By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The Biafra War had just ended in January 1970, and aged nine, all I could feel about the war was heroism – as opposed to the general despondency all over the place – such that I fabricated fibs to my credulous mates of how in the company of some diehard Biafran war-commanders I used to bring down enemy Nigerian planes from the sky with the aid of a special magnet called Magnetor! It’s against the background of lapping up heroes in the post-war broken city of Onitsha, the market town on the bank of the River Niger in eastern Nigeria, that I came into the unforgettable company of Lance Spearman when a dog-eared copy of the photo-magazine African Film was given to me by Jude Akudinobi, then a secondary school student at Christ the King College (CKC), Onitsha, where his father taught alongside my uncle, the linguist JO Aginam, and we all lived in the staff quarters.
Shortly after letting me into the arresting world of Lance Spearman, alias Spear, the selfsame Jude took me with four of his younger brothers to Chanrai Supermarket, Onitsha and asked us to pick any novel of our choice whereupon I remarkably chose a book, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, without any knowledge whatsoever of the classic western movie starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef. The daredevilry of the novel’s toughie, Desperado Tuco, became aligned to the intrepidity of Spear to define my growing-up years. It nearly led to a tragedy.
One of the local Onitsha boys who could not bear my hyperactivity brought a friend of his to have a fight with me, which the entire neighbourhood gathered to watch. It took no time at all for me to floor the boy, actually using him to “stone the ground” as we used to say. The boy passed out, and the fellow who brought the floored fighter was now accusing me of killing the lad, saying: “Have you seen what you have done to him?” It took some heart-stopping moments for the boy to be revived, for which the witnesses still rib me to this day, especially Jude Akudinobi who would later take a doctorate in film studies, and now lectures at the University of Southern California at Santa Barbra. A stint in jail or even the hangman’s noose on account of the death of the kid would of course have effectively marked the end of my brief career as the local Lance Spearman!
In the heady days after the Nigerian Civil War the look-read photo-magazine African Film starring the dapper Lance Spearman was our hebdomadal staple in Onitsha, the overpopulated township that earned its mark in the world of letters on account of market literature. Some Monday for sure, as Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer would put it, the paterfamilias of the Akudinobi family shelled out one-shilling for a copy of Film magazine, and another shilling for Boom magazine starring the Tarzan-like Fearless Fang. Scores of us had to make do with each edition of the magazines such that wear and tear always supervened.
Spear was our darling crime-buster per excellence, a cigar-chomping champion who was a serial lady-killer in the mold of James Bond 007. Riding in his Stingray coupe with his trademark panama hat on the head, Spear showcased the urbane and the modern. Talking through his walkie-talkie and drinking scotch-on-the-rocks, Spear was indeed the toast of the generation. The breath-taking car chases were grist to the Spear mill that kept us hooked for weeks on end. The modernity of technology added cubits to the appeal of Spear as the role model of the new age of ultra-modern architecture, sharp women and sharper criminality.
Given the anti-apartheid politics of the era no mention was made that the magazine originated from South Africa. A Lagos-Nigeria address was ready to hand as the place of publication. It was much later that one learnt that African Film was originally produced out of South Africa by the legendary publisher of the influential Drum magazine, Jim Bailey. In the manner that Drum offered fledging writers such as South Africa’s Can Themba, Nat Nakassa and Nigeria’s Nelson Ottah their break in magazine writing, African Film provided work for about 25 writers, some of whom were students of the University of Lesotho. Initial photo shoots were undertaken in Swaziland, and the strips were then sent to London for mastering before the eventual transnational distribution all over Africa. The publishers had to in the end settle for printing by local subsidiaries.
The leading man who starred as Lance Spearman was a fellow named Joe Mkwanazi, a former houseboy doubling as a nightclub piano player, who was discovered by the white photographer Stanley N. Bunn. Spear had for ready company Captain Victor, the police honcho who forever wore his uniform. The swanky lady assistant of Spear, Sonia, was a study in independent womanhood. The young sidekick of Spear, Lemmy, lent to the cast a measure of humane and vulnerable precocity not unlike the role of Jim Hawkins amongst the pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. You would always trust Spear to get out of all troubles, given that Captain Victor, Sonia or Lemmy could pull a string or two on their own to stave off the barricades.
The dialogue was hip and contemporary, in the manner of the racy thrillers of James Hadley Chase, the hottest writer we cherished back then. The lines were indeed riveting such that one readily committed them to memory that lasts to this day. For instance, the thug bearing down on Sonia gets the following words from Spear as he steps forward for a fight: “Woman-beater, try me for size!” Before the hoodlum can get to the races, Spear lands him the sucker-punch, saying: “You have a glass jaw!” With the fallen thug crying “Aaaaaargh!” Lemmy would congratulate Spear thus: “Attaboy, Spear!”
The archetypal antagonist of Lance Spearman was Rabon Zollo who lost an eye and thus bore the hideous black eye-patch. Zollo was menace in overdrive. There were other villains like the Hook-Hand Killer who as the name suggests kills with the evil hook on his hand. The criminal mastermind was known as Dr Devil. There was Mad Doc with the bespoke serum that had the power to shrink people. Who will ever forget the antics of Professor Thor who could read the thoughts of people through his vile machine? There was the other Professor Rubens who used the organs of animals to produce the werewolf. The menace of the Cats almost overwhelmed Spear; it was quite daunting doing battle with cat burglars in black masks and claw gloves that could climb and scale all heights. Hilda “the Head Huntress” was yet another villain that left a mark in our annals of the enjoyment of the adventures of Lance Spearman. It was the thrill of a lifetime savouring the spells of Spear’s confrontations with diabolical insurance agents, sinister diamond thieves and baleful power syndicates. The cosmic, end-of-the-world wars of Lance Spearman reverberated and resonated with us because Spear stood as the positive force to save humankind.
It was in the course of 1972 that the supply of African Film stopped with no reason whatsoever. We were not abreast with the high-wire politics of Apartheid, the Cold War and suchlike. The rumour flew fast and free that Lance Spearman had died. We were all in disbelief that Spear could ever die, for as all Nigerians know, “Actor no dey die!” That is, “the actor never dies!” We had to make do with smuggled back issues of African Film dating back to the 1960s and even the years covering the 1967-70 duration of the Nigeria-Biafra War. We devoured the back issues waiting for the inevitable day that the unbeatable Lance Spearman would make a triumphant return, as it stood as a given to us that his was one death that was quite impossible.
Well, we are yet to see the return of Spear, but the memory lingers of the dynamic action scenes, the assorted camera angles and the ever suggestive sex acts. Black like all of us, Spear served up a counterpoise to white images such as Superman. In the age of the so-called Blaxploitation films featuring Richard Roundtree as John Shaft and the former American football player turned film star Jim Brown who beat the living daylights out of white folks, Spear was akin to the local boy who made good, an exemplar of the middle-class youth culture of the race.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a poet, journalist and author