Not for you, buddy

The 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.”

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 to 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