Golder’s offer

The second set of references to the cinema in Wole Soyinka’s 1965 novel The Interpreters is connected to a particular character, Joe Golder, an American lecturer at the university who claims to be a quarter black and wants desperately to embrace his distant African heritage. “For God’s sake blacken me,” he says to Kola, who is using him as a model for a painting of the gods. “Make me the blackest black blackness in your pantheon.”

Golder also has a predilection for male black students and has developed a whole range of strategies to test their openness to his advances.

This in turn would lead to a conversation about the handsomeness of the film’s hero, and the attractiveness of men in general. Yet the tactic was rarely successful, leaving Golder “chagrined always to discover that the craving for beauty or ‘handsomeness’ was only one more student aesthetic malformation”.

Several pages earlier, Golder has tried is charm on the young journalist Sagoe, who has memories of his own about cinema predators.

While Soyinka’s feelings about American cinema are not clear in all this, there can be little doubt that he didn’t have much time for the Americans to be found in cinemas.

text © Ian Mundell 2013

Authentic cobra maidens

There are two cinema references in Wole Soyinka’s 1965 novel The Interpreters, different enough to warrant separate entries. The first takes place in a bar, where the cast of young Nigerian men have gathered to contemplate their troubles. At a certain point, the music changes. “The drumming had turned brisk for the floor-show,” Soyinka explains, “it was the familiar beat that announced the guttural entry of the witchdoctor in foreign films on Africa.”

Which makes me wonder if, alongside all the westerns and crime films that made the rounds in African cinemas of the period, the more ‘exotic’ adventure yarns also travelled, and what impression they made on audiences. An answer is suggested later in the same scene, when the man performing the floor show takes a fall.

So were the Tarzan films shown widely in Africa? Were they seen and did their counterfeit images seep into the local culture? Or is this an international component of Soyinka’s rich narrative voice?

text © Ian Mundell 2013