The ‘Jim Comes to Joburg’ Trope in Literature and Film - Simon Stanton-Sharma (University of Salford)

In this lecture, Simon Stanton-Sharma, Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of Salford, explores the 'Jim Comes to Joburg' trope in South African literature and film. Originating in the early twentieth century, the trope captures the rural-to-urban migration of Black South Africans in search of work and opportunity at a time of extreme exploitation and alienation. Tracing the trope from Douglas Blackburn’s Leaven (1908) to Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946) and the landmark 1949 film African Jim, Simon Stanton-Sharma shows how this narrative arc reflects broader social histories: forced land dispossession, apartheid’s spatial and economic segregation, and the rise of Black political consciousness. The lecture pays particular attention to the protagonist of Mine Boy, Xuma, whose journey from rural hope to urban awareness dramatises the psychological and physical toll of extractive capitalism. The lecture also considers how music, language, and collective resistance are used and represented in film, sometimes subversively—as in the unscripted protest song in African Jim—to challenge white authority while asserting a Black urban identity. This talk reveals how 'Jim Comes to Joburg' texts and films function as sites for understanding and interpreting South African literary and cinematic resistance.

Further reading

Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy (Heinemann, 1946)

Douglas Blackburn, Leaven: A Black and White Story (T. Fisher Unwin, 1908)

R. R. R. Dhlomo, An African Tragedy (Lovedale Press, 1928)

Lindiwe Dovey, African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Lindiwe Dovey and Angela Impey, 'African Jim: Sound, Politics, and Pleasure in Early "Black" South African Cinema', Journal of African Cultural Studies 22.1 (June 2010), 57-73

Stephen Gray, 'Third World Meets First World: The Theme of "Jim Comes to Joburg" in South African English Fiction', Kunapipi 7.1 (1985), 61-80

William Plomer, 'Ula Masondo' in Selected Stories (Philip, 1984)

W.C. Scully, Daniel Vananda (Juta, 1923)

Donald Swanson, dir., African Jim (1949)