BFI

This is the only surviving 6 minutes of a longer travel film made by female explorer and anthropologist Rosita Forbes in 1924. The extract begins fourteen days into a journey across Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. Sadly it does not contain the more glamorous episodes, as when Forbes was entertained by the Regent Ras Imaru (Haile Selassie), or the sights of the ancient cities she visited. Nevertheless this is a unique piece of early social history.

Forbes was celebrated in her day, not only for being a woman in a male dominated field but also for the bestselling accounts of her adventures, Forbidden Road - Kabul to Samarkand and The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, the latter documenting this particular Abysinnian journey.

Forbes also used her experiences to write the screenplays of romantic melodramas set in Africa, The White Sheik (d. Harry Knowles, 1928) and US feature film Fighting Love (d. Nils Olaf Chrisander, 1927). In the 1930s, she also edited Women of All Lands, a prototype lifestyle and politics magazine.

Ann Ogidi

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