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

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

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.

The 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.

Flamingo 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

Africa at IFFR 2013: Nairobi Half Life

Nairobi Half Life by David ‘Tosh’ Gitonga may come from the same country and the same co-production scheme as Something Necessary, but it is a rather different proposition. It’s a fast moving, highly polished satire on city life which sets out to entertain. It wouldn’t seem out of place in a multiplex and it scored well in Rotterdam’s audience poll. Right now it has a 46-screen release across the USA.

As in many crime entertainments we are encouraged to admire the nerve and skill of the film’s hero. This is Mwas (Joseph Wairimu), a country boy who makes a living selling DVDs of Hollywood movies, but who dreams of being an actor himself. He goes to the capital to try his luck, but he is robbed of everything within minutes of stepping off the bus. Then he is thrown in jail.

His natural exuberance wins him the respect of fellow prisoner Oti (Olwenya Maina), a small-time gangster who sets him on the road to a life of crime. But in parallel Mwas pursues his acting dream, winning his first stage role playing a housebreaker in a political farce. As his criminal career goes from strength to strength (well, mostly) the big day of his stage debut also approaches.

The story could take place almost anywhere in the world, apart from the extreme criminality which the film invites us to see as characteristic of Nairobi. Take the spectacular way Mwas is stripped of his possessions when he arrives in the city, at which point we are reminded that the city is nicknamed Nairobbery. Later on Oti steals a mobile phone from a woman using it in the street, shouting back at her “Where do you think you are?” Crime and the city are synonymous. Crime is normal, and people who think otherwise are fools.

Nairobi Half Life — Where do you think you are?
(photo: IFFR)

It’s interesting to compare this with Something Necessary, which acknowledges the damage done in the post-election violence but aims to understand the underlying causes. Nairobi Half Life normalises the negative and has little interest in explaining it. In a way the film has the same outlook as Mwas, who at one point has to negotiate a turd-strewn toilet in the jail. Finding it impossible to avoid the shit, he ends up sliding about in it, doing a song and dance number.

As an outsider I found the film very entertaining and so over-the-top that my immediate reaction was not to take the crime and violence too seriously. If it were my own home town on the screen I might feel differently, but dipping into local press coverage on the web suggests that no-one is particularly bothered by this depiction of Nairobi. One blogger even celebrates the fact that the film does “urban filth” so much better than Hollywood.

That’s great for a film that stands out from the crowd, but bad news if it becomes the trademark of a whole industry. And when will US audiences see their next Kenyan film?

A couple of other things happen in Nairobi Half Life that I think are worth mentioning. The first is the way in which the film deals with prostitution, portraying it as an economic choice without a moral or even much of a sexual dimension. This is interesting because it creates a space for strong, independent female characters without objectifying them on screen. What defines Amina (Nancy Wanjiku Karanja) is not that she is sexually available, but that she is unavailable, at least as far as Mwas is concerned. She becomes a character in her own right, not just the ‘tart with a heart’ so familiar in US and European films.

This looks increasingly like a theme worth investigating in African cinema. Just off the top of my head, it reminds me of a brief scene in Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar (1993) where a prostitute justifies her choices, and Henri Duparc’s Rue Princesse (1994), which is built around a romance between a musician and a prostitute. So maybe I mean an interesting theme in films by male African directors…

The second thing of note is the merest hint of a sympathetic gay character (and one of the best jokes in the film, which I won’t give away), which is unusual enough in my experience of African cinema to warrant recording. It has certainly caused as much comment in the Kenyan press as all the urban filth, violence and police corruption put together.

André Deutsch in Africa

A lot of the African fiction I read is second-hand and I’m used to looking out for the distinctive spines of the Fontana and Heinemann African writers series as I run my eye along the shelves of book and charity shops. I’ve also wondered idly how so many African writers came to be published in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Doubtless that question will be answered in full when I get around to Charles R Larson’s The Ordeal of the African Writer, but in the meantime I was interested to stumble across Diana Athill’s brief account in Stet, her memoir of working for publisher André Deutsch.

Distinctive spines

In 1963 the company helped set up the African Universities Press in Nigeria, followed two years later by the East African Publishing House in Kenya. According to Athill, it was André Deutsch himself who found local capital to start these businesses, put together editorial boards and found managers. The London company remained a minority shareholder and had no say in which books were printed, simply taking the option to publish those with international appeal under its own imprint.

This usually meant books about African politics and economics, along with some fiction. Athill says her favourites among the novels were The Gab Boys by Cameron Duodu and My Mercedes is Longer than Yours by Nkem Nwankwo (both new to me and now duly added to the reading list).

She describes André’s involvement in Africa as a romantic one, and says the motivation for publishing African authors at that time was a combination liberal guilt, curiosity and a desire to get in early on a potentially large overseas market. “Many [people in book publishing] were genuinely interested in hearing what writers in those countries had to say now that they were free,” she writes. “For a time during the fifties and early sixties it was probably easier for a black writer to get his book accepted by a London publisher, and kindly reviewed thereafter, than it was for a young white person.”

Africa at IFFR 2013: Something Necessary

Something Necessary made its international premiere at Rotterdam, shortly after opening in Kenya. As director Judy Kibinge pointed out, its story of people coming to terms with the post-election violence of 2007 is particularly timely given that the country goes to the polls again in March this year.

“All of this happened five years ago, but already there are certain conversations that we are having and certain anxieties,” she said following the screening. “I think it was very important that this open before the elections to just get a constructive conversation going.”

The film tells the interlocking stories of a victim of the violence, Anne, and one of its perpetrators, Joseph. Anne lost her husband when a mob invaded their farm, and while she seems to have recovered, her young son Kitur is still in a coma. When she leaves hospital, she throws all her energy into rebuilding the farm in anticipation of Kitur’s recovery, but the physical and mental scars run deeper than she realises.

Meanwhile Joseph is troubled by the part he played in the raid on the farm. Resolving to break away from the gang that carried it out, he tries desperately to find work. Moving from one casual job to another, he crosses Anne’s path once more.

There is a lot to like here, even if the film as a whole film is rather uneven. Susan Wanjiru is a striking presence as Anne, haunted by what has happened but not willing to be a victim. She also delivers one of the films most harrowing scenes, a frank depiction of the consequences of the violence she has suffered.

Susan Wanjiru in Something Necessary
(photo: IFFR)

Not everything hits home in the same way, however. Some of the supporting cast are rather mannered, and their acting sits uneasily with the more naturalistic performances of the leads. The music is similarly out of step with the serious intent of the plot, anticipating emotions like the score for a TV soap. Meanwhile characters such as Joseph’s girlfriend are paper thin, and some elements of the plot strain credulity.

Perhaps the biggest problem is the decision to draw Anne into a truth and reconciliation hearing. Important in reality, this is a dead weight in the drama, telling rather than showing, adding detail but no depth or feeling. In contrast, the film provides a tantalising glimpse inside Kenya’s entrepreneurial class through Anne’s property developer brother-in-law. This could have been taken further, adding to the film’s exploration of the economic factors underlying the violence.

Even with these reservations, Something Necessary remains a pertinent drama, engaging seriously with social and economic issues. As Kibinge explained, this was her motivation for getting involved in the project.

“When you see a conflict in a place like Kenya or Somalia, I think there’s a certain image that you have: ‘Who are those people? Why on earth are they doing that to themselves? There they are, fleeing again with their luggage on their heads!’ It’s really easy to depersonalise those streams of people that you see — even in Nairobi, which is a very cosmopolitan city — to sit there and think: ‘Oh my God, look at these guys!'”

The goal of the film is to shift the viewer from the general to the personal. “To put those images that we see and then somehow to try and draw us into the story of one woman and therefore help us make sense of all that madness that we see and dismiss.”