There have been so few mentions of the cinema in my recent reading of African fiction that I’m inclined to make something of the faint traces in Hurray for Somo and Other Stories, a 1982 collection by Ugandan author Ejiet Komolo.
There is a colourful crowd in front of the Odeon Cinema waiting for the seven o’clock show. A handsome young man, slight of build and stature, takes one look around and decides to go up into the bar up-stairs. He has seen this film before.
In Ejiet’s tales of amorous adventure, the cinema is mainly of interest as a place to meet girls. Polo, the hero of Kampala…! knows that the barmaids in the Odeon can be his for the asking, but tonight his sights are set higher. He bumps into a promising girl at the bottom of the stairs, and they go off to dinner at the Kampala International Hotel. Now he congratulates himself on avoiding the cinema’s deceptions.
She was even more beautiful than the neon lights at the Odeon had made her out. As a rule Polo distrusted these lights where faithful judgement of a woman’s beauty was concerned.
If he had liked her at the Odeon, now he was ready to worship her.
As in so many of these stories, the bulk of the narrative is taken up with the entanglement of man and girl, before ending in a violent twist. The same is true of The Ringed Moon, in which Irumba has fallen for Krishna, an Indian girl. Realising that their cross-cultural relationship is doomed, they agree to go out one last time.
“There is a beautiful film on, called Vishful Thinking. I do vant you to see it.”
This is Ejiet doing an Indian accent, something he attempts with other accents in other stories, only to fall over himself explaining what the character means. The film is not identifiable, unlike the books he has his characters read, for instance Path of Thunder by Christopher Okigbo. Anyway, Irumba and Krishna are too early for the film and go for a walk instead, which is when violent retribution catches up with them.
Finally, there is a reference to the ubiquity of Westerns. In Not for Love, the narrator rescues a girl from being raped, but doesn’t like the threats her assailants throw at him.
I was hardly in the mood for loudmouthed intercourse drawn straight from cheap cowboy films.
Ejiet is not a great stylist, and the sensationalist bent of the stories undercuts some interesting character portraits. But I like the narrative device he uses in Mistaken Identity of a man who is often told detailed and intimate stories because his face looks familiar to so many people.
This collection appears to be Ejiet’s main work in English. In 2005 it was expanded slightly to become Aida, Hurray for Somo and Other Stories, and published under the name Austin Ejiet. He spent much of his career as a university professor, teaching English literature and, for a time, creative writing. Obituaries published in 2010 also say he wrote satirical newspaper columns, in English, and three children’s books in Ateso, his mother tongue.
text © Ian Mundell 2015
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