Something of Value: The Mau Mau film that missed a chance to be epic

In a year that saw the leader and Mau Mau figurehead Dedan Kimathi Waciuri captured and executed, 37 African candidates were garnering for the Kenyan 1957 election for eight African constituencies, which was the first time an African could be elected. It was also the year the 1951’s African Queen and 1942’s Casablanca actor Humphrey Bogart died and film actor and director Spike Lee was born.

1957 was an action-packed and spellbinding year in Kenya and America. The first ever attempt at launching a satellite into space, the Vanguard TV3, had failed with an explosion of the rocket before the launch. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the US President, suffered a stroke as Toyota begun importation of vehicles into the United States.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was also enacted, culminating in the creation of the US Commission on Civil Rights. It was also the year the Arkansas Governor, Orville Faubus, called the US National Guard to prevent the entry of the “Little Rock Nine” black students from enrolling in a previously whites only high school after desegregation. Hurricane Audrey was demolishing Cameron, Louisiana, killing hundreds. Elvis Presley’s two films, Loving You and Jailhouse Rock opened up in national theatres on July and November, respectively.

In the same year, a film with colonial Kenya written all over it was also opening in film theatres across the United States. Something of Value, later reissued as Africa Ablaze, was a story that brought the Mau Mau uprising to the American and global consciousness, but missed a chance to be an epic.

Something of Value was not the first film to feature a Mau Mau storyline. Two years earlier, Brian Desmond Hurst had directed the British drama film, Simba, about a British family living in Kenya who gets embroiled in the raging Mau Mau war with a shouting poster “White Heat Explodes in Green Hell!” Interestingly, Independent Kenya’s Attorney General Charles Njonjo, at the time a legal clerk for the colonial government, was an adviser for the film.

Another film, Safari, released in 1956, attempted to introduce a Mau Mau story to the American audience by making the vengeful white hero, whose family and property are wiped out by the Mau Mau with the help of Jeroge (a corruption of Njoroge), an American. Jeroge is played by the black Bermudian actor Earlston J. Cameron and one of the lucky black English actors to surmount the thick colour bar at the time. Earlston had featured in the Njonjo-advised film Simba, as Karanja.

Something of Value was not telling a new story per se. The world already knew about the Mau Mau the western media termed simply as a terrorist uprising. With such gripping early renditions of the Mau Mau story on the big screen, it was expected that the new Richard Brooks film would tell the real story of the grotesque trouble in British East Africa.

The film was based on Robert Ruark’s book, Something of Value, that attempted to showcase the conflict between the African and the colonial master. Sidney Poitier played a local Gikuyu boy, Kimani wa Karanja, and Rock Hudson as Peter McKenzie, the son of a colonial landowner. Both Peter and Kimani grow up close with a titillating bond almost brotherly in its manifestation. Prejudices wake them up to the reality of the brewing white and black tension confounded by the uprising of the Mau Mau. Kimani sides with his tribesmen and naturally, Peter takes the side of his colonial self. Kimani is now the Mau Mau ringleader who unleashes lethal terror to Peter’s family, setting up the former friends in a final bloody mortal showdown. 

Sidney Poitier probably gives the best performance in a film reminiscing the American Wild West films, where the white man was usually casted dealing with savagery of the indigenous American. His enormous, stirring performance as an emotionally torn Gikuyu young man who has the unenviable reality of balancing between disgust, hate, utter savagery and sympathy is heart-stopping. 

Robert Ruark’s novel had a tense impact in the imagination of the western world, a financial success and earned him a fortune in film rights and royalties. However, the film made a net loss and had to be released five years later as Africa Ablaze.   

MGM studios, who had bought the film rights for about $300,000, sought to translate the book’s popularity into a theatrical big screen success. MGM, nonetheless, failed to read between the black and white lines that transcended the black-and-white film. The American civil rights movement was in its early stages with the deep American south facing an almost all out white uprising against any attempt at civil rights.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 became the first ever federal legislation on civil rights passed by the US Congress. It was the Congress’ way of supporting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that had desegregated public schools. As a result of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, a massive resistance by southern whites started with ugly violence meted on black Americans virtually in all states in the south. In Little Rock, Arkansas for instance, the US President had to send federal troops to escort nine black children courageous enough to attempt enrolment in a previously all-white public school amidst threats of death and brutality. Bombings of churches and schools, physical assault and killings of perceived white sympathisers and activists were very high.

It was in this backdrop that Something of Value film was released and immediately became a financial flop. A film showing an uprising by black people against their white masters was too much for a society involved in a similar war against itself.

MGM top-notch production values are noteworthy and the black-and-white photography impressive throughout. The film had all the hallmarks of success and a great story. Save for the fact that the black-and-white film colour-conscious sensibilities were just too real.