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S

Lance Spearman

THE AFRICAN JAMES BOND

2

L a nc e S p e a r m a n, a k a The Spear, is a nattily dressed detective whose
trademark is a fashionable straw hat, bow tie, and goatee. He likes cigars
and scotch on the rocks, and is fond of beautiful women. From 1968 to
about 1972, the crime-fighting adventures of “Africa’s top crime buster,”
who had “a charming way with the girls” and “a deadly way with thugs,”
appeared weekly in African Film, a photo-novel magazine published by
South African Drum Publications. Through the publisher’s subsidiaries
in Nairobi and Lagos, African Film had an almost Pan-African circulation,
at least in Anglophone Africa, and was widely read in countries as diverse
as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
By taking a closer look at African Film, this chapter draws attention to
the photo novel, a genre and medium of African popular culture which,
despite its wide historical circulation and immense popularity, tends to be
largely overlooked in current discussions about African visual media. Al-
though the African photo novel is still in circulation in various forms and
countries, I am especially interested in its heyday, which was the late 1960s
to the early 1970s. I suggest that at a time when African filmmaking was
still a rather new and highly expensive venture, the photo novel—a kind of
cinematic comic book—served as a surrogate for film. Probably no single
title makes this argument more plausible than African Film magazine.