Director Bruce Beresford lived in Africa in his earlier years. As a young filmmaker, Beresford made several short films in Africa.
The film was selected to screen in competition at the 41st International Berlin Film Festival in 1991. Maynard Eziashi won the Silver Bear award for Best Actor.
According to film critic Roger Ebert, "when the novelist Joyce Cary went out to Nigeria to join the British colonial civil service in 1913, there was no question in his mind, and in the minds of most British, that he was doing a good thing, representing the world's greatest democracy in an African backwater much in need of improvement. When Cary wrote 'Mister Johnson', the fourth of his African novels, in 1939, some questions had begun to arise. The novel is about those questions."
The movie is set in West Africa in 1923. Blurbs on some DVDs for this film state: "Africa 1923: A clash of cultures between British imperialists and a black man too smart for his own good."