Taylor Swift’s 2015 music video, Wildest Dreams, tells the story of an illicit love affair between two white actors filming on location in 1950s Africa. Shot in Botswana and South Africa before a backdrop of wild animals, acacia trees, and a host of white extras playing filmmakers, the video created instant controversy because of the absence of black actors and the idealized image it portrays of colonial Africa. Writing for National Public Radio, Viviane Rutabingwa and James Kassaga Arinaitwe charged that the video “packages our continent as the backdrop for . . . romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline . . . in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic” (2015). The director of the video, Joseph Khan, arguing that his diverse team exercised artistic integrity in choosing to reflect the historical reality of mid-century filmmaking in Africa, responded to criticisms with the following public statement:

In subsequent remarks, he defended the video by explaining that it alluded to “old Hollywood iconography” found in films like The African Queen (Timpf Reference Timpf2015).

It is my contention that Wildest Dreams actually does succeed in replicating an elusive dynamic of mid-twentieth-century filmmaking in Africa worthy of deeper consideration. Then, as now, the racially diverse composition of actors and experts involved in Africa-based film projects—black labor—disappeared behind a focus on white agency. Even contemporary debates over whether “Taylor Swift Is Dreaming of a Very White Africa,” as the NPR commentary expressed it, tend to frontline white acts and preserve the ideological presumption that filmmaking was an all-white enterprise in 1950s Africa.

The patient zero, of sorts, for Hollywood movies filmed on location in Africa is King Solomon’s Mines, which was shot on location in the Uganda Protectorate, the Kenya Colony, the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika, and Ruanda-Urundi between 1949 and 1950. The film tells the story of a British woman, Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr), accompanied by her brother, John Goode (Richard Carlson), who hires a professional hunter, Allan Quartermain (Stewart Granger) to locate her husband who disappeared somewhere in the African interior while searching for riches in the mines. Made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for a modest U.S.$2,258,000, it earned U.S.$9,955,000—making it MGM’s most profitable film in 1950. As only the second feature-length American film to be shot in Africa and the first in color, the success of King Solomon’s Mines spurred a host of “filmed in Africa features”—including Kahn’s inspiration, The African Queen (dir. John Huston, 1951). Furthermore, “safari footage” of African dancers and savannah animals from King Solomon’s Mines became valuable MGM stock footage (Behlmer Reference Behlmer1989), featured later in four different Africa-set but California-shot movies: Watusi (dir. Kurt Neumann, 1959), Tarzan, the Ape Man (dir. Joseph Newman, 1959), Drums of Africa (dir. James B. Clark, 1963), and Trader Horn (dir. Reza Badiyi, 1973).

When King Solomon’s Mines debuted in 1950, two narratives gripped the imagination of Western spectators. First was the well-known Victorian fable written by Sir H. Rider Haggard in 1885 of buried treasure in Africa. Second was the more contemporary situation of Hollywood stars on safari in “darkest Africa, where no white woman had ever been before,” as the movie trailer expressed it. Nonetheless, the archival legacy of King Solomon’s Mines reveals precisely what the film and its derivatives conceal: a production history powered by African actors, crew members, and politicians. A review of behind-the-scenes photographs, newspaper interviews, actor-penned essays, and business contracts preserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library revealed three valuable facts. ^{Footnote 1} First, the Africans who appear in the film were understood and contracted, not as oblivious “tribesmen,” but as actors. Second, a large number of African professionals functioned behind the scenes as stage managers, special effects engineers, musicians, and set designers. And third, the set of King Solomon’s Mines was both socially and politically pluralistic.Though the credits identify only three black “performers”—with their first names followed by their alleged membership in either the “Kipsigi” or “Watusi tribe”—the film includes upwards of two thousand highly visible African actors and extras. ^{Footnote 2} Accurately identifying the enormous paid, costumed, and scripted black cast would have been tantamount to discrediting the film’s own mythological presuppositions about Africans. All the same, hundreds of Africans did appear before international viewers in King Solomon’s Mines. The trick was that like the savannah wildlife, black actors in the roles of tribesmen were not supposed to be thought of as actors at all. The cinematographers’ commitment to a “documentary approach” and aesthetic only furthered the racist suggestion (Hopper Reference Hopper1950; Weiler Reference Weiler1950).

Nonetheless, before shooting even began, MGM embraced a plan to cast “black performers,” including in several “important parts . . . on the spot” (Hollywood Bureau 1949). In fact, only three white actors even traveled to East Africa for filming. But on-the-spot casting was not so easy. Colonial divisions and regulations meant that African actors were recruited and cast through complex political negotiations. After receiving formal permissions from the various colonial governors, MGM had to get clearance from district officers to hire Africans, and in turn from African leaders understood by MGM as “chiefs.” These colonial middlemen expected payment in the form of currency or livestock for their approval and help. Then, working as talent managers, they negotiated “the amount to be paid the tribesmen” and dispatched “runners . . . into the bush or forest” to recruit the talent (Carlson Reference Carlson1950a:47). According to one of the three white actors, Richard Carlson, local talent “walked 30 miles to join the company . . . [and] slept in the open” (quoted in Hopper Reference Hopper1950).

After recruitment and casting, African “company members” were costumed and coached to act like tribesmen. King Solomon’s Mines culminates in an elaborately choreographed “Watusi dance,” followed by a fight to the death for the throne. The trailer for the film described the scene as “an actual death fight of the pagan kings, actually filmed in the savage heart of equatorial Africa” (Bennett & Marton Reference Bennett and Marton1950). The absence of credited African actors allowed this preposterous publicity stunt to stand as shocking ethnography, not as drama. A behind-the-scenes snapshot recovered and then published in 1989 in American Cinematographer magazine shows the film’s shirtless director, Andrew Marton, brandishing a sword and coaching the African actors in how to block the fight scene (Behlmer Reference Behlmer1989b). Moreover, it seems that an affluent local by the name of Chief Kamuzinzi joined with a Belgian administrator, George Sandrart, to choreograph and costume the “Watusi” dance sequences. According to Richard Carlson, it was Sandrart who persuaded the group of black actors who portray the Watusi to “get up in the morning[,] . . . discard their beloved pull-overs and berets and tennis shoes, and to do the inexplicable things these strange Americans wanted them to do” (1950c:67).

Of course, payment was a central element in the persuasion. However, as Carlson reported in The Chicago Tribune (Hopper Reference Hopper1950), “lest high wages upset the economic balance of the area, [MGM was] asked by officials not to tip unduly or give high wages to the natives.” Carlson explained to the New York Times that “Metro saved money by hiring extras at about 30 cents a day.” Recognizing the insufficiency of that wage, he averred, “I don’t know what the crafts [the international Studio Crafts Union] are going to think about it” (Weiler Reference Weiler1950). Though the union never did intercede or organize a strike, African actors refused on more than one occasion to continue their involvement in the film without better compensation.

Far from passive recipients of higher-ups’ arrangements, African actors and extras demonstrated a strong initiative of their own. By refusing to work for a pittance alongside “those fabulous Hollywood salaries,” a Kenyan actor called Kimursi effectively brought the filming of King Solomon’s Mines to a standstill. Kimursi had the highly visible role of Allan Quartermain’s personal servant. Appearing in the majority of the scenes, Kimursi came to know his white co-stars, who respected him and found him talented, intelligent, and likable. Filling more than one role, he became a key interlocutor between the European directors and the African cast and crew, “explaining [to African actors] . . . that we were ‘waiting for the sun or for a camera reload.’” After shooting half the picture, however, Kimursi began to balk at his wages—threatening to “return to his shamba, where his wives needed him” (Carlson Reference Carlson1950b:70). Richard Carlson explained MGM’s conundrum in the Chicago Tribune interview:

It seems that Kimursi understood the matter clearly—that his wages were in no way commensurate with the social and professional power he wielded as a starring actor. Carlson estimated that if he had left the film, he would have cost MGM U.S.$1 million in unusable footage. In the end, a district officer offered a solution to the problem: Despite the cap on African wages, there was nothing in MGM’s agreement with colonial Kenya that forbade giving bonuses in the form of something other than money. The directors arranged a conference with Kimursi, “and after suitable haggling between interested parties, it was duly recorded that six cows, to be delivered at the completion of the picture, would be an eminently satisfactory out-of-court settlement” (Carlson Reference Carlson1950b:70).

In order to manage the demands of African actors in the context of limiting colonial structures, it seems that MGM learned to leverage livestock-as-currency. Consider the economics behind a large dance sequence shot in Machackos, Kenya. For their participation twelve thousand Wakamba men and women received the “arranged fee”—likely amounting to thirty cents a day. After some time, sixteen unbidden Maasai performers arrived and stole the show: everyone—Wakamba, white settler spectators, MGM filmmakers—watched or filmed the performance, transfixed. Having first demonstrated their artistic value, the Maasai stopped dancing and, eschewing the standard fee, “demanded (and got) three cows” (Carlson Reference Carlson1950a:48).

Black talent and labor were present not only in front of the camera, but behind it as well. Whereas Wildest Dreams presents viewers with cameramen, sound operators, makeup artists, and stage managers who are all white (although in the distance you might spot two black actors dressed as porters lugging props and baggage), this picture of mid-century African filmmaking is entirely inaccurate. King Solomon’s Mines, in fact, relied heavily on Africans in specialized roles. And as with the on-the-spot casting of African actors, the employment of an African crew was always part of the plan. In addition to the three white actors, only eleven film technicians traveled to East Africa. From their base in Nairobi, MGM hired several dozen Kenyan settler-consultants and thirty-five Wakamba men. In addition to the Kamba crewmen, “82 African servants” were subcontracted by the safari company (Safariland Ltd) that handled the cast’s and crew’s lodging (Carlson Reference Carlson1950a). Many of these crewmen were former King’s African Rifles soldiers—well-traveled World War II veterans. This crew (numbering 177 people in total) remained with the film throughout the entire four-month period, and though they were referred to as “assistants,” their contributions went far beyond their assigned roles as porters, cooks, and go-betweens. They acted as stage managers, costume managers, special effects engineers, set designers, crewmen, on-set tutors, simultaneous translators, and musicians (Carlson Reference Carlson1950a; Granger Reference Granger1952; Hopper Reference Hopper1950; Williams Reference Williams1950).

For example, in order to film the Machakos dance sequence, which included more than one thousand performers, African stage managers were indispensable. Disguised in the non-Western costumes of “tribal dancers,” these urbane Nairobi-based professionals “were planted in the mob to control sections” (Hopper Reference Hopper1950). They “coached” and “guided group after group into camera range” (Carlson Reference Carlson1950a), and “when they were ready, they were supposed to yell ‘Roll ‘em’” (Hopper Reference Hopper1950). ^{Footnote 3} Acting as costume managers, these “African assistants” also inspected the costumes of the enormous cast, looking for anything too revealing that might pose problems for MGM with the Motion Picture Production Code. Exercising both authority and creative license, one assistant took charge when he spotted a topless woman in violation of the production code: “He snatched a baby from its mother’s arms, clapped the infant to the exposed bosom, and yelled, ‘Roll ‘em!’” (Hopper Reference Hopper1950). Other Africans worked as special effects engineers to help cinematographers respond to the challenges of filming wild animals. To facilitate the filming of a stampede, a group of Maasai crewmen designed and built a V-shaped corral of thorn bush a mile long on each side and drove the animals into the construction so that they could be filmed (Hopper Reference Hopper1950). Specially commissioned set constructions were also designed and built by Africans. Upon their arrival in Ruanda-Urundi, MGM found the Watusi “royal compound” in “disrepair . . . [and] badly situated photographically” (Hopper Reference Hopper1950). Rather than repair the abandoned construction, Marton hired an eighty-five-year-old African architect (“fragile and elegant”) to build a new compound. The set was situated on a hill and open on one side to facilitate filming. ^{Footnote 4}

Though the thirty-five Wakamba men from Kenya were compensated as servants-cum-assistants, they also worked as musicians, a contribution that went uncredited and uncompensated. Regularly throughout their two months of travel the Wakamba provided live entertainment for the British and American cast and crew—who, in turn, screened films (such as The Postman Always Rings Twice) for the African crew’s entertainment (Hopper Reference Hopper1950). During their live performances the co-director, Compton Bennett, carefully recorded the “drums, strange instruments, chants and accompaniments to dances” to use as the film’s sound track (Carlson Reference Carlson1950c:21). Publicity materials emphasized Bennett’s collection of “traditional” African music to underscore the film’s ethnographic authenticity. A promotional article stated that authentic African music “will comprise the music score to the movie. There will be no other. From the opening title to the closing fadeout, you’ll hear nothing musically but sounds from the veldt” (Smith Reference Smith1950).

In reality the final film included two original scores by the Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa. Records from the music copyright department from 1950 and 1951 show, however, that whereas MGM purchased the rights to Rozsa’s music, neither formal rights nor official money was exchanged for the ten different African compositions also featured in the film. Leaving the “composer” and “publisher” columns blank, the documents list the titles of these ten compositions with various combinations of the words “native music,” “drums,” and “chants.” ^{Footnote 5} By compensating Western musicians as composers but reducing African musicians to traditionalists, MGM avoided fees and legal legwork. But their characterizations of the music more than missed the mark.

Much of the Wakamba porters’ music, which the copyright department reduced to traditional chanting, was actually freshly composed and situationally engaged. Richard Carlson took an interest in the “continually improvised haunting little songs” composed for the so-called Bwana Metro (the MGM personnel) by the “Wakamba tribesmen who served us as porters and laborers,” and had the following lyrics translated to English:

The satirical “little song” describes some of the ritual absurdity involved in filmmaking: carrying heavy things up hills, using reflectors to bounce the blinding sun onto actors’ faces, destroying fine cloths that were considered merely costumes. Despite the inequities preserved by divisions of race and class, the humor and social critique conveyed by the song—along with a willingness to translate and share it with Carlson—speak to the shared social world that developed behind the scenes of King Solomon’s Mines.

In explaining her inspiration for Wildest Dreams, Taylor Swift said that she wanted to make a love story about actors on location at a time when there was no social media and in a place where there would be no one to talk to but each other (Klosterman Reference Klosterman2015). She chose 1950s Africa. But far from isolated, mid-twentieth-century East and Central African film sets were bustling, cosmopolitan affairs. Photographs of mealtimes and downtimes reveal black and white crew members and actors playing board games, socializing, receiving on-set Kiswahili language tutorials, and posing arm-in-arm. ^{Footnote 6} When writing for Collier’s about his experience filming in Africa, Richard Carlson produced whole paragraphs about the intimate relationship he developed with a sixty-year-old servant—whom he referred to as “my revered Suleman.” In the Hedda Hopper interview he described the rapidity with which cast and crew came together socially.

In the Lost Angeles Mirror he described the great interest in the production on the part of local residents, who “were as curious about movie-making as Americans are in this country” (Williams Reference Williams1950). Massive and diverse audiences of locals attended the shooting of various scenes as spectators (Carlson Reference Carlson1950a; Behlmer Reference Behlmer1950a & 1950c). Africans as well as white settlers came from fifty miles around with their entire families to watch the filmmaking spectacle—and were joined by representatives of the colonial state including district officers and askari charged with maintaining law and order (Williams Reference Williams1950).

In addition, some prominent Africans developed relationships with members of the Hollywood cast. For example, the cast spent an evening in the Georgian mansion belonging to Eddie Mutesa—whom Carlson described as “the Cambridge educated King of the Baganda . . . [who] wears impeccable Bond Street clothing with dazzling starched colors, mixes an excellent Martini and loves Brahms and Beethoven” (1950c:66). Two publicity photographs show the rapport that developed between Stewart Granger and the Kenyan Maru leader King Phillip. ^{Footnote 7} It appears that what was on display was not only Hollywood entertainment, but African politics as well.

Though historical evidence suggests that Western film sets functioned in mid-century East Africa as sites of social mobility, cultural hybridity, local entertainment, and possibly even political organization, the internationally circulating final film cuts clearly reinforced (just as they scripted) contrasts between European civilization and African alterity. For all its situational complexity, the 1950 release of King Solomon’s Mines was fundamentally a white love story told before an African backdrop.

In the film, traveling into the untamed but beautiful African countryside serves as a metaphor for the journey into lust of the searching wife and her hired hunter-guide. With the discovery that the husband may still be alive, the mood darkens and hope for their burgeoning affair seems lost. At this point, fate seems to intercede in the form of a previously silent African porter, Umbopa (Siriaque), who reveals himself to be the estranged but rightful king of the Watusi. By leading them to the Watusi, he helps the group discover the eponymous mines and, inside, the husband’s body. In the end, Elizabeth and Allen escape the treacherous African wilderness without treasures, but with their love legitimized.

Wildest Dreams also centers on white passions kindled in the Africa wilds. An affair develops between an American actress (Taylor Swift) and her married co-star, when they find themselves shooting somewhere in a generalized late-colonial Africa. Far away from the public and the man’s wife—realities to which they ultimately return—the pair lose themselves to desire. Written in a nostalgic key, the song works to create lasting memories through which to preserve the doomed colonial reality and love affair. Before the backdrop of roaring lions and a golden savannah, Swift croons, “Say you’ll remember me standing in a nice dress staring at the sunset,” but also, “I can see the end as it begins.”

When their romance ends, Africa disappears. Swift’s co-star returns to his wife, and the two actors find themselves in a California studio performing before a painted savannah backdrop. The chorus changes. Whereas previously Swift implored her lover to remember her, now she speaks of pretending to be together. When Swift sings “just pretend, just pretend,” the refrain “even if it’s just in your wildest dreams” poses new questions. Was the entire film shot in a California studio? Did the love affair even take place? Was Africa the manifestation of a forbidden fantasy? Does the dream in fact center not on passionate carnality, but on the desire to be desired?

When Wildest Dreams ends, the following announcement appears in place of credits: “All of Taylor’s proceeds from this video will be donated to build animal conservation efforts through the African Parks Foundation of America.” With no mention of the people of Africa but rather its animals, this gesture moves to preserve the continent as precisely that undeveloped wilderness best suited not for modern African nations, but for white dreaming.

In his exploration of the challenge faced by African intellectuals to create knowledge outside of universalizing Western frameworks, V. Y. Mudimbe writes, “the Western tradition of science, as well as the trauma of slave trade and colonization, are part of Africa’s present-day heritage” (1988:79). Like science, slavery, and colonialism, the production and consumption of Hollywood films are part of African heritage, culture, and storylines. In their critique of Wildest Dreams, Rutabingwa and Arinaitwe suggest that Swift cannot responsibly depict the dramas of white protagonists in 1950s Africa without also conjuring distinctive “African storylines.” Clearly we need to adjust our analytic frame to account for actors who were just as surely black as white, thereby challenging, rather than powering and preserving, (neo)colonial fantasies about Africa.