one hundred men

This is a film in which I am quite personally implicated: I was born and raised on the Island of St Helena, in the South Atlantic, where, I recall years later, there was frequent reference to so-and-so having gone to Britain with ‘the hundred men.’ I met one of these men, Jordon Philips, in Cape Town in 1987 where I had just arrived from St Helena after my first visit home in seven years, for what turned out to be my father’s last few days. I was spending time with family and friends in Cape Town before proceeding to Zimbabwe which had been home, by then, for six years. Jordon had just flown down from England and was staying with his sister, whom I knew as Aunty Gertie. He was making his first trip in thirty-eight years ‘home’, to St Helena, and was about to board the ship on which I had just arrived. It was a very poignant time, pregnant with some of the emotional themes –of loss, convergent and divergent journeys, home- to which, as life would have it, I return years later in this film. Gertie, it must be noted, went south to South Africa from St Helena, before the formal introduction of apartheid, ‘into service,’ to use the Edwardian left-over language of the day for domestic employment. Jordon had headed north to England, in 1949, one year after Apartheid which effectively ended ‘coloured’ immigration from St Helena. He was of the hundred men contracted to work as agricultural labourers.

I was intrigued by Jordon’s account of his experiences in rural England and saw in it a moment of social history waiting to be re-told. More than a decade later, I began that work, tracking down other men from the group of one hundred (most had passed on) for interview and following up on archival research. In my conversations with these men I was struck by their insight, resilience, humour, the impact of those early encounters, and the passion of their reflections upon them. My being from St. Helena did much to enhance the flow of our conversations. Regarding the archival materials, I was struck by the anxieties about race and citizenship evident in how government officials and bureaucrats argued over the work-scheme to bring these British subjects to England. There was resistance, for example, to the ‘importation of this type of labour onto the English countryside’ (my italics). At the same time the men’s ‘mixed stock’ and ‘European’ blood, their Britishness and capacity for assimilation, were championed and the suggestion that they be sent to work on Africa’s groundnut scheme dismissed as ‘a disservice.’ I was struck by the racially constituted landmark of Britishness –rural England- and the imagined threat to this national imaginary posed by the ‘mixed stock’ of British immigrants. Such arguments and counter-arguments were made at a time when immigrants from Europe, deported persons and others, were brought in by the thousands to the English countryside, seemingly posing no such threat to the landscape as a racial marker of identity. With the St Helenian ‘mixed-stock’ also viewed as incompatible with African space-place imaginaries, the men appeared to fall between the cracks of these binary racial representations of race in/and place. Such contradictions and contestations leapt out from the archival sources. My research was undertaken with no plans for a film. However, in a conversation with film enthusiast, director and producer, Paul Lee, I described what I thought was the story’s ‘filmic potential.’ “Then why don’t you make a film!” Paul replied. He proceeded to convince me of the possibility and talked me through what the processes entailed.

As the film project unfolded, I wanted to bring to the story-line a set of aesthetics that would engage the aforementioned contradictions and the idea of one hundred men negotiating the heart of Britishness -rural England- bringing, what a friend described as a ‘bits of Britain back to Britain’ in the form of cricket, football, Anglicanism, ‘English’ hymns and tea; and the mutual curiosity invoked by these encounters. I also wanted to hint at a convergence of time, space and place, so as to locate the telling of this particular story of migration in the context of a long, continuous and continuing history of movement within the Atlantic World. Landscapes and gardens became the aesthetic working metaphors. Thus, juxtaposing landscapes and gardens in St Helena and England, and allowing seconds of my own garden and home in Toronto to merge with a shot of the Steam Ship Umtali against Cape Town’s Table Mountain, signal the dispersed and interconnected multiple nodes of the story, as well as the four countries in which the work was produced.

The idea of the garden came about when, after an on-camera interview, Edward Leo, one of the men, walked me around his little garden in Hampshire describing, with immense pride, the plants therein, that he had over the years ‘brought from St Helena.’ It was not just the metaphoric and literal routes and roots –uprooting, re-rooting, making home and being in two places at once- and the evident subversion of old concerns about importing this type of labour onto the landscape, that excited me. I was also struck by how the metaphor -planting and nurturing- stood in for culture and people, as about circulations and re-creations: Every plant in Edward’s garden that came from St Helena, at one time or another in the distant past, like its people, were brought from elsewhere to St Helena.

There are many levels and threads to the story of One Hundred Men -much is told and much has to be left to the imagination. Very early in the project I was asked by Iris Duncan, who is mentioned in the film (she was aboard the Umtali, in 1949, heading ‘into service’) ‘But what about the women?’ I had, and have, no fully satisfactory answer to that question, except to say that the film is really about the men who went on this contract, and that I apologize for any omissions. However, that said, I am enormously grateful to Beverley Yon for the thread that she brings to this film, hinting at a shadow cast by the departure of these men, in her talk of her mother and about growing up with the absence of her father who left, as one of the hundred men, before she was born, never to return. The postscript (about her father’s passing and plans for his ashes) inscribed towards the end of the film over one of my favourite shots of St Helena, amplifies, I think, the poignancy of her story as it reminds us of how this film is all about how the past revisits and lives on in the present.

The often emotionally-charged project of doing this work was only possible because of the friendships I have formed through the process, not least with those who feature in the film. The team involved in making the film was as dispersed as the subject it takes up and I have benefited greatly from conversations and support from friends, students and colleagues at York University in Canada, folks in St Helena, Cape Town and England. In Toronto, Paul Lee introduced me to Antonin Lhotsky who became the primary camera person. On our shooting session in England, Antonin introduced me to Harriet Pacaud who did follow-up camera work when I was in transit in England en route to Cape Town. Anya Richards, my niece in St Helena, did most of the shooting there and when she had left, on my subsequent trip, Darrin Henry did follow-up work. Doug Campbell took out his camera when it was necessary and Paul persuaded me to borrow one to use on one of my journeys to St Helena. I spent many long and rewarding hours, over different seasons, with Doug, my editor (and his beautifully-disciplined dogs) in his studio barn in London, Ontario, and he put in many, many more hours editing passionately as though this film was his very own. He is also responsible for the film’s sound. Co-producer, Paul Lee, provided constant probing, advice, encouragement and generally made the project possible. I have learnt much and owe a great deal more to the generosity of this brilliant team.