Dancing beauties and soldiers’ stories

The presence of Indian films in Africa continues to fascinate me, hence my interest in this aside in The Naked Gods (1970) by Nigerian author Chukwuemeka Ike.

The novel — a bawdy political satire — concerns a power struggle at the University of Songhai, set up under British and American patronage but now about to appoint its first local vice-chancellor. The foreign powers want to retain control over the institution, which will shape the country’s elite, and each has its preferred candidate. The question is how they can pull the levers of power to ensure that their man gets in.

One of influential figures in this game of deans is His Royal Highness Ezeonuku III of Onuku, a chief with insatiable appetites and a roving eye. Here he is dreaming of an encounter with Miss Murti, a young Indian woman working as a secretary-typist in the prime minister’s office:

“That night she had worn a typical Indian sari, in which pale blue was the dominant colour. Her characteristic Indian short blouse had exposed a margin of delicate flesh, spotless like her face, and she had none of the folds of superfluous flesh you see on the wives of many Indian merchants. Her graceful movements had reminded HRH of the dancing beauties who are part of every Indian film, and of the accounts which Songhaians who had fought in India gave of Indian girls.”

What I find interesting here is that the cinematic image is contextualised by other images of India: the direct experience of encountering Indian women in the community, where it is wives rather than daughters who are seen, and the tales of soldiers who presumably fought in the colonial army during WWII.

In Ike’s novel Miss Murti turns out to bridge the two worlds. When HRH makes enquiries to see if she already has a protector, he is told she had come to Capital City on holiday, to stay with an Indian family. When a civil war broke out in her home state, she decided to take a job in Songhai until the fighting subsided.

And this is the last we hear of Miss Murti. Her appearance in the narrative seems to serve no other purpose than to counterpoint the arrival of the less appetising Mrs Ikin, predatory wife of one of the potential VCs. And yet the detail makes her stand out, more so than many of the novel’s other characters. I wonder if a real person lay behind this cameo.

Reading this passage also prompted me to look at the experience of African soldiers in India, Ceylon and Burma during WWII. It seems to be a rich area of research, and one that is new to me. It raises questions about whether contact with Indian nationalists influenced African independence movements, and how witnessing Indian poverty changed perceptions of the relatively wealthy Indian merchant class in Africa.

As for women, David Killingray has this to say in Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War:

“The British and Indian authorities planned encampments for African troops away from centres of population. This was done more to reduce the likelihood of communal unrest, particularly over women, than from fear that African soldiers might be politically ‘infected’ by African nationalists.”

So it seems that attractive young Indian women were distant objects of desire, whether in the cinema, in the community or in the memory.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Court of last resort

It’s not cinema-going that caught my eye in Chinua Achebe’s 1987 novel Anthills of the Savanah, but a reference to an African film. That is very rare in my reading so far.

The reference appears in a chapter narrated by Beatrice Okoh, one of three linked characters the narrative follows through the treacherous political water of a fictional African dictatorship. The others are Chris Oriko, a government minister, and journalist Ikem Osodi.

Beatrice recalls meeting Ikem while she was studying English literature at a London university. She admired his brilliant and original ideas, but found that he had no clear role for women in his political thinking. She concedes this hurt his feelings, since he had celebrated the role of women in a novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929, an uprising against the British administration in Nigeria. However laudable this foregrounding of women, Beatrice objects that it is not sufficiently progressive.

“The way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembène film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late.”

The film in question is Emitai (1971) by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. It dramatises a stand-off towards the end of WWII between villagers in the Casamance region of West Africa and French colonial forces, who want the village’s rice harvest. When the men eventually cave in and hand over the rice to the French, the women continue to resist. Or at least they take up the discarded spears, and we see no more, since this is where the film ends.

Emitai (1971)

In addition to being a rare reference to an African film in African literature, this comment on Emitai is unusual for challenging Sembène’s position regarding women. The conventional view is that he is a champion of African women and a progressive in gender relations, whereas Beatrice (and by implication Achebe) is more critical.

Emitai seems to have made an impression on Achebe, since he returns to the subject in a Paris Review interview of 1994. Again he is talking about Beatrice, with whom he says he identifies, but this time he puts himself in the firing line rather than Sembène.

“There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture—that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in… this is the way the stories have been constructed, and this is what I have tried to say.”

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Sembène wrote a book with a similar setting to Anthills of the Savanah, anticipating Achebe’s novel by several years. Le Dernier de l’Empire (1981) explores the relationships of a group of people close to an African dictator who has mysteriously disappeared. The main characters include old government colleagues of the dictator, a journalist and a businessman with an interest in politics. Wives and lovers appear, but not in the foreground. Traditional roles, once again.

Finally, there’s another passing cinematic reference to note in Anthills of the Savannah, which is even more unexpected than the mention of Emitai. It appears in a tirade about official photographs, spoken by His Excellency the president.

“I don’t find it funny, people shaking hands like this…while their neck is turned away at right angles, like that girl in The Exorcist, and grinning into the camera.”

 

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Television-Handed Ghostess

There are several moments in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) where signs of modern life intrude on a tale apparently taking place outside time and space. For example, when the narrator and his second ghost wife have to strip naked to cross a very narrow bridge across a deep valley, they each leave behind a “costly wrist watch”. These are put on by a naked ghost couple heading in the other direction.

But the most striking instance comes towards the end of the novel, when the narrator encounters the Television-Handed Ghostess. This ghost has terrible sores all over her body, which can only be cured if an earthly person agrees to lick them every day for ten years. Our hero is reluctant.

“But when she told me to look at her palm and opened it nearly to touch my face, it was exactly as a television, I saw my town, mother, brother and all my playmates, then she was asking me frequently — ‘do you agree to be licking the sore with your tongue, tell me, now, yes or no?'”

In his foreword to this Grove Press edition Geoffrey Parrinder, a lecturer at University College Ibadan, notes that this Television-Handed Ghostess is “described by a man who has never seen television”. Elsewhere he cites conversations with Tutuola to back up his statements, but this comment is just thrown in. Other writers are happy to repeat it as fact, but I think it’s misleading.

It would be more accurate to say that Tutuola had not watched television. Nigeria was the first sub-Saharan country to introduce TV broadcasting, but that was not until 1959, long after the book was published. And up to that point Tutuola seems not to have travelled outside Africa. But he could easily have seen television in the cinema or in newspapers and magazines.

While American and British films filled the cinemas of Lagos in the 1940s and 1950s, it was rare for them to show the competing medium of television. I can find references to only one or two examples, such as Open Secret in 1948. However a search of the Pathé News and Movietone catalogues indicates that television was covered fairly often in contemporary newsreels.

It even turns up in this 1945 edition of forces newsreel The Gen, in which a happy family watches television in a section on prospects for servicemen after demobilisation. These newsreels were shown overseas, and Tutuola was a craftsman in the RAF in Nigeria from 1942-45. So perhaps…

I also think that the way Tutuola refers to the Television-Handed Ghostess assumes that his readers will know what he is talking about. It seems that the concept, if not the experience, was common enough in Nigeria in the early 1950s.

All of this is a little off my usual beat of cinema in African literature, and it is no surprise to find that the ghosts do not go to the movies in Tutuola’s novel, nor do the ‘deads’ in his debut, The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952). But this passage in the earlier book did catch my eye, from the part where the drinkard is staying with the Faithful Mother in the White Tree.

“The children of seven to eight years etc. of age were always dancing, tapping on the stage with melodious songs and they were also singing with warm tones with non-stop dance til morning. There we saw that all the lights in this hall were in technicolours and they were changing colours at five minutes intervals.”

Technicolour? That has to be from the cinema.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

See the latest Indian films

There is just one passing reference to the cinema in Cyprian Ekwensi’s 1963 novel Beautiful Feathers, but I find it rather evocative.

“Wilson and his men were gathered in his sitting-room. Wilson was talking, while the hawkers sold the evening kerosene outside and the buses were taking the cinema-goers to see the latest Indian films.”

This is Lagos, after independence, so as near contemporary as makes no odds. Were Indian films simply popular, or does he mean to suggest something else? Frivolity, perhaps, while Wilson Iyari and his friends are planning a demonstration in pursuit of African unity?

Ekwensi is hardly a subtle writer, and usually if he wants to make a point he does so plainly and repeatedly. So I’m inclined to think it is just local colour.

Beautiful Feathers is much simpler in its narrative than Jagua Nana (1961), the last Ekwensi novel I read. Wilson Iyari runs a pharmacy but also leads the Nigerian Movement for African and Malagasy Solidarity. These two activities take up all his time and his wife Yaniya feels neglected, seeking male company elsewhere. Hence the main theme: the great champion of African unity has a divided family, the respected leader has no authority at home.

The novel charts the ebb and flow of the Movement, and Wilson’s personal trials as Yaniya strays, leaves him and eventually returns chastened by the death of their eldest son, Lumumba (their other children are Jomo, a boy, and Pandhit, a girl…talk about dedication to the cause).

I always get the impression that Ekwensi wrote in a hurry, his plotting uneven and his prose sometimes careless or just plain bad. Yet he occasionally hits a higher, clearer tone, combining acute observation with a deftness of writing that makes me wonder what he might have achieved with more time or more discipline.

For example, here is his description of a girl hawker selling bread in the market.

“Her hands paddled her slim body, her neck danced to keep the vanishing balance of the loaded tray on her head, while her bare toes gripped the undulations of the earth. At the same time she was crying out musically to buyers the qualities of her wonderful bread.”

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Ben Okri in Brussels

It’s unusual to have an African writer in Brussels to help launch a Belgian film, but this was one reason for Ben Okri’s visit at the beginning of March. The Nigerian novelist and poet was also interviewed on stage before the screening, answering questions about his early life and its influence on his writing. The following day he gave a lecture on art’s role in society.

The film was N — The Madness of Reason, by Flemish director Peter Krüger, a mix of documentary and fiction whose starting point is French encyclopaedist Raymond Borremans. After fleeing Europe in 1929, Borremans travelled around Africa, first as a musician then running a mobile cinema.

He also started collecting information on every aspect of what was then French West Africa. Towards the end of his life he assembled an encyclopaedia on Côte d’Ivoire, where he had settled, but when he died in 1988 only the volumes up to the letter N had been published, hence the title.

Krüger’s film begins with Borremans’ death, then goes on to imagine the Frenchman’s spirit roaming restlessly around Africa, unable to find peace because his life’s work is unfinished. Along the way he observes the world he has left behind and encounters old friends, associates and people who follow occupations similar to his own.

In this way the film contrasts Africa’s past and present, and challenges the urge to order the world. “The aim of Borremans’ life was to objectify and systematise African reality, but as a spirit he is forced to enter a world which cannot be reduced to facts and figures,” Krüger says in the film’s press material. “The film presents a subjective experience of reality which is penetrated by a world of imagination, dreams, emotions, stories and poetry.”

Okri’s involvement came late in the process. Krüger had approached him at the beginning to collaborate in writing a text for the project but Okri was busy with a novel. Okri also explained during the post-screening Q&A that he thought the film would take much longer than the three years Krüger suggested. He was right.

Seven years on Krüger had finished shooting the film and had a rough edit, but he still needed a text. When he approached Okri again, the writer’s focus had moved from prose to poetry and the notion was a better fit. Having seen the rough cut, Okri worked independently on his text. He then handed it over to Krüger, who distributed it through the film.

Most of it is spoken in French, but other languages also feature, and some of Okri’s text has been turned into lyrics to be sung. Largely, however, the words represent Borremans’ inner thoughts, voiced by Michael Lonsdale, and a dialogue between Borremans and an African woman (Wendyam Sawadogo) who can perceive his spirit. In some instances, Krüger said, he altered the editing slightly to accommodate the text, but it seems that Okri’s words were used rather like a musical score. This accords with Okri’s approach to the text.

“I wrote it like poetry,” he says in an interview recorded when the film screened at last year’s Ghent Film Festival. “I added oblique lines. I introduced words that pulled at the image, that sometimes subverted the screen, that sometimes opened a new door into the image and into the world of the characters. It was just little additions, just the way Miles Davis does his trumpet interventions.”

He also spoke about how he felt the text should complement the images. “The words must do things that images cannot do, which is imaginative suggestion, hinting at other realms, philosophical disturbances, ripples on the surface of the screen. A sneak punch underneath the mind of the viewer.”

This works to some extent if you are a French speaker, and the words enter your mind on the same level as the images. But reading the subtitles — which you have to do in any case when the language changes — puts the words at a disadvantage. Both Krüger and Okri spoke of an interest in the oral tradition in African art, which makes all the writing on the screen somewhat counterproductive. Unfortunately (but typically for a ‘Flemish’ film in Belgium) there appear to be no plans to screen N — The Madness of Reason in French-speaking parts of the country, nor was this Brussels avant-première at Bozar followed by a general release in the city.

The way of working and the translation into French makes it rather hard to assess Okri’s contribution, although in addition to providing the text it seems clear that he was an inspiration for Krüger’s appreciation of Africa. For example, there is one shot of a misty road at night that strongly recalls scenes from Okri’s The Famished Road.

Okri is complementary about the film, of course, but it is interesting that he situated his comments last year in the wider context of films about Africa, both by Europeans and by Africans. “There’s a way that Africa tends to be filmed that I’m not very fond of, which is to say it tends to be filmed too externally,” he said. “It’s too much of an outward gaze, too much of looking for sensational elements. But what Peter had done is he’d filmed Africa with warmth and with dimension, with transcendence. He’d looked at ruins and decay and sadness, but he’d also looked at fertility and richness and dance and celebration. He conveyed the richness. I like the textuality of the film, I like the layers of it.”

During the March Q&A he said that he hopes to publish his text, either as part of a future poetry collection or as a stand-alone publication. The press kit gives a 15-line taster, beginning:

The road is singing about the voices of the feet
The crooket feet of history.

We have suffered
And our songs will return our missing moments.
What does it mean to return?

And yes, ‘crooket’ rather than ‘crooked’.  You can get an idea of the way Okri’s text is used in the film through this excerpt. Meanwhile, his lecture — entitled Can Art Save the World? — can be seen here.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Clark, Speed and the Ozidi saga

I hadn’t heard of Frank Speed until I started investigating an aside in a 1966 essay on Nigerian drama by John Pepper Clark. And now I have heard of this ethnological film maker — who sounds like an obscure English Jean Rouch — I wonder why he isn’t better known.

My starting point was Clark’s comment about filming a performance of the Ozidi saga, which takes place over seven days in a remote part of the Niger delta. Clark spent 1963-64 researching the saga, work which informed his 1966 verse drama Ozidi. In the essay he also mentions plans to publish a transcript of the whole saga, in Ijaw and English, a project that was eventually realised in 1977.

Clark doesn’t say much more about the film in the essay. It was shot in Orua, and ‘possession’ among the performers (a term he uses, but disparages) caused constant delays in shooting. He ends by expressing the hope that the film will be seen outside Ijaw.

So is this an ethnological document, a fiction built from the performance or something else? If it is somehow authored by Clark, the film would be a relatively early example of creative Nigerian cinema.

Searching for further traces of the film led me to Frank Speed, who is credited as Clark’s collaborator in the project. Speed worked in Nigeria from the 1950s onwards, making medical documentaries and films recording rituals, dances and other performances. Although highly regarded, little detailed information is available about his life and work.

Scholars working with Clark’s texts of the Ozidi saga also reference the film. Isidore Okpewho, a professor at the State University of New York Binghampton who specialises in oral literature, often mentions it in passing but seems not to think it particularly significant. Neither Speed nor the film appear in the index of Blood on the Tides, his latest book on the saga.

Richard Dean Taylor, professor of English and comparative literature at Bayreuth University in Germany, is more interested. In his 1982 inaugural lecture he examines the various versions of the Ozidi saga overseen by Clark and the transition from oral to written literature. He concludes that the film is a valuable record of an authentic presentation.

“JP Clark made self-conscious decisions when arranging the scenario and commentary. However, the film does demonstrate the meaning the saga has for its natural audience,” he says. This is in contrast to the performance recorded, transcribed and eventually published by Clark, which took place in Ibadan before an invited audience of urban Ijaw speakers, Nigerians from other communities and ex-pats.

More importantly, however, the text of the lecture on Taylor’s website includes a link (live in December 2014) which allows the Ozidi film to be seen in its entirety. Entitled Tides of the Delta, the 30-minute film is dated 1969, and attributed equally to Clark and Speed.

The film begins with the striking image of an oil palm stump bobbing eerily in the river. “That strange figure reeling there in the tide is no fetish to some god of the sea demanding sacrifice. Nor is it a stray, baffled monster left over by the wash of time. Tide, like time, carries all kinds, with countless unknown drifts…”

This is a more poetic commentary than might be expected from an academic ethnographic film or a commissioned travel short. And Clark’s delivery (assuming he is the narrator) is precise and poised.

He goes on to describe the region and the Ijaw, their trades and occupations. Then a more knowing tone appears, a reminder that Clark is talking about his own people. “One local export of the Ijaw, well-known behind doors and under desks all over the west coast of Africa, is the so-called illicit gin they distil from the wine of the raffia or […] palm in simple home-made apparatus, well away from the baleful eye of the law and it’s long, itching palm.”

He turns next to the river and its traffic, much of which passes the Ijaw by. And then a political note enters, for the first time disconnected from the images on screen. “Merchant adventurers from overseas, in towering seismic rigs and floating suburbias, drain the Delta dry of oil, now overflowing the place to enrich others outside.” This is followed by a comment on the way the region has been neglected by governments, both before and after independence.

This introduction lasts seven minutes, before the film finally turns to the Ozidi “festival”. Images of the performance and the audience follow, with Clark’s narration guiding the viewer through the story as it unfolds over a week, beginning in one village and concluding in another.

The lead performer is by turns a storyteller, taking on multiple roles, and the actor who plays the hero Ozidi. He is supported by a troupe of actors who act out the story.  This concerns a young warrior who sets out to avenge his father’s death, helped by his grandmother, who is a powerful witch. After defeating his father’s killers, there are other battles with people who try to trap Ozidi or challenge his supremacy. These opponents become increasingly fantastic, including an incestuous cannibal mother and son, and the Smallpox King who finally defeats Ozidi. The narrative is accompanied by singing, dancing and a series of rituals.

Constrained to remain in the crowd, Speed’s images are sometimes distant, but capture the drama and mobility of the performance, as well as the reactions and interactions of the crowd. They dovetail neatly with Clark’s commentary, and occasionally achieve a more formal beauty in their framing.

I wouldn’t want to claim too much for the film. It is only 30 minutes long and it was clearly shot during a flying visit rather than the result of a long immersion in the community. Yet it seems to me to occupy an interesting place between ethnography and a more personal essay film.

As far as the Ozidi festival is concerned, Clark appears to be a very close outsider, a guide and interpreter rather than an observer from a completely different culture. And in the introduction, which concerns the Ijaw of the Delta more broadly, he is commenting on a place and a people he knows well and might even be called his own.

When he talks of young boys swimming out to meet boats on the river (not something that appears on screen), is he thinking of himself or childhood friends? The tone of the commentary suggests he might be.

Having quickly run through the available evidence about the film, there are, of course, some loose ends. While most reliable sources talk of just one Ozidi film, there are inconsistencies that could point to others. Some sources date the film to the mid-1970s, which is likely to reflect its availability in the UK and USA. Others call it The Ozidi of Atazi, but there is little evidence to suggest this is a different film (Atazi, according to the film, was the first storyteller, two or three generations before the performance shown).

Some sources also credit Peggy Harper as co-director, which is not backed up by the present version. She was a choreographer who worked with Speed in the 1970s on a series of films dealing with Nigerian dances and masquerades. Initially I thought this was a simple error, but then I found a recent interview with Speed’s colleague Doig Simmonds, in which he describes the filming in some detail. He and Harper accompanied Speed and Clark, the party sleeping on a launch on the river during the shoot. His comments come between 7.14 and 10.40 in this recording by Jeremy Weate, who has also posted an image of Harper on location.

Finding this copy of Tides of the Delta answered my questions about the film mentioned in Clark’s essay, but it has also piqued my interest in Speed. When he died in 2006, The Guardian‘s obituary suggested that he remains a significant ethnographic filmmaker, but his legacy seems to be limited to academia. The Royal Anthropological Institute in London rents out some of his films to educational institutions and there are occasional screenings in academic settings, but there is nothing like the programme of DVD releases devoted to other ethnographic filmmakers. I would be fascinated to see more of his work.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

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

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.”

Make-up, cinema, jazz…

“This was a girl who belonged strictly to the city. Born in the city. A primary education, perhaps the first four years at secondary school; yet she knew all about western sophistication — make-up, cinema, jazz…” From People of the City (1954/1963) by Cyprian Ekwensi, part of an on-going project to collect cinema references in African fiction. The previous owner of the book seems to have a slightly different interest.