70 african appropriations
temporary African male attitudes toward women and the gender matrix
observable within the two templates of African Film magazine—the con-
temporary espionage film and earlier American crime thrillers of the hard-
boiled school. Still, Lance Spearman, who is always up for a romantic
adventure, has probably more of James Bond’s elegance and appetite for
women than does Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, both of whom harbor
deep-seated ambivalent feelings toward the opposite sex. As in the James
Bond movies, seductive women are collaborators of Spearman’s antago-
nists, and even when he is fully aware of the role they are playing, Spear
on ly ra rely decl i nes a n i nv itat ion. Most often Spea r ma n a nd a woma n end
up in her apartment. “You help yourself to a drink while I put on some-
thing more comfortable,” she tells him before changing her clothes. And
he might reply: “Gee... thanks, Doll.” W hat follows, however, is never
shown. K issing is the utmost in terms of explicitness and only occurs
occasionally.
But women may also turn out to be man-eaters in their own right, as The
Head Huntress (no. 50: 1) demonstrates. This story opens with a bar scene,
in which “Mister Munn E. Spinna, a rich married man,” trips over his own
sexual desire. “He sees a shapely doll with all the curves in the right places
coming towards him. She gives him a big, friendly smile,” which the reader
cannot see because the actress is captured from the back, laying bare a sub-
stantial measure of her “curves” to the gaze of the presumably male reader.
“Wow! That’s what I call real sexy!” exclaims Mister Munn E. Spinna,
and two pages later, he loses his head, quite literally, because Hilda, the
headhuntress—a stylishly dressed woman—turns out to be avenging a
racket that once destroyed her family and left her almost insane.
The only departure from these staples of female characterization in Af-
rican Film is Sonia, Spearman’s crime-fighting assistant. She always resists
Spearman’s advances and is not afraid to enter the fray and use her fists,
if need be. In episode 128, for example, “Sonia gets into the mood” and
butts into a fight Spearman is already engaged in. One of the thugs pushes
her aside with typical male gusto, saying: “Out of the way, lady, this is a
man’s game.” She replies: “Remember equal rights for women?” And as
she punches him with a hard right in the next frame, she casually remarks:
“This is one of them” (28). This sequence of just three frames is not only
remarkable for its reference to the contemporary women’s liberation move-