows how it starts or where it comes from--but while those drums call, every black devil in the bush will be a homicidal maniac. And if your skin happens to be white, the witch-men are the better pleased.”[28]
Trader Horn adds a crucial element to the chronic fears of the white settlers: that Africans would love to kill Europeans just because they are white. Millions of self-styled “whites” would now have their whiteness reinforced, learning that that “black” Africans were heartless savages bent on the senseless slaughter of Europeans in a generalized race war. On the Hollywood landscape, no significant cultural diversity would be permitted for “Africa.” Hollywood’s Africa was Hegel’s: a people without history. All of Africa was reduced to a generic West and Central African jungle. In M-G-M’s cinematic Africa there are no farmers or herders, just savages with spears in jungles, without visible means of support (and therefore no legitimate claims to the soil).
At the climax of Trader Horn, Alfred Horn, his young visitor “Little Peru,” and Renchero (Olmoolu) are waiting their turn to be crucified head-down and burnt alive by their captors, the menacing Isogas (Igbo). This fate had already befallen their African porters the night before. They vow to go out fighting, however, and Alfred Horn makes a curious speech in their shared cell. “At least the white race won’t be disgraced by...” Here Horn breaks off as his eyes fall on his loyal African squire Renchero (Omoolu): “...well, any of the three of us. Why, you black hunk!” This gesture grants to Renchero a guest membership in the white race. But their only hope is the sympathy of the so-called “White Goddess,” “Nina T,” the Missionary’s grown daughter, who is now a priestess of some sort, respected and feared by the Isoga. Peru and Nina are the script-destined love interest, but at this point Nina is struggling with her racial loyalties, refusing at first to show any mercy. “Don’t you understand,” Peru pleads with her, “white people must help each other!”
The violence-crazed cannibals who worship the “White Goddess” are an obvious lynch mob, bent on public torture and execution for no discernable reason. The crucifixion scene mobilized the very iconography of Christendom (St. Peter’s Roman execution, up-side down by choice) to drive home the theory of pure African evil and white salvation. It also drew alarm from the Hays Office of the Motion Picture Producers Association and heavy criticism from the state censorship boards. The New York Board of Censors was not bothered by the sacrilege so much as the racial heresy. They required the distributors in that state to “eliminate” from Reel 8 ”close views where natives are choking whites, (by sound and expression) showing extreme cruelty," as they bind their captives to the crosses and place them upside down above unignited bonfires.[29]
White mobs in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and many other states publicly tortured and murdered African Americans at an average rate of 39 lynchings per year while this film was produced and distributed. The United States Congress blocked several AntiLynching bills in the 1920s and 1930s. The NAACP’s Anti-Lynching Campaign gained much public consciousness about the horrors of lynching, but failed to move even the liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt to take the problem as seriously as that of a stagnant economy. Hollywood’s contribution to mass indifference among whites was to reverse the horrors of white supremacy and publicize the racist fantasies of the white lynch mobs.[30]
[1] The same month that Ned Doheny was murdered at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills (see ***).
[2] O.A.G. Telegram dated 6 February 1929; Kikuyu Central Association, “Petition to Secretary of State for the Colonies,” 14 February 1929. Public Record Office, Kew, U.K. (hereafter PRO), CO 533 384/9.
[3] Van Dyke (1933): 55-6; Robert C. Cannom (1948): 193.
[4] Lewis ([1927] 1932)
[5] Jon Tuska justifiably speculates that Horn also borrowed the white captive story from William Selig’s 1922 movie, The Jungle Goddess (Export-Import Film Company). Tuska (1971): 51-58.
[6] Delf (1961): 66.
[7] The thousand light bulbs is an actual statistic, but it echoes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The European could use a thousand light bulbs and still could not see the African as a person.
[8] Lonsdale (1989): 6.
[9] Maxon (1989): 86.
[10] Meinertzhagen (1957): 158. Meinertzhagen’s admission that “every soul” was put to the gun or the sword makes it unlikely that he really spared the children.
[11] Bennett (1971), pp. 71-2; Zeleza (1989): 35-70, 48.
[12] Maxon (1989): 72-3.
[13] Zeleza (1989): 53.
[14] Bennett (1965): 303.
[15] Charles Carlton to M. J.J. Cohn, “Technical Notes,” 22 June 1928. M-G-M Collection, University of Southern California, Cinema-Television Library.
[16] Van Dyke (1933): 159.
[17] Kenya Register of Correspondence, 1929 CO 628 24, pp. 163, 224. PRO.
[18] Dispatch, E.A.J. Dutton 26 November 1929. CO 533 384/9. PRO.
[19] R.G.B. Spicer to Chief Native Commissioner, 21 July 1929. CO 533 384/9. PRO.
[20] Governor Edward Grigg to Secretary of State, 12 October 1929. CO 533 392/1. PRO.
[21] Bennett, (1965): 301.
[22] Prakash (1995).
[23] E. Park, Scotland Yard, to Col. E.A.J. Taylor, 19 June 1929. CO 533 384/9. PRO.
[24] The practice is defended in Kikuyu Central Association, Petition. 14 February 1929. CO 533 384/9. PRO. The practice was roundly condemned by the National Council of Women of Great Britain. “Circumcision of African Girls,” CO 533 392/10. PRO.
[25] “Kagwnarwa,” N.D. [1929] CO 533 392/1.
[26] Bennett (1965): 311-313, 315-6.
[27] Lucy Langridge, c1912, quoted in Kennedy (1987): 132.
[28] Trader Horn Screenplay, Temporary final script (1 October 1930), scene 10. MGM Collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
[29] Jason S. Joy to Mr. Irving Thalberg, 25 February 1931, MPAA Production Code Administration Files, Margaret Herrick Library.
[30] Statistics on lynchings are drawn from the NAACP’s contemporary research. “Lynchings 1918-1934 Inclusive,” NAACP Papers (microfilm), Library of Congress; Dray (2002); Zangrando (1980).
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- White Shadows: The Eros, Race and Power of Global Hollywood Phil Ethington
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
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This page references:
- Kikuyu Big Man and Son. "Costume Still." Trader Horn Production Still 1
- Carriers As Crew and Cast: Hired to Carry M-G-M Equipment and Hired to Play Carriers for M-G-M's Trader Horn. Trader Horn (Dir. W.S. Van Dyke, M-G-M, 1931)
- Unloading At Mombasa, 1929: Trader Horn Crew Begins 11-Month Cinematic Safari.
- Harry Carey and Mutia Omulu as Trader Horn and Renchero in Trader Horn. Production Still (1930).
- Edwina Booth as the White Goddess Dominates East Africans and African Americans in Climactic Scene of Trader Horn, in Culver City. Trader Horn Production Still.
- Shooting Trader Horn, Shooting Rhinocerus 1930
- King Kong Original Movie Poster (1933)
