lance spearman 59is doubtful, and the popularity of these early photo novels seems rather
to have stemmed from the new form’s transportability, which brought an
equivalent of cinema much closer to its consumers, the idea of the photo
novel as an ersatz cinema gains plausibility under conditions in which
local film production was almost nonexistent, such as in sub-Saharan
Africa of the 1960s.
The spread of the new generic form to sub-Saharan Africa had dif-
ferent roots and routes. Most likely, Francophone West Africa already
witnessed the circulation of French photo novels (Nye 1977) either as
part of women’s magazines or as independent publications during the
1960s. In Senegal in the 1970s, popular women’s magazines, such as Amina,
Bella, and Bingo, devoted large sections to photo novels, which dealt with
the complexities of gender relationships amid the rapidly changing con-
ditions of urban Africa (Rejholec 1986: 366). During the 1960s, Italian
photo-novel magazines translated into English entered the South African
market, and from 1965 onward local South African photo novels, or “look-
reads,” firmly took root.^1 The first look-reads featured white characters,
such as Captain Devil of the South African Secret Police, and were geared
toward a white audience. At some point in the second half of the 1960s,
Drum Publications, the publishing house of the famous Drum magazine,
“decided to get in on the publishing boom and produce look-reads for Af-
ricans” (Meisler 1969: 80). By this time, Drum magazine’s much-written-
about golden age of the 1950s was long gone. With the tightening of apart-
heid rule, many of Drum’s former staff had been forced out of the country
and the magazine had changed its face somewhat, more or less steering
clear of investigative journalism and politics (Sampson 2005). Jim Bailey,
the owner of Drum Publications, had been able to set up and maintain
a distribution network for his magazine, with satellite offices in Accra,
Lagos, and Nairobi, among other locations, which also provided content
for the local issues of Drum. During the late 1960s, Bailey had also begun
to expand the business of his publishing house beyond Drum magazine
(Sutton 2006), and I assume that he published look-reads using an African
cast with this expansion in mind. According to Jürgen Schadeberg (pers.
comm., September 25, 2008), Drum’s now-famous photographer during
its first decade, the magazine had already experimented with the photo
novel format during the mid-1950s, in the form of two-page inserts, but