Out of the Archives 15: America Past and Present on Display in 1967 USIA Film “Africa Goes to the Fair”
The US Information Agency (USIA) was a Cold War propaganda and public diplomacy agency. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) contains a large collection of USIA’s film, photography, and textual records, with many of these holdings still to be explored. As I make research visits to NARA, I’ll be sharing occasional updates of my discoveries, especially those materials related to post-independence Africa, from the USIA archives.
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In 1967, USIA released Africa Goes to the Fair, a 15-minute color film that “depicts modern American products and U.S. economic development through the U.S. national exhibit at the 1966 trade fair in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which was attended by 360,000 Africans (including children from the Haile Selassie I Day School, who toured the exhibition as part of a classroom assignment).”
Ethiopia was a frequent subject and site of USIA’s Africa-related films during the early to mid-Cold War period. Under Emperor Haile Selassie, Ethiopia was described as “our closest friend in Africa” and the Emperor cultivated as a moderate, pro-Western leader on the continent. This made the country of high strategic value, facilitating the flow of substantial economic and military support for the “modernization” of his empire for which Selassie felt a personal responsibility.
Furthermore, Selassie had a keen interest in being portrayed as driving this modernization on behalf of his country and as an elder statesman and close ally to America. USIA proved a willing partner in amplifying these curated messages and indulging Selassie’s vanity with regular coverage. It is reported that Selassie even recruited a USIA photographer whose work he admired to be his own personal photographer.
The US national exhibit in the film is an adulatory showcase of the pre-eminence of American industrial and consumer goods. As the uncredited narrator intones, the fair included “300 products from 82 companies, large and small, displayed in full working order for all visitors by young Ethiopians: plastic school desks, television sets, a mechanic’s tools, a hand-powered loom, a machine that can make 200 concrete building blocks in an hour, an automated hen house, and Hollywood fashions for women.”
While America is uniquely superior (as demonstrated by this exhibit), the film also underscores the commonalities with Ethiopia, or at least the version of the country on Selassie’s modernization journey. Over the three-week display, we hear, “Africans are seeing American products, products made by people who build a new country out of the wilderness of North America, people who had a dream, a dream of progress.” It’s this dream of progress that’s the foundation of nation building, one that is shared by Africa and America.
The exhibit’s display of US history, complete with Ethiopian guides speaking in Amharic but dressed in vintage American costumes, reinforces America as a relatable model for 20th-century national growth. It emphasizes themes of self-reliance, mastery over nature, and industry (in the senses both of hard work and greater mechanization). Leaving quite a lot of uncomfortable truths out, it dates the country’s origins to the 1776 revolt against British rule and continues, “American men and women got to work in the 1800s. Their efforts started to bear fruit. They harnessed water and steamed to power their mills, and people learned to run machines. Machines gave birth to more machines, more products, and more jobs. The nation imported less and grew more self sufficient.”
Through this display, touring high school students “can see how a country can grow, starting with a dream.” When the students return to their classroom, their art teacher has them draw and describe the America they have learned about. Africa Goes to the Fair thus crosses into meta territory by depicting Africans viewing a manufactured version of American history, which is then played back through the eyes of young Ethiopians. Both the film’s telling and students’ retelling would be ultimately seen by African audiences to whom the film would be shown. Rarely is USIA’s mission of promoting and modeling the absorption of American worldviews so economically encapsulated in one media artifact.
The film’s visual storytelling is skillful and more playful than the description of its content would suggest. It opens with a remarkable scene of American servicemen parachuting onto the fairground to bring a pair of scissors to Emperor Selassie with which to perform the ceremonial opening ribbon-cutting.
Throughout, camera shots are taken from above, below, and moving horizontally as if on a dolly. They linger over consumer products and people staring at those products in a style very evocative of industrial sponsored films of the time. There’s an extended whimsical interlude that follows a toddler wandering the fair and a narratively unnecessary sequence involving the school students singing and clapping on their bus ride home.
The diegetic sound recording is superb, combined with a cool jazz score credited to Buddy Collette/Buddy Collette Quintet. Collette is likely to have scored at least one other USIA film, George Washington Carver (1964).
Africa Goes to the Fair is credited as “A film by Stevan Larner.” According to IMDb and his obituary, Larner had an extensive career in documentary and commercial narrative films (he was the Director of Photography on Caddyshack!). Both he and fellow USIA director James Blue attended the French film school IDHEC and filmed during Algeria’s independence period. Larner and Blue co-directed the USIA production, A Few Notes on Our Food Problem (1968), which was nominated for the Oscar for best documentary feature in 1969. Larner also served as DP on fellow USIA director and leading independent Black documentarian William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968).
The film’s associate editor Gary Schlosser got his own Oscar nomination for the documentary short Cowboy (1967). Additional photography on the film is credited to George Telanos, which I believe is a misspelling of Talanos and whose camerawork in East Africa can be seen in other USIA films of the 1960s including The Tailor I discussed in Out of the Archives 12.
According to USIA records, Africa Goes to the Fair was retired from circulation in 1975.
