When Neil Armstrong placed his foot on the moon on 21 July 1969, the entire world was able to follow the event on the screen. The television revealed its cosmic mission; the ability to create a sense of simultaneity and global community. Approximately 800 million people around the world saw the moon landing. The only exception was in highly industrialized South Africa, where the apartheid regime's ban on television was still in power. The Rand Daily Mail came out with the headline "Out of this World" 1 on the same day thereby striking precisely the subdued mood of a white South African society worried about its future position in a century of technological revolution. The moon landing marked a turning point in the long and richly monotone history of South African TV-abstinence (presenting probably the most obstinate regressive media critique). Shortly thereafter the planetarium in Johannesburg organized a public screening of the televised recording. The people stood in line for miles, strictly separated as usual by the color of their skin, blacks and whites on separate days.
For the apartheid ideologues, television, especially television that originated in the United States, had been a steady threat since the fifties. Instead of censorship, they chose to take a special Byzantine path: until 1976 there would be absolutely no television in South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd and the members of his cabinet were convinced that the devilish media had soul damaging effects and would necessarily lead to dangerous liberal tendencies. In the sixties it was the messages from the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, feminism, rock'n'roll, student unrest and flower power that could undermine the South African way of life.
America had become decadent; Americanization meant cultural suicide. "Russia" was the other enemy. South Africa had to uphold the Western values on its own and take over the leading role in the current and future battle of the races. The old animosity against the British imperialists and competitors was likewise confirmed through the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Twiggy. A South African Minister for Media lamented that British television programs constantly propagandized for racial mixing: they showed blacks and whites living together. While Marshall McLuhan was formulating his vision of the global village and reflecting on the emancipative consequences, the apartheid regime was busy distributing the black population in ethnically defined homelands, the bantustans, and maintaining these as reservoirs of cheap labor power for white industry.
Another threat came from the African states that had suddenly become independent. The fear of a media invasion (Radio Accra, Radio Leopoldville, Radio Cairo, and soon also Radio Tanzania as well as radio from Moscow, Peking, Damascus, Morocco) led to the founding of Radio Bantu. Radio shows in as many as nine African languages followed the logic of the Bantustan system. Television was dangerous because it was cosmopolitan and could break apart the ethnic categories enforced by apartheid. Radio Bantu was meant to dissuade people from listening to foreign shows and immunize them against influences from abroad. Only 1.5 percent of black households had electricity in the mid-sixties.
The Group Areas Act of 1950 ushered in the era of forced expulsions and resettlements. Sophiatown, a suburb in the west of Johannesburg, was one of the few placess in the Transvaal where black Africans were allowed to buy property. It was the little Harlem of Johannesburg, a creative center of jazz and new literature centered around the editorial staff of Drum magazine, with shebeens (illegal bars) and Hollywood inspired tsotsi gangs, whose playing with the image of the outlaw modified state ordained illegality. They named themselves after their American film heroes and dressed like them: hats from Woodrow or Stetson, Florsheim shoes, Magregor shirts. Street with No Name with Richard Widmark was an absolute cult film.2 The Sophiatown Renaissance stood for black urbanity, in clear contradiction to the exotic borders drawn by the apartheid bureaucracy.
The plan of the government was to resettle the residents of Sophiatown in a far distant township named Meadowlands. ANC activists, who set their campaign against the evacuation of Sophiatown under the slogan "Over our dead bodies," held demonstrations in Freedom Square and bi-weekly gatherings, for example in Odin Cinema. On the morning of 9 February 1955, the police and the army blockaded the streets. While workers began to tear their houses down, the first hundred families were deported to Meadowlands. Five years later the field of ruins that the bulldozers had left behind became a completely new development for whites. It was renamed "Triomf," the Afrikaans word for triumph.
Sophiatown's demise is recalled in the final scene of the jazz opera King Kong which premiered in Johannesburg in 1959. Todd Matshikiza, musician and Drum writer, composed the music; Harry Bloom, a white lawyer and writer thought up the plot and the journalist Pat Williams wrote the lyrics. It was the era of West Side Story. The story centered on the tragedy of the heavyweight boxer Ezekiel Dhlamini, whom everyone called King Kong and who became a township legend. Dhlamini, the Zulu giant, "a big gorilla of a guy," 3 came from the countryside to Johannesburg. In the City of Gold he boxed his way through until he became champion and could no longer find any opponents. He was not allowed to fight against white boxers. His dream of going to England also went unfulfilled. In the end, his manager organized a fight against the middleweight boxer Simon Mthimkulu, and to everyone's surprise King Kong was defeated: k. o. third round. Afterwards he went downhill fast. In February 1957 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison and hard labor for the murder of his girlfriend. Remaining eccentric to the bitter end, he demanded the judge sentence him to death. After two weeks on a prison farm in the north of Johan- nesburg he drowned himself in the nearby Rivonia river. He was thirty-two years old.
Dhlamini's career under difficult conditions resembles that of the Afro-American boxer Jack Johnson. A longer article in the February 1959 edition of Drum, shortly before the premiere of the Jazz opera stylized him in keeping with the times as "South Africa's James Dean" 4. King Kong Dhlamini is the "simple son of nature, confused by the roaring modern world;" "King Kong the love-killer, the self-killer." 5 The author of the article was Nat Nakasa who later threw himself from a skyscraper in exile in New York. He is buried in the Ferncliff cemetery near Malcolm X. The romantic counterparts of nature and big city can also be found in the piece whose plot is located in Sophiatown. The producers were white liberals who wanted to authentically show that blacks were just as good as they were. In the words of Hugh Masekela, who played trumpet in the band, "The whites who got involved with King Kong were all drawn from the liberati, the new intelligencia who mixed with blacks." 6 The money for the production came from the gold mines.
King Kong was a commercial success and a myth. Myths must multiply. After an extended tour through South Africa and after recording two albums, the musical played with almost the identical cast at the Princes Theater in London's West End and in other British cities. The export of township atmosphere was well received although there were a few critical voices that rejected the piece as too apolitical. Approximately half of those involved remained in exile. In the meantime, Sophiatown itself existed only as a myth.
Already in the original Hollywood film from 1933, King Kong learned how to box. He impressively won the fight with the Tyrannosaurus Rex as the better boxer and wrestler, a triumph of the stop-motion-technique. While Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) crouched fearfully on a tree, the giant gorilla finished off the pri-meval monster. Willis O'Brien, who was already responsible for the trick shots and special effects in The Lost World and Creation (a similar project which was abandoned after a year), had boxed during his youth and later worked as a sports cartoonist.7 His first attempt to create stop-motion was meant to have involved setting two boxing figures into action. He made King Kong into a real fighter.
Like Carl Denham, their fictional director in King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack also cultivated their image as adventurous filmmakers. During the filmings of their travelogue, animal and documentary films in far off lands, they not only gathered experience with the camera, but also with the gun. A relevant tiger anecdote, whose real background was in the filming of Chang in Siam, can be found slightly altered in the famous screen-test scene King Kong 8. Onboard the Venture, Denham (Robert Armstrong) shoots a screen-test with his new female star, whom he has just hired and taken away from Times Square. He tells of a trip to Africa where he and his cameraman stood facing a charging rhinoceros. Denham covered him with a rifle, but the cameraman was too afraid to do it and ran away. Since then he had had enough of cameramen: "Now I take all my pictures myself."
Camera and guns are also present as he and his crew witness a sacrificial ceremony on Skull Island. Denham, a true travelogue and adventure filmmaker, shoots the scene without asking permission until the natives discover him and the other white intruders. As soon as the drama with the kidnapping of Ann takes its course, guns, pistols and gas bombs finally replace the camera. In King Kong's wild jungle world, Denham's authority does not function. The film within the film comes to an end when the horror begins. And suddenly the filmmaker becomes the show master who only trusts his capitalistic energy. Skull Island is the nightmare of a cameraman who is used to mastering every adventure.
In the image of the filmmaker who knows how to operate the camera and the gun, the illusion of power and control finds confirmation in the midst of a hostile, colonized surrounding. This appears in a great number of documentary, expedition and animal films from the twenties and thirties. Hunting Big Game in Africa with Gun and Camera is the very explicit title of an early safari film from 1909. In Martin Johnson's nature film Simba, a black camera assistant briefly comes in view. Cooper, Schoedsack, Johnson and others undertook film expeditions to rediscover and reconstruct colonialized Africa for their cinema audiences. The ambiguous image of the filmmaker suggests that there is a natural connection between reflection and violence. In the screen-test scene, first the white woman is caught in view. In the New York storm of flashbulbs the imprisoned monster reaches out to break free. The two directors have the final word in this story: Cooper and Schoedsack are sitting in the airplane that shoots King Kong from the Empire State Building. Several wars later, Jean-Luc Godard in his episode for Loin du Viêt-nam delivers a monologue, standing all alone behind a camera that could be as big and dangerous as a piece of anti-aircraft artillery.
At a party in May of 1965, on the occasion of the reprinting of Lovelace's novelization, authors from the political satire magazine Monocle read diverse King Kong parodies, among them, "King Kong to Viet Cong: Thirty Years of Gorilla Warfare." 9. The "Monkey Party" took place in the Empire State Building. After a showing of King Kong, Warhol showed three minutes of his eight hour film, Empire. Lou Reed took Warhol's comment that "The Empire State Building is a star" literally: if you look up to the sky in New York, you do not see any stars.10 In the 1976 remake of King Kong, the price that must be paid to become a star is negotiated. King Kong enters Lower Manhattan. At full moon he climbs with the woman up one of the Twin Towers. The helicopters then come closer and fire at him. One of them rams into the World Trade Center and explodes.
Besides the Doctor's House, the Church of Christ the King is the only other building that remained standing in Sophiatown. Not far away are former police houses, the Triomf Shopping Center and the Triomf park with a children's playground that looks like a lot of other playgrounds. The white children still speak Afrikaans, and the blacks talk to them, when necessary, in English.
There is also a church named the Church of Christ in Waller ("The Gateway to Clean Living") in Texas, a small town outside of Houston where Daniel Johnston lives with his elderly parents and makes music in the garage. I Am A Baby (In My Universe) is the title of one of his songs. On the album Yip/ Jump Music it says, "I'm a sorry entertainer." Johnston's 1983 version of King Kong circles relentlessly on the king of the monkeys' love for a woman who has no name, language or identity. He looks at her with his big eyes and takes her without question. In the South African King Kong musical, the woman is murdered. "Back of the Moon," she sings, is the best shebeen in Jo'burg, where a man feels free. The jealous boxer has to go to prison and drowns himself. Daniel Johnston sits somewhat groggily on three benches in Triomf park. He is the King, and all the children listen to him.
1. Quoted in Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 73.
2. Ibid., p. 32.
3. John Matshikiza, "An incomplete masterpiece," in John Matshikiza and Todd Matshikiza, With the Lid Off: South African Insights from Home and Abroad 1959-2000, (Milpark: M&G Books, 2000), p. 98.
4. Nathaniel Nakasa, "The Life and Death of King Kong," in: Drum, February 1959, p. 27.
5. Ibid.
6. Quoted in Muff Andersson, Music in the Mix: The story of South African popular music (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), p. 34. See Todd Matshikiza's essay written in exile in London, "King Kong. Making the Music," in New Statesman, 24 February 1961, pp. 315-16.; and the memoirs of Mona Glasser, King Kong: A Venture in the Theatre (Cape Town: Norman Howell, 1960).
7. See Don Shay, "Willis O'Brien. Creator of the Impossible," in Focus on film, No. 16, 1973, pp. 18-48.
8. Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 70-71; pp. 108-9.
9. Ibid., pp. 161-62.
10. See Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art 1994), pp. 16-17.
