74 african appropriations
great childhood. By the way, were the characters themselves real??!! How
I wish they were!” (chimurengalibrary.co.za, April 6, 2009). Obviously,
such memories are shrouded in nostalgia, and such voices, invaluable as
they may be, make up only a tiny fraction of the magazines’ former readers,
whose numbers must have reached upwards of 500,000 per week (based
on the data provided by Meisler in 1969 and the fact that a single copy had
more than just one reader).
In 2009, I was able to talk to about ten former Spearman fans in Tan-
zania who helped me get an idea of how and in what contexts African
Film was consumed around 1970.^5 Most of t hem were i n t hei r teens when
they encountered The Spear; only two were older than twenty years
old. A ll of them had at least a secondary-school education and they
read African Film during their school days. Judging by where they lived
at the time, it becomes clear that the magazine penetrated far into the
hinterland, beyond the major cities and towns. Only some were lucky
enough to acquire their own copies, others had to borrow them. Some
even had copies bought for them by parents wanting to enhance their
children’s English language skills. In the same vein, the proprietor of
Drum Publications advertised African Film as educational material. “A
message to all distributors and advertisers,” printed in the second issue
of the magazine, reads as follows:
Far too many children come out of school and read little thereafter. So
often the reading habit is lost and is never again recovered.... We hope
with this magazine to cater [to] the lost readers. By giving them an excit-
ing magazine made up with pictures in appealing form, the buyer is led to
read and by this means is kept reading. A fterwards we hope he will move
to buying newspapers, better quality magazines such as drum, and even
books. But the first problem is to catch the otherwise lost literate and
induce in him the reading habit. And so we supply him in this magazine
with exciting serials after the style of films and television shows that he
may see, executed in a style with which he can identify himself. Written in
simple language, it will appeal to young and old, leading them by the hand
into paths of greater literacy.The young readers, of course, were looking for something else in African
Film. “W hen you read Spearman it was actually as if you were watching
a film,” one interviewee said, and almost all agreed that the Tanzanian