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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