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

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

Sembène meets Pagnol

I thought I had picked up all the cinema references in Ousmane Sembène’s first novel, Le Docker noir (1956), until I glanced through an English translation. Then I read this:

How could I have missed such a clear cinematic simile? Well, the original French text is not nearly so explicit. Instead of saying the city looked like a scene from a Marcel Pagnol film, Sembène is more allusive.

The English translator, Ros Schwartz, has joined the dots for us, informing readers that Marius and Olive (or rather Ollivier) are characters in Pagnol’s  Marseille trilogy. This begins with Marius, a 1931 film written by Pagnol and directed by Alexander Korda. Before that, however, Marius was a stage play, published in book form at around the time the film came out.

Sembène was writing in the 1950s, having lived for several years in Marseille. Would he know Marius and the rest of Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy from the cinema, the stage or the library? Or is he adopting a common shorthand for local colour? The substitution of Olive for Ollivier might just be a typo, but to call them companions when they are father and son — César and Marius Ollivier — suggests Sembène may not have known the work that well.

Yet the possibility of a connection is fascinating. Pagnol is not usually cited as an influence on Sembène, but it’s a notion that might bear further scrutiny.

text © Ian Mundell 2014

Not a word to Ma

People rarely go to the cinema in Ousmane Sembène’s first novel, Le Docker noir (1956), but they talk about it all the time. They talk about wanting to go, about not going, and about using a trip to the movies as an excuse for doing something else.

The story unfolds in contemporary France, mainly in Marseille, among the Africans who work as casual labour in the docks. The cinema is ubiquitous popular entertainment, but considered expensive. “I’m as poor as Job,” says Diaw Falla, the docker of the title. “If I go to the cinema, tomorrow I’ll be eating on credit.”

But it’s a different story when he later offers to buy sweets for a friend’s child. “I don’t want any,” the boy says, “but slip me the cash to go to the movies…and not a word to Ma, it’s just between us. I’ll fill her in once the money is spent.”

Even then, before he became a film director himself, Sembène appreciated the popular appeal of the cinema.

text © Ian Mundell 2014