In 1957, a 33-year-old American film-maker called Lionel Rogosin slipped into South Africa, looking to shoot the film that he had dreamt of making for almost a decade. The project would be, he told the authorities, a trave-logue for the French airline UAT; later he submitted plans for an African musical in which the world would see that the natives “were basically a happy people”.

Later again, he was forced to report, his interests were turning towards an adaptation of a classic adventure yarn about the Boer War. But by the time the film had its debut at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, Rogosin had got away with the first cinematic exposé of apartheid – and perhaps still the greatest. Come Back, Africa took its title from a slogan of the antiapartheid protest movement.

“He was Jewish, and this was not so long after the Holocaust,” recalls Lewis Nkosi, one of Rogosin’s local collaborators on the film. “He hated anything that that had the odour of fascism.”

He was not, however, a film-maker. To school himself, Rogosin made On the Bowery,a critically lauded portrait of drunks on skid row in New York, shot semi-documentary style with many street veterans reenacting their lives. Rogosin called the style “poetic realism” – a mixture of postwar Italian Neo-Realism and the ethnographic documentaries of Robert Flaherty. He brought the same approach to Come Back, Africa.The film follows Zacharia (Zacharia Makeba), a peasant driven off his land and into the city where he suffers the degradations of a succession of menial jobs.

Around this, Rogosin weaves a tapestry of observations of communal life: daily commuting, street traffic, some wonderful montages of black children playing penny-whistle tunes and dancing (culled from the footage shot for the musical alibi), weddings, preachers, and crime. Rogosin had, in fact, spent a year in South Africa before he ever started filming, determined not to impose a white man’s story, but to let the real South Africa express itself.

“He wanted to find out what we were feeling, then work from there,” Nkosi says. “He used to spend hours walking about to watch and listen to people speaking, long before we sat down to create a script.”

The film also showcases the vibrant cultural life of Sophia-town, a mixed-race neighbourhood outside Johannesburg. Two extended scenes capture the vitality of the old institution of the shebeen, a hang-out for artists and philosophers to debate, perform and play. “ The atmosphere reminded you of Joyce’s Ulysses or Dubliners,” says Nkosi. “That’s what we were trying to capture.” Then a skinny young singer called Miriam Makeba breaks up the jaw-jaw with a sensuous song-and-dance number.

The film-makers sent their innocuous footage for developing at local labs, but the more revealing takes had to be smuggled to safety. “We had to ask for help from our friends in the US Embassy. It’s a sensitive thing, using diplomatic bags for anything outside government business,” he says, “and that’s why the South African Government was astounded when the film was shown at Venice and they read what Lionel had been doing.” Come Back, Africa won prizes in Europe and Time nominated it as one of its Best Pictures of 1960, but it was inevitably banned in South Africa.

Dr Lindiwe Dovey, a lecturer in African film and performance arts at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and programmer of the Barbican’s South African retrospective in the London African Film Festival, counts just two films made by black South African film- makers over the following three decades of apartheid.

“It’s all part of a cinema of exile,” she says, “and relied on the input of foreigners.” But she’s excited to have discovered another film also smuggled out of South Africa – Dilemma, an adaptation of Nadine Gordimer’s A World of Strangers, directed by the Danish Henning Carlsen in 1962. “That was made with a similar Neo-Realist aesthetic,” she says. “It does make you wonder if there are other works out there we don’t know about.”

London African Film Festival (www.africaatthepictures.co.uk), Nov 29-Dec 8; Early South African Cinema, Barbican, London EC2, Dec 1-4 2008

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