By John Weedy
Once thought to be a lost or undocumented race film, The Black Journey can now be identified as a British charity screening of a French expedition documentary. The source is a special page in The Illustrated London News dated 21 January 1928, which presents three stills from the film and describes it as "a record of an expedition from Algiers to the Cape."
An enlarged caption from the same page confirms that the film documented the Citroën Motor-Car Expedition across Africa, part of the well-known Croisière Noire (Black Cruise) sponsored by André Citroën in 1924–25. The British screening took place on January 16 at the Plaza Theatre, with royal attendance including the Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of York, and Princess Arthur of Connaught, alongside André and Mme. Citroën. The Prince of Wales spoke from the stage in his capacity as President of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The event raised £1,000 for the Lifeboat Service, reinforcing the film's function as both a cultural event and a charitable fundraiser.
This means The Black Journey was likely a British rebranding of the 1926 French documentary La Croisière Noire, directed by Léon Poirier. That film chronicled the 28,000 km journey from Algiers to Cape Town undertaken by a Franco-African team using Citroën half-track vehicles, and was notable for its staged ethnographic imagery and cinematic ambition.
The ILN stills remain valuable visual evidence of the film's reception and framing in Britain. This includes a reference to a "Hazena witch-doctor"—a term for which no documented ethnic group or region appears to exist. It may be a mishearing, mistranslation, or typographical distortion of a French original from the Citroën expedition film. Alternatively, it may reflect the colonial tendency to exoticize African subjects using fabricated or romanticized labels. The use of the term likely aimed to dramatize the scene for a European audience and should not be understood as an accurate ethnographic designation.
This clarification also rules out the earlier speculation that the film may have been produced by Richard E. Norman, the American race filmmaker. No such film appears in his known works, and the new evidence confirms the film's French-African documentary origin and its British charitable presentation context.
Nonetheless, the rediscovery of this ILN coverage adds important context to the British reception of African-themed cinema during the interwar years. It also highlights how early expedition films were sometimes repackaged with dramatic titles like The Black Journey for specific fundraising events or royal patronage.
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