I had been told, was my mother country. To show loyalty to England, on the monarch’s birthday I and the rest of my peers were made to participate in the celebrations. Well-rehearsed songs we had sung with gusto and, as a reward, we children were generously rewarded with tons of yummy cakes and gallons of sweet drinks. To cap it all, at the end of the treat we were reminded yet again: you are the subjects of England and England is your Mother Country. But what my carefully crafted history book had not taught, Hollywood willingly taught and had taught in an amusing fashion.
Every Saturday morning when a cowboy movie was not being shown in the local fleapit it was almost certainly because a film about Africa was being flashed on the silver screen. In those films, - or flimsas we kids had erroneously pronounced the word – I and my friend, Ben, observed the natives of Africa holding spears, wearing grass skirts and dancing wildly to the sound of beating drums. Why were the natives so joyful? The natives, or the savages as the Africans were called, were about to have a ‘banquet.’
The banquet was fundamentally a one course meal, and the meal was a succulent healthy foreign female. The female had been bound and dressed in a khaki safari outfit and ready to be cooked in a large black pot. Hollywood was about to educate me about my people, and just as the action was about to begin, Ben, my innocent friend, interrupt by idiotically asking, ‘You mean, dey goin’ to cook de woman?’
‘Yeah Ben! Now shet-up an’ watch de movie!’
Ben paid no attention to me and continued, ‘You mean, dey really goin’ to cook de woman wif her clotheson?’
It had not dawned on me that the woman in the large industrial pot had been clothed, and like an industrial washing machine I agitated vigorously and told Ben again to shut up and watch the film.
Meanwhile, the woman protests, she weeps buckets but to no avail. The natives are under the spell of the drum and the fire is seconds away from being lit under the large, Made in the USA iron pot. Now the real action begins. A man in a loin cloth, different in every respect from the natives, selects a vine and swings urgently expertly through the thickly condensed trees. In the nick of time he saves the distressed woman from the twenty or so natives that are dancing and singing and waving their spears. The woman is now off the gastronomic menu and effortlessly the man in the loin cloth demolishes the natives and rescues the frightened woman.
My Hollywood lesson in African life, for the moment, had come to an end. But in that one lesson I had ‘learnt’ a great deal about Africa: Africa, Hollywood style, was obviously a hilarious place with doltish people. Worst of all, the movie that had been made for the amusement of America and the rest of the world had – because of our childish innocence – managed to entertained us too.
Shortly after being “entertained” by the African adventure movie, I became confused. I felt that something was amiss. I tried to extricate myself from my confusion by trying to understand, but understand what? I was too young to know that no light exists in a dark cave. I was too young to know that my brain had not yet developed sufficiently to understand the manner in which the world about me worked, but my pen had insisted on recording as best as I could, my observation of Hollywood Africa on the silver screen.
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