Quite in keeping with Latham’s notion that missionary films should be used for missionary study, and that missionary study must focus on the present and not replay  the past, The Desert Rejoices eschews any detailed mention of the LMS’s past role in Bechuanaland and concentrates on contemporary challenges in missionary work.

Taking its title from Isaiah (‘the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’; 35:1), the film begins with suitably biblical imagery: an African man on a donkey, arriving at a bleak desert settlement of simple thatched huts. He is the local minister, necessarily come from afar. He is greeted with great excitement and we see him conduct a service and give communion under a tree. The narration emphasises the harsh and inhospitable nature of the country (‘a hostile world’), and a comparison is made with the adversity that the Christian message encounters in such a land – despite the labours of the church, Bechuanaland is still a ‘spiritual desert.’

Not only that, it is ‘a country at war.’ The war in question is in the first instance one between ‘superstition and truth’ (ie. ‘witchdoctors’), while a second front is being fought against the growth of modern politics. Sunday morning is the time for political rallies in the town of Lobatse, and there follows a long sequence of a meeting in the centre of town. Such meetings clash with Sunday worship, and so compete for the attention of the people.

The sequence of the meeting is remarkable, and the camera pays close attention to the speakers and the audience. (The narration identifies the political group as the ‘Peoples Democratic Party’: probably Seretse Khama’s Bechuanaland Democratic Party. See Morton and Ramsay, 1987, 172-94.) Although there is thereby an implied equivalence of modern nationalist politics with the jujus of the witchdoctor, the narration here begins to depart from the expected stereotypes and narratives of post-WW2 African LMS film titles (see, for instance, Christianity and Copper or Health for Africa). As the churchgoers who did not attend the rally leave the church, the narrator actually laments that they probably heard a simply devotional service, rather than one which would have started to integrate Christian ideas into the emerging political debate (viz. ‘Christian responsibility in social and political matters’). 

Though hardly radical, this is very different from a more common LMS line, based largely on Merle Davis’s Modern Industry and the African, which presents Africans as spiritually helpless and morally confused children, urgently in need of assistance. In many LMS films, Africa is merely acted on by external forces. The Desert Rejoices, while still retaining much of the conventional LMS approach, does begin to move the argument to a position which comprehends African agency at work in many of the changes which are taking place.

Themes of this latter kind are present through much of the film, and Latham himself must be credited with an enquiring and original perspective on missionary filmmaking – the subjects he chooses to film, and the detailed and careful level of visual engagement with them are unusual within the LMS film corpus, as is the camera’s frequent focus on Africans as individuals rather than merely as crowds. 

A long sequence of the journey to the South African mines and life in the mining compounds illustrates this difference well. The conditions of mine life are addressed in some detail, the shots are filled with visual interest and the sequences have significant documentary value, but most importantly it is made apparent that the people who go to the mines are knowingly engaging with a source of temporary contract work – they are not the disorientated peasants whose world has collapsed that are found in some other LMS portrayals. The film’s final observation on the mines is that the migrant labour system is ‘fundamentally an unnatural existence, and only a different political and economic organisation can redeem it.’ Compared to the attitude found in an LMS film such as Christianity and Copper (1956), this is an extremely progressive position.

The Desert Rejoices remains though in many ways a very conservative film, and it is by no means free from stereotypically prejudiced portraits of Africa and Africans. However, it differs from many LMS pictures in its willingness to approach and portray the African subjects of missionary work as fully active agents who are directly involved in changing political, religious and economic spheres. With the exception of the missionary, there are few Europeans in the film, and the African subjects of the camera – a cast which includes political leaders, qualified and self-made religious men, town councillors, schoolchildren, and workers – are all evidently involved in processes of self-determination. The Desert Rejoices thus shows not only Bechuanaland, but the Botswana to come.

Francis Gooding (October 2009)