Empire, Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

Abstract

In 1928, Lieutenant Commander Glen Kidston, a renowned racecar driver, pilot, and playboy, visited Kenya with a group of male and female companions from Britain. Amongst Kidston's companions was a friend and cameraman who took a series of 'home movies' or amateur film of the group's safari. Shot in black and white, without sound but including intertitles throughout, these films document the group's activities, including luxurious travel by boat, expansive lunches, and the wildlife they encountered. The footage is punctuated with images of vast landscapes, Maasai housing, and a long scene of a laborious crossing of a river by car. In 1972, 44 years after Glen Kidston visited Kenya with cine-camera in tow, and 9 years after Kenya gained independence from Britain, David Lean, the successful British director, also visited Kenya and made a series of home movies while there. Accompanied by his then mistress and future wife, Sandra Hotz, Lean visited a number of luxury lodges, taking extensive footage on his cine-camera. Lean and Hotz went on safari as well, dined in the wilderness, and produced metres and metres of film of the surrounding landscape, including Maasai homes, river crossings, and wildlife. Indeed, the differences between the amateur 1928 footage by Kidston's party and the footage of a critically acclaimed director are scarce. Other amateur films produced by Britons visiting Kenya in this same period follow similar visual patterns. Ultimately, what stands out in these films shot over four decades by multiple men, including the five amateur film-makers examined here, is the sheer repetition of imagery on screen. These films are both remarkably similar and 2 remarkably undisturbed by the formal end of empire. The holiday films produced by a range of Britons visiting Kenya seem to follow a clear visual pattern that remained static in the 20 th century. Locating the repetitive aspects of culture produced by Britons while abroad in the empire is not a particularly new discovery for those engaged with empire studies, even if that repetition has seldom been the subject of sustained examination. One need only have a passing familiarity with John MacKenzie's 'Studies in Imperialism' series and other key works on the culture of empire to note the persistent similarities in material such as film, fiction, posters, soap advertisements and the like. 1 This imperial culture collectively fosters narratives that, at times, verge on an exhausting pastiche. 2 It is certainly the case that 'culture,' widely conceived, produced by metropolitan-based imperialists, travellers as tourists, and settlers, made for a series of cultural conventions of empire that are striking in their similarities. These conventions, and what we could even identify as a formula, underpin various terms used by scholars, such as the 'imperial gaze,' the 'imperial eye,' the 'colonial order', or, in an acknowledgement of the fixed nature of this trope, concepts of 'colonial nostalgia,' as Anna Bocking-Welch has argued. 3 The repetitive, stylized, and pe...