The Influence of The Birth of a Nation on South Africa: Film Culture and Race

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was screened for the first time in South Africa in 1931, for a very limited run of four nights only in the Johannesburg Town Hall.1 This was some sixteen years after its first release in the United States. Yet, in spite of this gap, it will be argued in this chapter that The Birth of a Nation had major consequences in South Africa of two contrasting kinds. It played an important part in the life and work of black South African intellectual, writer, linguist and political activist Sol T. Plaatje, who first saw the film in London in September 1915 and subsequently campaigned against it in the United States. In this sense, The Birth of a Nation played a part in the growth of both black nationalism in South Africa and black internationalism. Yet at the same time, however, Griffith’s film also influenced the development of white nationalism. The commercial success of The Birth of a Nation encouraged the entrepreneur Isidore W. Schlesinger, an American citizen who first traveled to South Africa in 1894, to invite American film director Harold Shaw to make De Voortrekkers (1915), an epic film focusing on the “Great Trek” of the Boers [descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa] in the late 1830s. Described as “The Birth of a Nation’s South African equivalent,”2 it was a favourite of white nationalist Afrikaners and would enjoy a long career in South Africa during the twentieth century. The Birth of a Nation itself consequently worked both sides of the racial divide in South Africa, encouraging both black nationalism and white supremacy.