lance spearman 79than the South African templates, provided the companies with a supple-
ment to their income from stage performances and were in fact the first
portable records of such plays available to a mass audience (prior to the
printed photo plays, dramas had been broadcast on television; see Barber
2000, chapter 8). Founded in 1969, the Yoruba photo play magazine Atoka,
which in each of its issues featured a play from a different theater company,
survived well into the 1980s and went out of print only when stage drama
declined and theater companies began to experiment with film and video
(Barber 2000). W hile anonymous authors who were never mentioned
in the magazines scripted Drum look-reads, Yoruba photo plays always
printed the scriptwriter’s name on the cover. The Nigerian photo plays
must in fact be considered the first genuinely African photo novels: unlike
African Film, which appropriated European and American templates, the
Yoruba photo plays self-consciously display a very clear and specifically
located African life-world—that of 1970s Nigerian Yorubaland, including
its rich mythology and contemporary urban lore.
Despite the thrills and pleasures it conveys, the photo novel as a me-
dium has almost ceased to exist in Africa today. Of the once-famous
Drum Publications look-reads, only Tr u e L o v e , the South African version
of Nigerian/Kenyan Sadness and Joy, is still published. Video, the medium
that has made possible the reinvention of a truly popular African cinema,
currently fills the space once occupied by the photo novel in the popular
culture of urban Africa. Interestingly enough, in Tanzania, cultural pro-
ducers have recently combined the two media by reinventing the format
of the early cineromanzi. Some of the mushrooming tabloids include a
page on which Nigerian and Tanzanian video films are recaptured, with
video screen shots and pasted balloon dialogue in Swahili (see chapter 5).
Within the realm of development communication, the photo novel also
resurfaces here and there, albeit as a noncommercial “tool of communi-
cation.” Various development agencies make use of the generic form to
spread the topics on their agenda—for example, aids/hiv prevention,
health education, and the empowerment of women—to clients imagined
as being only barely able to read and thus receptive to an image-based
form of communication.^10 Even the once-famous Atoka series seems to
have been stripped of its initial entertainment value and remodeled into
a tool for evangelism. Radio Abeokuta commissioned the first edition of