Under the auspices of making a commercial musical, Lionel Rogosin and his film crew made this documentary-style feature on the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa; if the film has a rough edge to it, this is because it was shot largely in locations prohibited to whites and under constant fear that the film would be discovered and confiscated. Come Back, Africa dramatizes the desperate conditions of black Africans under Apartheid--not only the squalor of Johannesburg's vast slums, but the concentrated government oppression directed toward breaking up the black family and community. Zachariah Mgabi heads a cast of non-professional actors as a black man forced by starvation to take his family from the plains to the city. He is fired from job after job and suffers innumerable indignities--including being jailed for sleeping with his own wife in her domestic's quarters--before the film comes to a seemingly inevitable tragic ending. Much of the film was shot in Sophiatown, a once-vital African township that was broken up by the government's attempts to replace it with a white suburb.
Lionel Rogosin was one of the first filmmakers to form the New American Cinema Group. His films include On the Bowery (1956), another fiction-documentary, and Good Times, Wonderful Times (1964), a jarring juxtaposition of cocktail party and war footage.