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A doll less travelled

It’s an odd thing to buy: a doll that belonged to a dissident in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Doina Cornea used dolls similar to this one to send letters critical of the regime out of the country, for broadcast by Radio Free Europe. One of them played a prominent role in Roumanie: le désastre rouge, a documentary made in 1988 by Josy Dubié and Jean-Jacques Péché, which dramatically changed the way the Romania was seen in the west.

This particular doll, however, appears to have stayed at home; an understudy, a bystander in the closing days of Romania’s dictatorship. And yet someone did buy it, for €700, at an auction last week in Bucharest. It was among 28 lots put up by Cornea’s estate to fund a foundation that will celebrate her life and work, and promote the values for which she campaigned.


Doina Cornea’s doll, auctioned in Bucharest, December 2020

The auction documents do not exactly say that this doll missed its destiny, but reading between the lines this seems to be the case. It was one of three dolls, the catalogue says, bought to smuggle letters out of the country. Interviewed in 1993 for the short film Păpușa, by Marius Șopterean, Cornea recalled selecting the dolls and described how she was able to slip the tiny letters between the fabric of the doll’s hood and its plastic face.

The first doll left with Dubié in the summer of 1988, containing two letters. One was an open letter to Ceaușescu, criticising his rule and demanding reforms; the other a letter to be read to a conference organised by the Polish Solidarity movement in Cracow. The story goes that Cornea saw Dubié’s car, conspicuous by its Belgian number plates, close to the church she attended in Cluj, and quickly asked the foreigners to take the doll with them. After checking who she was with the Belgian Embassy in Bucharest, Dubié returned to Cluj and succeeded in getting past her minders to film a brief interview.

In Roumanie: le désastre rouge the doll is shown sitting on the back seat of Dubié’s car, as if left by a careless child. This is followed by a scene where the doll is cut open. Two letters, tightly folded squares of paper covered in miniscule handwriting, are extracted from the stuffing in its head. The doll is also shown in the studio of Radio Free Europe, present as one of the letters is broadcast. And later it is handed to Mihnea Berindei, of the Paris-based League for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania, to whom one of the letters was directed.

Dubié’s doll, in the studio at Radio Free Europe

Emil Hurezeanu, formerly a journalist with Radio Free Europe in Munich and a participant in the film, later recalled Dubié arriving at the station to deliver the letters, and the impact the film had once broadcast in December 1988. “After Désastre rouge, Romania suddenly went from being a forgotten country in the south-east of European, or at best one known for its non-conformist relationship with Moscow, to being seen for what it was: a country sacrificed, along with its unhappy people, at the whim of the national communist dictatorship.”

A wave of international protest and solidarity followed, with campaigns launched to address specific issues brought to light by Cornea’s letters. For example, Opération Villages Roumains was set up in Brussels to campaign against the systematic destruction of rural communities by twinning them with Belgian villages. Cornea, meanwhile, was placed under house arrest.

One of Doina Cornea’s letters, concealed in the doll

The second doll, containing a letter addressed to Pope John Paul II, left the country with Cornea’s daughter, or more precisely in the arms of her 10-month-old granddaughter. This doll was later donated to the Sighet Memorial Museum to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance.

This leaves the third doll, which presumably Cornea kept for sentimental reasons or for future use. And you never know, there might even be a letter inside it. I wonder if the person who bought it will risk damaging their investment to find out.

text © Ian Mundell 2020

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Robbe De Hert’s Fugitive Cinema

Often it takes the death of a filmmaker to get their films out of the archives and onto the screen. So it is with Robbe De Hert, who died in August at the age of 77. Long celebrated as the enfant terrible of Flemish Cinema, it is finally possible to see where some of that reputation comes from, thanks to memorial programmes this month in Ghent and Antwerp.

But these isolated events — all the more transient at a time when it is hard to get to the cinema — need to be followed by an effort to make his films available on digital platforms or DVD. If he is so important to the development of Flemish cinema, as the obituaries all say, it would be good to see why.

De Hert’s importance primarily lies in Fugitive Cinema, a collective he helped set up in Antwerp in the mid-1960s. Inspired by the Free Cinema movement in the UK, it made socially engaged and experimental films, mixing documentary, drama, collage and animation. It was particularly influential for its ‘off-television’ productions, reportage on social issues that the public television refused to address.

Louis Paul Boon and Robbe De Hert on the set of De Bom (1969)

SOS Fonske (1968), for example, showed a family going through the humiliation seeing its belongings auctioned on the street to cover the cost of a bankruptcy. Rather like the early work of Ken Loach, it helped launch reforming legislation. Meanwhile Dood van een Sandwichman (1971) looked at the way commercial and political interests took over the funeral of a young cyclist.

De Hert collaborated on these films with Guido Henderickx and Patrick Le Bon, who would also go on to careers as feature directors. Meanwhile De Hert made his own films, such as De Bom (1969), a short about a garage owner who finds a lost American atom bomb in his garden, and Camera Sutra (1973), a sprawling broadside against Belgian society.

In the 1980s De Hert’s career took a surprisingly commercial turn, beginning with the historical drama De Witte van Sichem (1980), and continuing with popular comedy Zware Jongens (1984) and the 1950s nostalgia of Blueberry Hill (1989). He also began making documentaries on the history of Flemish and Dutch cinema.

While his main feature films from the 1980s are available on DVD (assuming you have the patience to rummage through the second-hand bins) De Hert’s earlier work, and that of Fugitive Cinema more broadly, is extremely hard to see. This is where the memorial events this month make their contribution.

On 14 October the Ghent Film Festival will screen Dood van een Sandwichman and De Bom, with producer Willem Thijssen on hand to talk about his collaboration with De Hert, and veteran film journalist Patrick Duynslaegher present to provide context.

A deeper dive into the Fugitive years will then be held at De Cinema in Antwerp on 19-21 October and again on 26-28 October. The programme begins with De Hert’s debut short Twee keer twee ogen (1963), then goes on to cover SOS Fonske, De geboorte en dood van Dirk Vandersteen (1968), Camera Sutra, De Bom, Dood van een Sandwichman, and Le Filet Américain (1981), De Hert’s last film in the Fugitive style.

The Ghent and Antwerp programmes will both be introduced by film historian Gertjan Willems, who has written one of the best appreciations of De Hert’s career. This appears in Dutch on the bilingual film site Sabzian.

Willems has also been instrumental in ensuring that De Hert’s archive is preserved. This covers not just the activities of Fugitive Cinema and his subsequent productions (completed or otherwise) but also the fruit of his obsessional research on Belgian cinema history.

Robbe De Hert’s office, before its contents were donated to Antwerp University

The films have been transferred to the Cinematek for preservation and digitisation, while paper records and other items have been donated to Antwerp University, and will be held in the city’s Felix Archive. From October on, Willems and his colleague Steven Jacobs will organise a seminar to guide Antwerp master students in theatre and film studies through research into the early Fugitive films. The students will also help build an inventory of the archive.

All of this activity would make a lot more sense if the Fugitive films, and De Hert’s other work, were more widely available. Hopefully, we will not have to wait for too long.

text © Ian Mundell 2020
photos courtesy Ghent Film Festival (top) and Antwerp University (bottom)

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We sat there and got ourselves horrified

I was puzzled the first time I saw Tarzan name-checked in an African novel, and a little surprised that these films appeared on local cinema screens at all. And I get the same feeling from seeing Dracula come up in Son of Woman, the irreverent and immensely popular 1971 novel by Charles Mangua.

The book’s narrator is Dodge Kiunyu, an educated but dissolute chancer who is trying to make a living and get laid (although not necessarily in that order) in post-independence Kenya. His story unfolds in a kind of rolling present tense in which Kiunyu talks directly to the reader about his situation, in a salty, slangy prose that recalls American pulp fiction.

For what it’s worth, the pulp detective Perry Mason makes an appearance on Kiunyu’s bookshelf, but the stronger resonance for me is Charles Bukowski, both in Mangua’s narrative style and the self-aware low life lived by his alter-ego.

But back to Dracula, who breaks into the narrative for no good reason other than he once infected Kiunyu’s dreams:

“There was this horrifying movie ‘Dracula’ which I saw in Kampala — it gave me hell for a whole week. This bloodthirsty Dracula attacked me the first night with his bared fangs and proceeded to suck blood from my neck. You should have seen me when I woke up. I was scared as hell. The second night I dreamed about the fellow again. This time he was an African dracula and he sucked my blood from my tummy. Third night I shared a bed with Kisa, a snoring friend of mine, but Dracula came again. I put up a fight and grabbed him by the neck. We wrestled all over the bed Lord! I nearly strangled Kisa to death.”

I’m not sure he means anything specific by an “African dracula”. A quick search throws up no close parallels in local folklore or literature. There is blood stealing in the African occult, but it seems to be a component of witchcraft rather than something distinct. As for the cinema, black vampires only appeared later in the 1970s with Blacula — I’d love to know if that ever screened south of the Sahara.

Despite his nightmares, Kiunyu goes to see the film again. This time it is in the city of Nakuru, with a girl he is hoping to seduce.

“Every time Dracula opened his fanged mouth to take a bite at somebody this Kisii girl would turn her eyes away from the screen and hold me tight. The first time she did it I nearly screamed. I thought she’d bite me. Anyway we sat there and got ourselves horrified until I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

They leave the cinema before the end, but are back the next day for a different film.

“We went to another movie at the Odeon and I didn’t like it either. It was this movie ‘Attila the Hun’ where Anthony Quinn acts real primitive. I can’t seem to like the Huns anyway. They are a damn greedy lot.”

Would this cheesy 1954 adventure film still be playing in cinemas a decade or more after it was made, or is this poetic license on Mangua’s part? In this light, the Dracula film in question is anyone’s guess, but possibly he is thinking of the 1958 Hammer film with Christopher Lee, or one of its 1960s sequels.

Kiunyu’s reaction to the film is universal, but I can’t help wondering if Dracula films had a particular resonance in East Africa during and immediately after the colonial period. Luise White, of the University of Florida, has written extensively about rumours of white Europeans stealing blood from Africans for sinister purposes, such as turning them into medicines. Meanwhile medical researchers report that such fears still pose a problem for studies carried out in Africa.

Does that give the Dracula story extra bite, or is the typical opposition of science and the occult in such films enough to subvert a double reading? What does Dracula matter when the real vampire is Dr Van Helsing?

text © Ian Mundell 2017

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Not for you, buddy

rivercoverThe cinema is a faint echo throughout Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976), a diversion for people with time and money to spare, but not for Ben and his friend Ocholla. They spend what they earn as Nairobi construction workers on booze and prostitutes, hoping enough remains at the end of each debauch for cigarettes and food.

The cinema is considered expensive, although if you get up very early there are cheap morning shows. When he had an office job, Ben and his mistress Wini might go to a movie and later, when he is down on his luck, he lets her pay.

But mostly Ben and his co-workers walk on by.

Movie posters outside Kenya Cinema advertise a film to keep you awake through the night. The men hurry on by, hardly noticing the colourful boards. They don’t have to keep awake through the night. Besides, the price of a cinema ticket could be more realistically squandered on the more effective Karara.

Even if they prefer this harsh local beer to the diversion of a movie, the cinema still works on their imaginations.

Ocholla pauses to admire the life-sized picture on a nude white woman. He cocks his head appreciatively, then clacks his mouth. Next he whips off his cap and scratches his dusty, rugged head. “What do you think, Ben?” “Not for you, buddy,” Ben shoves him on.

But towards the end of the novel Ben does go into a cinema. He has argued with Baby, the child Wini has abandoned with him, and to make it up he takes the boy to the movies. The first place they come to, the Twentieth Century Cinema, will not let the child in. The movie — “a film to keep you on the edge of your seat” — is for adults only.

At Cameo Cinema round the corner they are showing a western to beat all westerns. This one is for general exhibition. Ben buys two balcony tickets. The film turns out to be one of the type where pistols sound like bombs, fists like canons, and horses gallop in a series of thunder claps. Baby enjoys the film thoroughly. It is hard to tell what has got him squirming with excitement the more, the popcorn or the movie. It may be both.

Later Ben learns that Baby has been skipping school, using tips he gets for helping people park their cars to go to the movies.

Going Down River Road was Mwangi’s fourth novel, and is often considered the middle part of an urban trilogy bracketed by Kill Me Quick (1973) and The Cockroach Dance (1979). At the same time as he was writing these books he was also an aspiring film producer, as he recalled in an interview in 2015.

“I was in a group that had hoped to pioneer a Kenya film industry in the 1970s and I decided to work on foreign productions coming to Kenya as a learning process before I got to making my own movies.”

In the late 1970s he was involved in The Bushtrackers (1979), a low-budget adventure film about game poaching shot in Kenya by Gordon Parks Jr, the director of Blaxploitation classic Super Fly. Part of the way through filming, Parks was killed in a plane crash, and screenwriter Gary Strieker seems to have taken over. Mwangi wrote a novelisation from the screenplay, and benefited from the high local profile of the film.

“I sold many copies of the book outside Kenya Cinema during the screening of the film,” he recalled in 2015, “and was a big seller in that account.”

cryfreedom1

Cry Freedom

Meanwhile in his 1974 book Carcase for Hounds was adapted for the screen by Nigerian director Ola Balogun as Cry Freedom (1981), not to be confused with Richard Attenborough’s 1987 biopic of Steve Biko. In Balogun’s hands, Mwangi’s tale of the Mau Mau became a more general story of guerrilla struggle against colonialists.

The film of The Bushtrackers appears to be lost, and does not appear in most accounts of Parks’ work. Cry Freedom seems equally forgotten, although efforts to revive Balogun’s reputation have resulted in some screenings in Germany and Austria. The Cinémathèque française also has a copy in its Balogun collection.

During the 1980s Mwangi worked on a number of bigger international productions shooting in Kenya. On Out of Africa (1985) he was an assistant director, involved in organising the Kikuyu extras. According to Mwangi, he “was very, very far behind the camera….” But he was close enough outofafricato see how the film progressed, and also to comment when the Washington Post scratched the glossy surface of the production.

“The Africans are in the background, like shrubbery,” Mwangi told the paper. “You almost had the impression when they were lining up the shots that they were trying to keep the Africans out of it…”

But here, and elsewhere, he was complementary about the film’s director. “It is not easy for Europeans to depict Africans. Sydney Pollack tried very hard.”

Mwangi went on to work as an assistant on Gorillas in the Mist (1985) and White Mischief (1988), and as casting agent on The Kitchen Toto (1987). He was also location manager for the TV movie Beryl Markham: A Shadow On The Sun (1988). But all efforts to launch his own films, or interest producers in adapting his novels, seem to have come to nothing.

text © Ian Mundell 2016

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We want to take copies

Letting chance dictate my reading of African books has often paid off, but rarely so well as when I picked up This Earth, My Brother… (1971) by Kofi Awoonor in a London charity shop. I had not heard of him and the cover (below) was not particularly inspiring. The first few paragraphs were dense and uninviting, but the rules of the game are that I must read any African book I find amongst the Ian McEwans and EL James. So it came with me.

Earth-Brother2And it is a remarkable book. The rather elaborate style of the first chapter runs through the novel but alternates with more grounded accounts of life in Ghana from the colonial period, through WW2 and on to independence. Some of these stories are digressive, delving into the histories and reflections of incidental characters, while others follow the thoughts of Amamu, a foreign-educated lawyer who feels ill at ease in urban society.

This unease is not the pressure of corruption so skilfully rendered a few years earlier by Ayi Kwei Armah in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Instead Amamu is troubled by a combination of lost love, social alienation and the echoes of a deeply religious education.

Awoonor’s two narrative voices often draw on the same events, memories and observations, so complement one another. The direct passages become a key to unlock the poetic, the poetic a commentary on the direct. He is a skilled writer in both registers, and I’m keen to read more of his work. There is only one other novel, Comes the Voyager at Last (1992), but several volumes of poetry and essays.

With my interest in African cinema I was also intrigued to read that Awoonor was involved in film production in Ghana in the mid-1960s and briefly head of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC). But it was harder to find out just what this meant. The Gold Coast Film Unit is often discussed as an example of Britain’s approach to film-making in its colonies, but post-independence cinema in Ghana barely seems to exist at all.

I finally found some answers in Perished Diamonds, a short documentary about Ghana’s cinema, made in 2013 by Anita Afonu. After independence in 1957 president Kwame Nkrumah nationalised film production, creating the Ghana Film Unit, which in turn took on responsibility for distribution and exhibition to become GFIC a few years later.

Awoonor, barely in his thirties, was a fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon when he was asked to take over. “I was invited […] to go in there, to take care of the creative angle, because the programme was to let the corporation begin to produce films,” he recalls.

It is harder to say what kind of films GFIC produced under his leadership. Biographies tend to say that Awoonor became manager in 1965, but in the documentary he says that he was involved for between two and two-and-a-half years, until the coup that brought down Nkrumah in February 1966.

Hamile-still4

Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet

That lines up with his credit (as George Awoonor-Williams) as production adviser on Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet, a 1964 film transplanting Shakespeare’s play to a village in northern Ghana. Originally a university theatre performance, the film was directed by Terry Bishop and runs to nearly two hours. A fragment (left) appears in the documentary.

Another hint comes in a book on Nkrumah’s cultural policy by Kwame Botwe-Asamoah. Awoonor told the author that he was involved in producing a script called Across the Parapet, which took its inspiration from line in one of Nkrumah’s speeches.

“And across the parapet, I see the vision of African unity and independence, her body besmeared with the blood of her sons and daughters, in their struggle to set her free from the shackles of imperialism.”

Unesco’s 1967 catalogue of African films dates the 54-minute documentary to 1964, and explains that it covers the history of Ghana, Nkrumah’s role in independence, the renewal of the country and its aspirations for the future. It was directed by Brooks and T Ahene Daniels.

The catalogue can add no other titles from 1964-66, and only a few public service films from the earlier post-independence period. However, it seems likely that No Tears For Ananse, generally cited as the first Ghanaian feature film, was made while Awoonor was running GFIC. Dating of the film is erratic, but director Sam Aryeetey said in a 1978 interview that it was made in 1965.

As a Nkrumah appointee, Awoonor lost his position after the coup in February 1966. He left the country, first to study English literature at the University of London, then comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After getting his PhD he stayed on in the USA to teach.

It was during this period of exile that he changed his name and wrote This Earth, My Brother. He returned to Ghana in 1975 to teach and write. He was imprisoned for a time, and then became a diplomat. He seems not to have been involved in film-making again.

The invisibility of the films he helped make may be down to a general purge of materials once Nkrumah fell, as noted by film scholar Manthia Diawara in Jump-Cut:

“When Nkrumah was overthrown, the new regime confiscated all the films produced between 1957 and 1966, giving as a reason that the films fed the ‘personality cult of Nkrumah’.”

But Perished Diamonds gives a further reason, with wider implications. In 1997 the Ghanaian government ‘divested’ the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and its archive to a Malaysian company which proceeded to strip the assets, discarding many of the films in the process.

Awoonor

Kofi Awoonor in Perished Diamonds

However distant his own involvement, Awoonor’s opinion is damning. “The sale of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation is a tragedy for Ghanaian culture and African civilisation. It’s a betrayal of the Kwame Nkrumah dream [that] we ourselves must be able to tell our own story.”

Returning to This Earth, My Brother it is intriguing to see how Awoonor makes use of the cinema. This begins with the mobile cinema vans that showed films around the country during WW2.

“The mobile cinema vans came regularly. They showed films of smart British soldiers marching to martial music and queueing for hot steaming food grinning from ear to ear. That was war. Quick montages of battle action, smoke and confusion. And a few British soldiers would be leading towards camera a long line of captive Germans.”

Then in the following chapter, which takes a more oblique view on the war years, this expands to cover the films made at the time.

“Hitler had only one ball. That was the song. Floated through our mornings and noons in palm groves as mobile cinema vans came and the Gold Coast film units came and shot films of kernel gatherers. Elders asked, When are you coming back to show it to us, we want to take copies, I will take five copies.”

A cache of copies in a village somewhere would be a treasure trove now.

Later the cinema features in the account of Ibrahim, a young man turned bad.

“He was a bright-eyed lad of eighteen, if anyone could tell his age. His brother apprenticed him to a tailor who made Hausa gowns near the first refuse dump. Ibrahim did not stay to learn the trade. He hired himself out as a commissionaire to Opera Cinema, a big dark cinema in the heart of the city with a large urchin clientele. Here he made the acquaintance of some of the tough northern boys of Cow Lane, the home of every jockey in the city. Then he started coming home late.”

And there was indeed an Opera Cinema, which Jennifer Blaylock tracked down in 2011. Her blog on the cinema in Ghana is well worth checking out for details of the cinema vans and the state of the film archives.

A final tragic note is that Kofi Awoonor is no longer with us. In September 2013 he died in the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

text © Ian Mundell 2016

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Clever new fashions

There are two passing references to the cinema in Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Most of the novel is in the third person, describing the struggle of an unnamed man to live in post-independence Ghana, and to satisfy the desires of his “loved ones” without getting involved in corruption. Temptations range from the everyday taking of bribes in the railway office where he works to a suggestion that he help a politician, Joseph Koomson, to defraud the state.

ArmahCoverBut a third of the way into the novel there is a sequence of 16 pages in the first person, recalling events before independence. I’m still not sure if these are the man’s memories or those of his friend, Teacher, but they include a description of the docks.

“The wharves turned men into gulls and vultures, sharp waiters for weird foreign appetites to satisfy, pilots of the hungry alien seeking human flesh. There were the fights, of course, between man and man, not so much over women as over white men asking to be taken to women, and the films brought the intelligent mind clever new fashions in dress and in murder.”

What kind of dress and what means of murder are left hanging. Possibly he is thinking of gangster films rather than the usual westerns, but there are no clues.

Fashion also produces the second reference, in a description of Koomson’s wife.

“She contemplated the diamond on her third finger, raised the hand itself, in the manner of a languid white woman in the films, to raise a curl that was obscuring her vision and push it back into the main mass of her wig, and continued as if no human voice had interrupted her.”

Again the suggestion is film noir, but that is little more than a guess.

Going to the cinema makes no appearance. Entertainment, escapism and status instead comes from the radio and reel-to-reel tape machines. There is even a passing reference to television, again as a status symbol.

text © Ian Mundell 2016

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No drive-in at Ilmorog

One of the themes of Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the transformation of Ilmorog from a neglected rural village in to an industrial town. There is a cultural centre for white tourists, a church, a brewery, bars and a brothel. But there is no mention of a cinema. That might reflect the realities of post-independence Kenya, although I suspect it is more likely to be Ngũgĩ’s lack of interest in the movies.

petals-coverThe cinema does not feature in the other books by Ngũgĩ that I have read, from the early novels Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965) to the more mature A Grain of Wheat (1967, revised 1987). That is not so surprising, since all three are set in rural communities and concern people with little or no experience of the city.

Petals of Blood (1977) is different. The principle characters — teachers Munira and Karega, trader Abdulla and bar girl Wanja — are all outsiders, who come to rural Ilmorog to escape problems connected with city life. All four subsequently go on a journey to Nairobi with the villagers, as a consequence of which Ilmorog undergoes its own urban transformation.

And while Ilmorog does not get its own film house, there are one or two places where the cinema creeps into the narrative. For example, Wanja is first seduced by a married neighbour, who takes an interest in her when visiting her parents.

Later he gave me a lift in his lorry and took me to an afternoon film show in the Royal Cinema in the city. School could never thereafter be the same.

A similar transaction appears in a different context much later in the novel. The delegation from Ilmorog has travelled to Nairobi to lobby the town’s MP, but he is away investigating a scandal in one of the tourist resorts he owns. A foreign newspaper has written that these are “special places where even an ageing European could buy an authentic African virgin girl of fourteen to fifteen for the price of a ticket to a cheap cinema show”.

I’m not sure if Ngũgĩ intends the irony, or if the parallel is a coincidence.

When Ngũgĩ invokes the movies rather than going to the cinema, it is the familiar territory of the Western. This happens when Munira is crawling the bars of Kamirithu, the author’s home town, and chances upon Wanja. He sees that her attention is elsewhere:

What seemed to draw her out was people: young men in tight American jeans and huge belts studded with shiny metal stars, leaning against the walls by the juke-box or at the counter by the high stools, chewing gum or breaking matchsticks between their teeth with the abandoned nonchalance of cowboys in the American Wild West I once saw in a film; young men and bar girls trying out the latest step.

This simile is picked up in an argument that they then overhear between some of these young men, who are disputing the merits of popular musicians Kamaru and DK. One of them says:

Geee — I gonna dance to Jim Reeves and Jim Brown and break a safe or two like some cowboys I saw in the Wild Bunch — Geee.

But this is a rarity. Ngũgĩ’s cultural references are more frequent and more detailed when it comes to literature, songs and art. There is even a whole plot twist in Petals of Blood built around advertising slogans.

For example, when Karega first visits Munira in Ilmorog, the older teacher surveys his own modest house with disapproval.

The sitting room, like the rest of the house, was rather empty: one wooden bench, a table with huge cracks along the joints; two folding chairs and a shelf fixed to the wall and graced with old copies of Flamingo, Drum, African Film and torn school editions of Things Fall Apart and Song of Lawino.

Rough-JusticeFlamingo and Drum were popular magazines, while African Film carried crime-themed photo-stories. According to Matthias Krings of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, these photo novels served as film surrogates, telling cinematic stories before commercial African cinema existed.

Then, towards the end of the novel, Abdulla is visited by Joseph, an orphan he rescued and who the four main characters have collectively helped educate. In this moment looking to the next generation, the boy is given a significant literary talisman.

Abdulla and Joseph sat outside their hovel in the New Jerusalem, talking. Joseph was now a tall youth in a neat uniform of khaki shirt and shorts. He held Sembene Ousmane’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood, in his hands but he was not reading much.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

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A dream told to a sleepy child

It is not the cinema in Mine Boy (1946), by South African Peter Abrahams, but the Bioscope. This suggests a specific place in Malay Camp, the Johannesburg suburb where much of the action plays out, although South African cinemas in general were also called bioscopes at the period.

MineCover3This Bioscope first appears as Xuma, the central character, is introduced to Saturday night in Malay Camp after arriving from the country to work in the mines.

“They stopped on a corner and watched the milling crowd. Across the way was the Bioscope and people were streaming in. Outside the Bioscope a little ring of men were playing dice. The man who had the dice executed an intricate dance before he flung the dice down.”

The Bioscope is singled out as a destination for courting couples, and a little later Xuma is teased with the suggestion that he and Eliza, whom he has just met, might go there together. But it is also a place of more general diversion. Later, when Xuma returns to the house after several months’ absence, he is told that the women folk — Leah, Eliza and Maisy — have all gone to the Bioscope.

The cinema is just an incidental detail in Mine Boy. We never learn what people are watching and although Xuma’s love life occupies much of the narrative, he never goes to the Bioscope with Eliza or Maisy. Instead they walk together or dance, and in one striking scene Eliza reads to Xuma from a history of the Zulu wars.

In this edition Mine Boy is billed as the first modern novel of Black South Africa, a plausible claim even if it ignores the author’s earlier, less polished Song of the City (1945). Abrahams’ style here is sometimes straightforward and uninflected, sometimes lyrical. His descriptions of street life are the most vivid in the book, and it seems he saw a lot first hand. He was born in the neighbouring suburb of Vrededorp, and grew up with an aunt who, like Leah, was a Skokiaan Queen, illicitly brewing and selling beer.

Abrahams left Johannesburg for Cape Town in 1938, then moved to London in 1939, aged only 20. He worked as a journalist and published his first fiction. This explains, perhaps, the occasional nostalgic turn.

“Perhaps in five or ten years Malay Camp would only be a name. And perhaps even Vrededorp, the heart-throb of the dark people of the city, would be like a dream told to a child who was sleepy, and who, on waking, would remember only vague snatches of it.”

text © Ian Mundell 2015

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Dancing beauties and soldiers’ stories

The presence of Indian films in Africa continues to fascinate me, hence my interest in this aside in The Naked Gods (1970) by Nigerian author Chukwuemeka Ike.

gods2The novel — a bawdy political satire — concerns a power struggle at the University of Songhai, set up under British and American patronage but now about to appoint its first local vice-chancellor. The foreign powers want to retain control over the institution, which will shape the country’s elite, and each has its preferred candidate. The question is how they can pull the levers of power to ensure that their man gets in.

One of influential figures in this game of deans is His Royal Highness Ezeonuku III of Onuku, a chief with insatiable appetites and a roving eye. Here he is dreaming of an encounter with Miss Murti, a young Indian woman working as a secretary-typist in the prime minister’s office:

“That night she had worn a typical Indian sari, in which pale blue was the dominant colour. Her characteristic Indian short blouse had exposed a margin of delicate flesh, spotless like her face, and she had none of the folds of superfluous flesh you see on the wives of many Indian merchants. Her graceful movements had reminded HRH of the dancing beauties who are part of every Indian film, and of the accounts which Songhaians who had fought in India gave of Indian girls.”

What I find interesting here is that the cinematic image is contextualised by other images of India: the direct experience of encountering Indian women in the community, where it is wives rather than daughters who are seen, and the tales of soldiers who presumably fought in the colonial army during WWII.

In Ike’s novel Miss Murti turns out to bridge the two worlds. When HRH makes enquiries to see if she already has a protector, he is told she had come to Capital City on holiday, to stay with an Indian family. When a civil war broke out in her home state, she decided to take a job in Songhai until the fighting subsided.

And this is the last we hear of Miss Murti. Her appearance in the narrative seems to serve no other purpose than to counterpoint the arrival of the less appetising Mrs Ikin, predatory wife of one of the potential VCs. And yet the detail makes her stand out, more so than many of the novel’s other characters. I wonder if a real person lay behind this cameo.

Reading this passage also prompted me to look at the experience of African soldiers in India, Ceylon and Burma during WWII. It seems to be a rich area of research, and one that is new to me. It raises questions about whether contact with Indian nationalists influenced African independence movements, and how witnessing Indian poverty changed perceptions of the relatively wealthy Indian merchant class in Africa.

As for women, David Killingray has this to say in Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War:

“The British and Indian authorities planned encampments for African troops away from centres of population. This was done more to reduce the likelihood of communal unrest, particularly over women, than from fear that African soldiers might be politically ‘infected’ by African nationalists.”

So it seems that attractive young Indian women were distant objects of desire, whether in the cinema, in the community or in the memory.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

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Court of last resort

It’s not cinema-going that caught my eye in Chinua Achebe’s 1987 novel Anthills of the Savanah, but a reference to an African film. That is very rare in my reading so far.

AnthillsAWSThe reference appears in a chapter narrated by Beatrice Okoh, one of three linked characters the narrative follows through the treacherous political water of a fictional African dictatorship. The others are Chris Oriko, a government minister, and journalist Ikem Osodi.

Beatrice recalls meeting Ikem while she was studying English literature at a London university. She admired his brilliant and original ideas, but found that he had no clear role for women in his political thinking. She concedes this hurt his feelings, since he had celebrated the role of women in a novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929, an uprising against the British administration in Nigeria. However laudable this foregrounding of women, Beatrice objects that it is not sufficiently progressive.

“The way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembène film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late.”

The film in question is Emitai (1971) by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. It dramatises a stand-off towards the end of WWII between villagers in the Casamance region of West Africa and French colonial forces, who want the village’s rice harvest. When the men eventually cave in and hand over the rice to the French, the women continue to resist. Or at least they take up the discarded spears, and we see no more, since this is where the film ends.

Emitai (1971)

Emitai (1971)

In addition to being a rare reference to an African film in African literature, this comment on Emitai is unusual for challenging Sembène’s position regarding women. The conventional view is that he is a champion of African women and a progressive in gender relations, whereas Beatrice (and by implication Achebe) is more critical.

Emitai seems to have made an impression on Achebe, since he returns to the subject in a Paris Review interview of 1994. Again he is talking about Beatrice, with whom he says he identifies, but this time he puts himself in the firing line rather than Sembène.

“There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture—that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in… this is the way the stories have been constructed, and this is what I have tried to say.”

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Sembène wrote a book with a similar setting to Anthills of the Savanah, anticipating Achebe’s novel by several years. Le Dernier de l’Empire (1981) explores the relationships of a group of people close to an African dictator who has mysteriously disappeared. The main characters include old government colleagues of the dictator, a journalist and a businessman with an interest in politics. Wives and lovers appear, but not in the foreground. Traditional roles, once again.

Finally, there’s another passing cinematic reference to note in Anthills of the Savannah, which is even more unexpected than the mention of Emitai. It appears in a tirade about official photographs, spoken by His Excellency the president.

“I don’t find it funny, people shaking hands like this…while their neck is turned away at right angles, like that girl in The Exorcist, and grinning into the camera.”

 

text © Ian Mundell 2015