Experiments in cinematic biography: Ken Gampu’s early life in the cinema

Contemporary scholarship on South African film is yet to address the participation of Black actors in film production, exhibition and publicity. The actors’ interpretive roles in the films, their memories and experiences, and the contradictions of their participation in colonial films and beyond, form part of an unexplored and hidden archive in South African film scholarship. This article focuses on Ken Gampu’s early life in the cinema by reflecting on his participation in two films: a western The Hellions and the drama Dingaka. Gampu was a well-known South African actor and also the first Black actor from that country to succeed in Hollywood. This article proposes an experimental methodology of life-writing called ‘cinematic biography’. It shows that the cinematic lives of the marginalized and colonized actors harbour critical potential in enriching the critical perspectives on the cinema and cinematic cultures in South Africa and beyond.