Watching Hong Kong martial arts film under apartheid

Author(s): Cobus van Staden

Source: Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, Special Issue: China-Africa
media interactions: media and popular culture between business and state intervention
(March 2017), pp. 46-62
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26157324
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JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 29, NO. 1, 46-62 II Routledge
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Watching Hong Kong martial arts film under apartheid

Cobus van Staden

Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS

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Introduction

In the early 2000s, a Korean-American friend was busy with research in Johannesburg.
Looking back, she remembers that random passers-by on the street kept asking her
whether she could teach them kung fu. The shadow of Bruce Lee lies long in Africa, stretch
ing all the way back to the cold war, and in South Africa, through the long period of apart
heid. Hong Kong martial arts film remains popular in Africa to the present day, with films
from the 1970s to the 1990s screening repeatedly on satellite and national TV channels.
But how did Hong Kong martial arts film find an audience in Africa?
This paper investigates this question via one case study: the reception of Hong Kong
martial arts film in apartheid South Africa. It shows that these films arrived in South
Africa at a moment when the political-economic structuring of film distribution and exhi
bition, which had placed black audiences under particular constraints (Tomaselli 1989;
Peterson 2003), started to weaken because of a variety of economic and political
factors. These included changes in apartheid cities (Beavon 1998), as well as technological
changes in film distribution and exhibition (Saks 2010; Botha 2012). While these external

CONTACT Cobus van Staden Q cobus.vanstaden@wits.ac.za

© 2016 Journal of African Cultural Studies

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES @ 47

and structural changes prepared the ground for these movies' arrival, I argue that their
popularity can also be understood as a result of the particular constraints placed on
black audiences during apartheid and the skills they developed to overcome them.
Firstly, a brief note about terminology. Throughout this paper I refer to the films I
discuss as 'Hong Kong martial arts' cinema. I use this somewhat unwieldy term because
it remains unclear to me whether subgenre divisions like wuxia versus kung fu film
played a role for the African consumers of these films. From my interviews I suspect
they did not, but I decided to use a broad category to cover all these subgenres, while
also making a distinction between martial arts cinema and Hong Kong action cinema.
This paper is intended as an oblique contribution to a growing debate about the role of
media in the construction of African perceptions of China (see for example, Gagliardone
2013; Gorfinkel et al. 2014; Zhang, Wasserman, and Mano 2016) I hasten to add that of
course most of these films were made in Hong Kong, and that the split between life in
Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China (PRC) was particularly wide at the time
when they became popular. However, as the above example of a Korean-American
being asked for her kung fu moves shows, the mediated construction of 'China' in Africa
has to be distinguished from the mediation of particular countries in the Asia-Pacific
region. These films arguably open a different way to look at the state - one more fluid
than the state as a geopolitical entity, and emotionally resonant in a different way.
Due to cultural distance, African perceptions of 'China' should be seen as a mediated
construct that encompasses both fantasy and reality, as well as ideas and visual images
emanating from Hong Kong, the PRC, Taiwan, and even Japan and North and South
Korea. This was not only caused by African audiences' lack of exposure to East Asia, but
also through obfuscation built into the films themselves. These films frequently present
worlds simultaneously pan-Asian and 'Chinese', simultaneously contemporary and
ancient. These films insert slippages between the ancient and modern, and between
different nation state cultures, and in the process construct 'China' as a mythical space,
a background to epic battles ranging from realistic to wildly imaginative. To a certain
extent, audiences' 'ignorance' of China was actually a reflection of martial arts film narra
tion. The important point is that this fantasy realm was both narratively and visually coded
as 'China', in the same way as the Wild West of Westerns was coded as 'America' even
though it bears little resemblance to current (or twentieth century) life in the actual
United States. Throughout this paper I refer to this mythical space as 'China' while drop
ping the quotation marks when I refer to actual places in the Asia-Pacific region like
China or Hong Kong.
In order to approach the complex issue of how African audiences reacted to Hong Kong
martial arts cinema, I start off this paper with a brief overview of academic discussions of
African audiences and argue that this concept can be understood as historically contin
gent. While there are references to the wider African colonial experience, my focus
throughout this paper is mostly on South Africa. However, the paper also views the con
sumption of these films in South Africa as an instance of globalization, and therefore South
Africa is situated in wider colonial and global networks.
In the second section, I focus more narrowly on South Africa, with an analysis of the
political economy of cinema-going under apartheid. I show that Hong Kong martial arts
film arrived in, and subverted, a system where a monopoly on distribution and exhibition
played into apartheid's wider economic hegemony, physical restriction and censorship.

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48 @ C. VAN STADEN

In the third section, I look more closely at how the world presented in these films facili
tated these changes, and I take a film theoretical approach to argue that the construction
of'China' played an important role in facilitating audience pleasure. Through a comparison
with black South African audiences' consumption of Hollywood westerns, I engage with
the way Hong Kong martial arts films resonated with the context of their circulation,
achieving what Modisane (2013) called 'public critical engagement' - a trigger to consid
ering oneself within one's social context, an act of consideration I primarily locate in the
pleasure of cinematic spectacle. Here I echo Modisane's call for dealing with film as 'a
material object that has a "public life'" (10).

African audiences

Akyeampong and Ambler (2002) have pointed out that the history of leisure in colonial
Africa needs to be seen in the context of colonial constructions of time. With the impo
sition of working and free time came technologies that spearheaded the insertion of Afri
cans as labour into colonial economies centred on mining, agriculture and so on. Cinema
arrived with, and has to be viewed in the context of, these technologies of control
(Diawara 1992; Ssali 1996; Johns 2010). In the case of Anglophone Africa, the hegemony
of English led to the rapid inflow of Hollywood cinema (Burns 2015). At the time, some
argued that Hollywood film could pacify African audiences (Couzens 1985; Peterson
2003; Johns 2010). However, the inflow also led to the racialization of widespread anxieties
that cinema would have a destabilizing influence on certain sectors of society: notably the
working class. In colonial Africa, this led to censorship systems particularly restricting
African audiences' access to what was considered inflammatory films (Paleker 2014;
Gordon 2005). While these censorship laws were ostensibly aimed at preventing violence,
they were also designed to guard against weakening the moral legitimacy of white rule, by
limiting black audiences watching white actors misbehaving onscreen (Ambler 2002;
Paleker 2014; Gordon 2005). This anxiety was stoked by the growing awareness of the
massive popularity of Hollywood cinema, and other American pop culture, among black
South African audiences - popularity which also translated into shaping black urban mod
ernity throughout the early and mid-twentieth century (Nixon 1994; Maingard 2007; Black
laws 2014). This was also true for the rest of Anglophone Africa (Ambler 2001; Gordon
2005; Reynolds 2005). While the particularities of apartheid tempts one to think of
South Africa as a unique case, the history of the consumption of these films show that
South Africa was permeable to global flows and shared experiences with other African
countries.
Despite the fact that Hong Kong martial arts film in many ways replicated the popularity
of westerns in South Africa, it also managed to undercut white/not-white binary that struc
tured westerns, and therefore the hegemonic whiteness of Hollywood cinema that,
despite the censors' fears, actually helped to naturalize apartheid. In making this argu
ment, I draw on the insights of Diawara (1993) that Hollywood cinema is so dominated
by whiteness that all representations of people of colour are warped by this hegemony.
It is important to point out that South Africa was not unique in this respect. I read the
South African consumption of Hong Kong martial arts film as one instance of this con
sumption in subaltern spaces in Africa and across the world. I have not found any research
about the consumption of Hong Kong martial arts film in South Africa, and my

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES @ 49

understanding is influenced by accounts of martial arts film consumption by African and

African-American audiences. Much work remains to be done on the martial arts fandom in
Africa. May Joseph's research on kung fu cinema fandom among young Tanzanians is a
notable exception. She found that Tanzanians drew on kung fu film narratives of forbear
ance and frugality and imaginatively integrated these narratives with ideas of community
relationships under socialism in Tanzania (1999).
More work has been done on the consumption of Hong Kong martial arts cinema
among African-American audiences. Stuart Kaminsky's article Kung Fu Film as Ghetto
Myth (1974) pointed out that black audiences in the United States saw parallels
between their own oppressed position and Bruce Lee's outsider persona. The significance
of Bruce Lee as an icon of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle is elaborated in the work of
Prashad (2001). While he does not write about African consumption of Bruce Lee movies,
he does locate the star in the wider context of anti-colonial struggle in Africa and South
east Asia. Prashad provides a valuable glimpse into how Hong Kong martial arts film reso
nated through the politics of what he calls Afro-Asia, a coinage that includes both Africa
and black Americans, and how it contributed to visions of anti-hegemonic cosmopolitan
ism, a world view that certainly informed sections of the anti-apartheid movement during
that time. In a similar vein Ma (2000) has pointed out the complex onscreen interactions
between black and Asian characters in kung fu film. In a wider sense, authors like Bill
V. Mullen, Daniel Widener and Yukiko Koshiro have contributed to mapping solidarity
and collaboration between black America and East Asia, albeit not specifically in the
field of cinema.
To focus on the impact of Hong Kong martial arts cinema on South African audiences, it
is important to understand how film consumption was structured and controlled by apart
heid economic and legal hegemonies. In the following section I show how these hegemo
nies constricted black movie-watching.

Film-watching under apartheid: control and subversion

Tracing the flow of Hong Kong martial arts cinema to South Africa is extremely difficult
because so few records of its importation remain. In my account I make up for this
absence by triangulating from two richer sources of historical material. In the first place,
black movie-watching under apartheid was severely circumscribed by censorship, includ
ing racially targeted censorship aimed at keeping violent films away from black audiences.
However, apartheid film distribution was also severely biased towards Hollywood. This
meant that Hollywood westerns flowed into South Africa in great numbers and were
widely watched by black audiences, despite their violent content. There seems to be a con
tradiction here. Below I argue that it is actually not a contradiction at all, but a conflation of
apartheid censorship with Hollywood white supremacy that together primed the black
African market for the consumption of Hong Kong martial arts cinema.
South African film exhibition and distribution has historically been dominated by verti
cally integrated near monopolies. These monopolies were closely aligned with Hollywood,
essentially functioning as conduits for Hollywood content into the South African market
from the 1920s to the present. During the 1950s Hollywood studios directly owned
some of these companies, before selling them to apartheid-aligned corporations during
the late 1960s. This meant that while nominally independent from the apartheid

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50 0 C. VAN STADEN

government and subject to its censorship policy, these companies were in reality closely
aligned with the apartheid government via capital ties (Tomaselli 1989; Shepperson and
Tomaselli 2002; Tomaselli 2006; Saks 2010; Botha 2012).
The pro-Hollywood structural bias of South African film distribution developed in nego
tiation with a censorship regime inherited from British colonialism. Anxieties about race
characterized censorship throughout the British Empire and shaped the Entertainment
(Censorship) Act of 1931, a key piece of censorship policy which set the template for
the apartheid censorship system.1 The act included prohibitions on scenes of 'pugilistic
encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans' and 'Scenes of intermingling
between Europeans and non-Europeans'.2
South African censorship inherited anxieties about the impact of film on certain audi
ences (children, women and the working class), anxieties which were racialized under
colonialism. Both Ambler (2001) and Paleker (2014) pointed out that colonial censorship
assumed that African audiences were unable to recognize the difference between
screen and reality and therefore had to be kept from violent and sexual content for the
sake of public order. Paleker has argued that differential censorship developed between
1910 and 1948 and that it operated in tandem with physical segregation of black and
white audiences as a combined form of state control. However, as I alluded to above, a
second, and perhaps more powerful, reason for keeping this content from Africans was
that it might lower Africans' esteem for white rule. Bhekisizwe Peterson quotes a mission
ary complaining in 1921 about the dangers of films portraying 'white sordidness' (2003,40;
see also Ambler 2001).
These colonial discourses were formalized under apartheid law in the form of the Pub
lications and Entertainments Act of 1963. This law further formalized a system of different
levels of censorship aimed at different (racially segregated) audiences. It was couched in
language of serving the different needs of (racialized) communities and promoting peace
between them (Geldenhuys 1977; Van Rooyen 1987). Tomaselli (1989,16) points out that
widespread differential censorship was officially retired 1974, but that an amendment to
the 1963 Act 'retained the right to restrict films "to persons in a specific category ... or at a
specific place'". In his 1987 book-length discussion of the 1974 act, Kobus van Rooyen
(head of the Publications Appeal Board from 1980 to 1990) specifies that

if any film has been approved under this Act subject to a condition that such film shall not be
exhibited to persons in a specified age group or other category, mak[ing] the film available to
any person in the age group or category in question

would be a punishable offense under the act (145).

The three barriers of differential censorship, a distribution and exhibition system funda
mentally biased towards Hollywood,"and a lack of access to movie theatres worked
together keep black audiences from watching action films in general and Hong Kong
martial arts film in particular. In addition, state control of black movie-going was enforced
on a granular level. Rafich Mohamed, an executive at Impact Video, the main importer of
martial arts film to South Africa, told me during an interview in 2014, that when he ran a
number of independent cinemas during the 1970s and 1980s, each screening of a film
deemed provocative had to have a plain-clothes policeman present, and could be
stopped at any moment (see also Van Rooyen 1987). In addition, even the posters faced
censorship. Akbar Adan, a dealer in vintage B-movie posters rescued from defunct

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES @ 51

independent cinemas, showed me examples of posters for martial arts films destined for
'black' or 'mixed' cinemas, that had images of knives and other weapons physically dis
solved with solvents and scraped off the paper (Figures 1 and 2).
In my description so far I have looked at film distribution and exhibition in apartheid
South Africa as a structure of control. I have emphasized the way institutional bias
towards Hollywood film worked alongside physical segregation and differential regimes
of censorship to keep violent content away from black audiences. However, despite the

Figure 1. A 1970s film poster on which the stain indicates where the image of a dagger was chemically
removed.

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52 @ C. VAN STADEN

Figure 2. A detail from the poster showing the stain more clearly.

institutionalization of differential censorship, Hollywood westerns, many of them quite

violent, continued to stream into South Africa, and were widely consumed by black audi
ences. I discuss this issue in more detail below.
While detailing the draconian censorship under apartheid, one should not err on the
side of presenting the apartheid state as all-powerful. No state, no matter how draconian,
is completely impervious to the flow of media. South Africans did have access to media,
even though that access was significantly curtailed.3 Yet, the combination of differential
censorship, lack of access to theatres and poverty presented significant barriers to black
South Africans' access to action film. I argue that this, together with a thematic shift in
emphasis brought by the depiction of race in Hong Kong martial arts film facilitated the
popularity of these films, especially after they arrived on VHS. In thinking about the role
of VHS tape I rest heavily on Litheko Modisane's call to think of film as a material object
with a public life, as well as to keep 'an eye on black participation and the problematic
of black identity' (2013, 8). The public nature of Hong Kong martial arts film on VHS was
one of hiding in plain sight, shielded by perceptions of triviality and worthlessness. In

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES © 53

their consumption by black audiences, they opened spaces for (in Modisane's words) 'criti
cal public engagements' - ways of reflecting on the position of the self in the public sphere
(2).
As far as I know, this article is the first attempt to document the popularization of Hong
Kong martial arts cinema in South Africa. The account below is based on a series of inter
views with distributors, video store owners and other industry figures, conducted in 2014.
Most of the key figures in the imporation of these films have died or left South Africa. In
order to fill in gaps in the account, I play two sets of archival knowledge against each other.
In the first place, I draw on the well-developed body of knowledge on censorship and seg
regation under apartheid, especially relating to the prohibition of violent content. In the
second place, I draw on the relatively well-documented popularity of violent Hollywood
westerns. In leveraging these two, seemingly contradictory bodies of knowledge against
each other I hope to hinge open a space through which to glimpse the ways Hong
Kong martial arts cinema created a space for critical public engagement with black identity
under apartheid.
The first martial arts films were imported into South Africa on 16 mm, to Johannesburg,
during the early 1970s by a Mr Ming. He reportedly imported them from Hong Kong for
South Africa's Chinese community. Mohamed told me that after the films were shown
in Johannesburg's old Chinatown they were provided cheaply to micro-cinemas in Johan
nesburg's African townships. However, this is impossible to corroborate directly because
Mr Ming apparently died in the Helderberg plane crash in 1987. This incident, when a pas
senger Boeing 747 rumoured to be carrying weapons smuggled for the apartheid govern
ment crashed off the coast of Mauritius while en route from Taipei to Johannesburg, is a
site of considerable mystery and late-apartheid urban legends (see for example Burbidge
and Meintjies 2000; South African Press Association 2012). A passenger named H. Ming is
actually listed among the South Africans who died in the crash on a scanned passenger
list stored on the online documents database Scribd (2016). The fact that he was on his
way from Taipei is significant. South Africa saw successive waves of migration from the
greater Chinese-speaking world. While early and mid-twentieth century migration
mainly came from Hong Kong, the 1970s and 1980s saw significant migration from
Taiwan, encouraged by Taiwan's close relationship with apartheid South Africa, a relation
ship which allowed the apartheid state to evade some international sanctions (Pickles and
Woods 1989). While I can't yet prove it conclusively, Taipei seems a likely transit point for
these films.

Cinema was an important component of Chinese community life in Johannesburg, an

aspect I lack the space to explore in detail here. Films imported from Hong Kong were
screened as part of community events before the general availability of vidéocassette.
(Ufrieda Ho, personal correspondence.) These films arguably sometimes found their way
to a wider audience.

Enter the Dragon was released in 1973. Co-directed by Bruce Lee, it both established
him as an iconic star of the 1970s, and Hong Kong martial arts cinema more generally
as an ascendant genre in global cinema. By this time, martial arts film had apparently
already reached South Africa, but it became much more popular due to Lee's international
stardom, leading to more imports of similar films. They were first imported on 16 mm and
shown in independent cinemas. Despite their popularity, both CIC-Metro and Ster-Kinekor
refused to distribute them. While both the duopolistic control and government censorship

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54 (g) C. VAN STADEN

tightened through the 1960s and 1970s, there were some precedents of independent
importers importing action films to be shown in independent theatres. For example,
Mohamed mentioned two micro-distributers named Silver Screen Films and Hollywood
Films, which imported Italian westerns during the 1960s and 1970s. After 1976, it
became possible for theatres to apply to screen films to mixed (or multi-racial) audiences.
This was not due to state liberalization, but rather due to pressure from the movie theatre
lobby, which was facing a lot of economic pressure after the launch of television in early
1976 (Tomaselli 1989). These newly multi-racial independent cinemas and drive-in
cinemas were mostly located in inner-city areas rapidly abandoned by white flight and
the development of mall multiplexes. It is here, and in informal cinemas in townships
that martial arts action cinema first drew big audiences. According to my informants,
the most common form these ad hoc cinemas took was a few seats arranged around a
TV set. However in some cases inner-city movie theatres, designed for celluloid projection,
got a second life as video exhibition spaces, with makeshift projector stands erected in
between rows of seats. I saw these as a student exploring the city. According to Rafich
Mohamed, the Eyethu Cinema in Soweto showed large numbers of martial arts films
and the Rio Cinema in inner Johannesburg (both now defunct) ran three martial arts
double bills per day. However, these theatres were still subject to censorship, police
action and segregation (see also Tomaselli 1989).
The early 1970s saw the lifting of an embargo on video technology, to facilitate the
development of the South African television industry (Tomaselli 1989). Video recorders
and cameras started flowing into the country. Opening up the country to this technology
initially had the effect of perpetuating white privilege with white audiences gaining access
long before their black counterparts. However, it also led to the birth of home video rental
stores, which slowly gained a mixed clientele. In Johannesburg's Chinese community,
small rental businesses emerged, frequently renting tapes recorded from TV broadcasts
in Hong Kong and sent to South Africa (Ufrieda Ho, personal correspondence.) Sony
launched the Betamax system in 1975, and JVC followed with VHS in 1976. The video
store owners Nada Ghannam and Tony Karam told me that when these technologies
arrived in South Africa by the late 1970s, they supplanted an already existing economy
of renting movies on 8 and 16 mm celluloid. Stores rented out films together with projec
tors, and these same stores rapidly started replacing 16 mm with vidéocassette as soon as
the prices for VCRs started falling. Initially, they were forced to invest heavily in buying
VCRs because so few households in South Africa possessed these machines. The format
war between Betamax and VHS also forced them to invest in acquiring machines and
tapes in both formats.
The eventual victory of VHS in South Africa by the mid-80s created a new system of
cheap, easily disseminated film that was difficult for the apartheid censorship system to
control. Whereas the collaboration between the exhibition-distribution duopoly and the
state led to the policing and segregation of movie theatres, the widespread distribution
of video tapes raised new barriers to monitoring. The rapid dissemination of VCRs led
to the flowering of micro-cinemas across Africa, usually a VCR running off a car battery,
with a few benches arranged in front (Ambler 2002). While it is impossible to say how
many of these existed during the 1980s, my interviews with the video store owners
who rented tapes to these cinemas indicate that there were many of them in South
Africa and that they were almost completely focused on action cinema. Video stores

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES @ 55

were frequently set up next to informal minibus taxi ranks, in order to service the VCR
micro-cinemas.

Ster-Kinekor and CIC-Metro/Nu-Metro quickly came to dominate VHS distribution as

they did film distribution (and later DVD distribution, with the newcomer Next Video).
However, in the scramble for Betamax and VHS movies in the late 1970s and early
1980s, video stores also acquired films from smaller, non-Hollywood studios. This was
especially true for exploitation, horror and martial arts film. Tony Karam, the current
manager of Videon, a store in the racially and culturally diverse town of Randfontein
(with Afrikaans and African populations living in what is still a segregated city), outside
of Johannesburg, told me that he frequently ordered copies directly from small studios
because he knew Ster-Kinekor and Nu-Metro's focus on Hollywood film would keep
them from distributing them. So while the distribution duopoly in the celluloid era effec
tively cemented the dominance of Hollywood film, during the VHS era, stores were able to
bend distribution rules and acquire films that were not officially cleared for rental.
Karam told me that when they stocked their shop with tapes, martial arts films were
frequently cheaper to acquire than Hollywood films. For that reason, early video stores
sometimes filled their shelves with relatively inexpensive martial arts films, knowing
that they would find an audience, especially among African audiences officially barred
from action film. However, there is a larger issue here: what were (and are) the tastes of
black audiences in South Africa? Litheko Modisane's seminal work is likely to open up
this field as a rich area for future scholarship.
The fact that these films could be acquired cheaply also means they stayed around for a
long time - video stores essentially became repositories of pulp film history. These stores
functioned as archives of certain modes of filmmaking, and certain genres became succes
sively embedded in community practices and patterns of taste. The video store owners I
interviewed told me that whereas English-speaking audiences preferred dramas, African
audiences overwhelmingly chose action, with a particular fondness for martial arts, and
Afrikaans audiences liked both action film and horror. Due to all of these contingencies,
action film was a rare site of shared, yet segregated, taste between Africans and Afrikaners
during the 1980s.
But what facilitated black South African audiences' enjoyment of these movies and
what does it teach us about their construction of 'China?

Onscreen fighting and the apartheid audience: westerns versus martial

arts

As I mentioned earlier in this essay, while martial arts film played an important role as a
globalized cultural commodity facilitating local identification and self-imagining, it was
hardly unique. Jazz, gangster films, and other cultural texts facilitated such processes
during the twentieth century (Nixon 1994; Baines 2003; Peterson 2003; Jaji 2005;
Maingard 2007; Modisane 2013).
Few film genres had such a strong impact on this self-definition as westerns. This was in
part due to the rapid growth of Hollywood production, and the expansion of distribution
networks, to the extent that by the late 1920s some Southern African theatres were mostly
showing Westerns. While some of these spaces took decades to desegregate, westerns
were also widely shown to black audiences at mine compounds, as part of the mine

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56 @ C. VAN STADEN

approved use of film as a device to distract workers (Burns 2015). In the process, westerns
developed an outsized cultural impact, and local gangs, for example, modelled their self
presentation on westerns. Urban South Africa even saw gang members wearing neck-ker
chiefs, cowboy hats and other Wild West accoutrements as a way to distinguish them
selves (Burns 2015; Reynolds 2005). This popularity should be seen in the context of
black oppression under apartheid. The actor John Kani has eloquently summed up the
role of Hollywood film under apartheid:

Just to sit in this dark place, and magic takes place on the wall. For a moment, we forgot apart
heid, we forgot that there was another world that wasn't good, we sat there and were carried
away by the dream of these American movies (quoted in Davis 1996, 23).

In addition, South Africa should not be seen in isolation. Westerns played a similar role in
other parts of colonial Africa (Ambler 2001; Suriano 2008). This popularity was not lost on
the authorities of the time. Despite the fact that the entire media economy of South Africa
was set up to facilitate the inflow of Hollywood film, these films also occasionally suffered
crackdowns by censors. Their focus was on sifting out films that could act as a spark
to revolt, and they were anxious about the racial and potential political implications of
westerns. In 1956 they declared they will restrict westerns where "Red Indians are shown
as good fellows and the White man as a crook, because of the bad influence they would
have on the Natives (Nixon 1994, 34).
However, African viewers were already adept at subverting the narrative mechanisms
of all the other westerns which had no intention of portraying indigenous populations
as 'good fellows'. Several black South African authors have described memories of
playing cowboy games in which the traditional white supremacist narrative of the classical
western was undercut, where the Indian were more formidable and ultimately victorious
(Blacklaws 2014). Black audiences managed to subvert these narratives and employ a
version of bell hooks's oppositional gaze (1992) or Manthia Diawara's resisting spectator
ship (1988) to still find meaning, pleasure and momentary liberation through these films.
However, I would argue that, compared with the decidedly mixed pleasures of reading
against the grain of western after western, Hong Kong martial arts movies provided African
audiences with more direct pleasures. To my mind, three main aspects of Hong Kong
martial arts cinema were key to heightening the viewing pleasure of African audiences:
spectacularized violence, changed racial dynamics and explicit anti-colonial imagery. I
discuss each aspect in more detail below.
I have argued that one of the charms of Hong Kong martial arts cinema was that it
allowed black audiences to consume onscreen violence. However, these audiences were
already watching large numbers of westerns. The consumption of onscreen violence
was therefore not new. To my mind the distinction comes in what Stephen Teo has
called Hong Kong action film's tendency towards 'aestheticized violence' that operates
as myth (2011, 158). Whereas violence (both as a theme and as a visual spectacle) lies
at the heart of both genres, the extended fight sequences of Hong Kong martial arts
cinema arguably takes up a larger percentage of screen time than do scenes of physical
conflict in mid-century American westerns. In this sense, Hong Kong martial arts films
come closer to the structure of Hollywood musicals, where narrative stops periodically
to fill the screen with spectacular bouts of choreographed physicality. Without these
sequences both musicals and Hong Kong martial arts films arguably stop being

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 0 57

themselves, in a way that is not true for westerns. One can imagine a western with no
shoot-outs, but it is harder to imagine a martial arts movie with no fighting. While the dis
tinctions here are vague (genres are difficult to define, influence each other and change
over time), I would argue that the pleasure of Hong Kong martial arts cinema is related
to the periodic placement of action sequences within the timeline of the narrative. This
echoes Tom Gunning's concept of the cinema of attractions (2007). He argued that
certain forms of cinema foregrounded moments of heightened spectacle, the visuality
of which exceeded their narrative utility. Drawing on the work of Gunning, Stephen Teo
argued that Hong Kong action cinema is defined by aestheticized action that operates
as mythical violence, 'where mortal characters possess attributes and supernatural
powers of mythical gods' (159).
These films are structured by regular moments of attractionist violence that exceed
their function in narrative, creating a series of spectacles that bring pleasure independent
of the plot. In addition, Hong Kong martial arts film's tendency to foreground hand-to
hand combat (as well as the presence on screen of swords, nunchaku and other
implements used over close range) over guns, draws the viewer into a closer physical
space than in the landscape-conscious westerns of the 1940s and 1950s. The extended
fight sequences do not only take up significant screen time, but also place the viewer
even further into a kind of hyperreal violence heightened even further by foley sound
added in postproduction to heighten the sensory impact of every onscreen blow.
The attractionist structure of Hong Kong martial arts film, as well as the way it draws the
viewer into hyperreal violence enabled easy access for even the most casual viewer. The
periodic bursts of spectacular action overcame the poorly dubbed dialogue, and the
degraded quality of the cassettes, and acted as a leveller between people of different lin
guistic backgrounds. I would argue that this is part of the explanation for why these films
seemed to appeal to both African and Afrikaner audiences, as indicated by video store
owners.

In the second place, echoing readings of Hong Kong martial arts cinema fr
American perspective, I would argue that the very reality of seeing the explic
people of colour as the agents of violence, especially violence of such virtuos
been powerful for black audiences under apartheid. The issue of the South A
tion of black bodies in violent onscreen motion has so far not been discussed
exception emerges from some of the discussions of Mapantsula (Oliver
where the complexities of the reception of this kind of black agency re
(see for example Beittel 1990; Modisane 2013). The power of this imag
even more striking if one takes into account that the films of Bruce Le
only East Asian, but also black performers. For example, in Enter the Drago
and Robert Clouse 1973) Jim Kelly (who was African-American) is first seen
gant zoom in and an 'and introducing' credit. Later on in the film, he is
group of other black men in a space decked out with black power insign
after fights off two racist white policemen. No reading against the gra
here. Lee also repeatedly defeats white opponents in his films, some cod
colonialists (especially in Fists of Fury). For audiences used to having to
white supremacist narrative of westerns, this was considerably richer pickin
These films also undercut a taboo against the cinematic depiction of w
lence which ran deep in colonial and apartheid South Africa. A 1910 f

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58 0 C. VAN STADEN

black boxer defeating a white boxer was banned, and the incident led to the formation of
the first ad hoc state censorship committee. When the Entertainment (Censorship) Act
became law in 1931 it included a regulation against showing 'pugilistic encounters
between Europeans and non-Europeans' (Ssali 1996,92). Hong Kong martial arts film expli
citly challenged this taboo, while locating martial supremacy in the bodies of actors who
were not white. In comparison, while earlier African audiences had access to onscreen vio
lence through watching westerns, ostensibly undercutting the differential censorship
system I outlined above, they did so by engaging with a form which implicitly bolstered
the status quo. Maingard (2007) has made the point that Wild West imagery greatly
resembled Voortrekker4 imagery, and that both were steeped in myths of open frontiers
where any anti-white resistance was pathologized. I would argue that this is a key reason
why westerns were allowed to flout the differential censorship system. The other key
reason is of course the structural collaboration with Hollywood, which was facilitated by
the vertical integration of film distribution and exhibition under apartheid. Hollywood
films as a whole (and especially westerns) were hegemonic in South Africa not only
because they made money for key stakeholders in the apartheid media economy, but
because they were largely ideologically in line with apartheid ideology. Where individual
Hollywood filmmakers challenged these biases (e.g. Joseph Mankiewicz's No Way Out
(1950)) the censorship mechanisms kicked in and Hollywood films were banned as well
(Ssali 1996,120).
In comparison, Hong Kong martial arts film not only featured people of colour as agents
of onscreen violence, but also made that violence explicitly anti-hegemonic. The work and
worldwide stardom of Bruce Lee is of particular note here because of his conflation of on
and off-screen anti-hegemonic struggle. His stardom in Hong Kong cinema was widely
known to have been preceded by a Hollywood career stymied by institutional racism.
His films also addressed racism and colonialism directly, with him encountering and
defeating agents of hegemony, and providing occasions for other performers like Jim
Kelly (who was African-American) to do so as well (Uyehara 1993, 87). In the process, he
opened up martial arts as a space for cosmopolitan expression (Prashad 2001). Hong
Kong's own colonial history surely also contributed to the impact of these films in other
postcolonies. Instead of paying lip-service to vague notions of justice, the action is
aimed against real (albeit stylized) signifiers of colonial oppression. The most notable
example is a scene in Fist of Fury (Lo Wei 1972), where Lee breaks a sign reading 'No
Dogs, No Chinese', a scene that reportedly got an enthusiastic response from diaspora
audiences, and arguably echoed African audiences' own experiences with segregation
(Feng 2002; Thomas 2007).
This point is slightly complicated by the fact that many of these films were set in a
mythic 'China' of the past. The 'China' of Hong Kong martial arts films acted as the provider
of narrative meaning, drawing the parameters of morality and human interaction. Even in
the most explicitly cosmopolitan subgenre - what Desser (2000,78) called the 'arena' sub
genre - where representatives of different schools of martial arts from around the world
battle for dominance, 'China' remains central as the delineator of morality and tradition. In
this subgenre, onscreen violence becomes a transnational competition to demonstrate vir
tuosity in an arena where violence is mythicalized, but where (unlike the mythical violence
of the western) the parameters are non-Western. While these films draw in many white
and East Asian performers, as well as African-Americans (e.g. in Enter the Dragon and

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 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES © 59

actual Africans (Bloodsport (Newt Arnold 1988)), the criteria of success and the rules of
loyalty and revenge are coded as 'Chinese'. Even in the case of later American appropria
tions of martial arts cinema starring performers like Jean-Claude van Damme and Chuck
Norris (also very popular according to the owners of video stores that I interviewed) the
protagonist's supremacy is proven by being better at 'Chinese' arts than actual Chinese.
In these cases, white supremacy is decentred in the moment of its reinscription. The
white protagonist ends up beating all his racially othered opponents, in the same way
as he would have in a western. However, this victory does not confirm the centrality of
a Western world view, because it only gains meaning within parameters set by 'China'.

Conclusion

In this paper I tried to provide some context for the ongoing popularity of Hong Kong
martial arts cinema in Africa, by focusing on the case of South Africa. Despite the cultural
distance and the alienating effect of (often poor) dubbing, Hong Kong martial arts movies
found enthusiastic audiences in South Africa. These films were radical in that they coupled
attractionist violence with the decentring of the white-centred West as the primal site of
meaning.
In the context of differential censorship, onscreen violence became a privileged site of
liberation and pleasure. In all of my interviews with video store owners, they emphasized
that while Anglophone South Africans mostly refused Hong Kong martial arts films
because they were dubbed, Afrikaner and African audiences accepted them much more
readily because they cared about action sequences. Here I want to be clear that I am
not using this data to echo colonial descriptions of African audiences as unsophisticated
viewers delighting in action and slapstick but incapable of following plot (for more on this
stereotype, see Burns 2003). Rather, I argue that both the attractionist structure of these
films and their 'Chinese' (and therefore non-Western) setting aided audiences whose
skills in resistant reading had been honed through years of westerns, to take maximal
viewing pleasure from films which combined attractionist violence with explicitly anti
hegemonic narratives. Because of the momentary loosening of duopolistic control
caused by the VHS revolution, and the fact that these movies entered the country
below the radar of the Hollywood-aligned censorship system, African audiences could
actually manage to get hold of them despite the decline in access to movie theatres in
late-apartheid. All these factors contributed to the popularity of Hong Kong martial arts
cinema in apartheid South Africa.
Li (2005) has argued that kung fu film as a genre narrated and soothed anxieties about
traditional Chinese culture in the face of European modernity. While different films
approach this issue differently, many key martial arts films can be read as performing a
symbolic decentring of the West and a positioning of Asia as the centre of meaning. I
would argue that the African popularity of Hong Kong action cinema opens the door to
thinking about how cinema, originally deeply complicit in Africa with colonial and apart
heid regimes of control could also become a site of non-Western meaning. Hong Kong
martial arts cinema represented a crucial, but overlooked, break between cinema and
the technologies of Western control in Africa, and an important moment of reorientation
of cinema on the continent towards the Global South. This made it an important precursor
of the current deepening economic and political relationship between Africa and East Asia.

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60 @ C. VAN STADEN

Notes

1. While this legislation shaped apartheid censorship significantly, it was not the first censorship
policy in South Africa. The earliest dated from 1872 and prohibited the dissemination of
material deemed obscene via mail. One of the earliest uses of censorship to police race and
miscegenation was the result of a 1905 obscenity case in the Durban High Court against
the publisher of a publication representing sex between black men and white women (Gel
denhuys 1977).
2. The legislation was so strict that it drew complaints from the US Department of Commerce
that it presented a barrier to film trade (Gordon 2005).
3. For example, one of the most stringently policed fields of media under apartheid was porno
graphy. Yet hotel resorts in Bophuthatswana and elsewhere made a living by offering (mostly
white) South African tourists access to pornography (Grundlingh 2006) and even the head
censor Van Rooyen (2012), acknowledged in his autobiography that he was aware that numer
ous South Africans smuggled porn back from overseas trips.
4. The Afrikaans name for white settlers who settled in the interior of Southern Africa in succes
sive waves from roughly 1835. Narratives of Voortrekker bravery were central to apartheid
mythology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Filmography

Bloodsport, 1988, Dir. Newt Arnold.

Enter the Dragon, 1973, Dir. Bruce Lee and Robert Clouse.
Fist of Fury, 1972, Dir. Lo Wei.
Mapantsula, 1988, Dir. Oliver Schmitz.

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