Try walking around Windhoek, asking passersby what their favourite movie is. “Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Wesley Snipes, Jean-Claude van Dammy [sic].” It’s action all the way. As one punter put it, “My favourites are those skop, skiet and bliksem movies.”
That was Geoffrey Nakanuku, at one time a diamond detective and now a production assistant for the Mubasen Film and TV Production Company, a small concern specialising in NGO documentaries. He remembers growing up as a kid in the nearby Katatura township and going to the local cinema to watch Tarzan, Bruce Lee and his favourite, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The biggest-grossing film last year in Namibia was The Matrix and most of those I spoke to, on a recent visit, had loved it. The only cinema in Windhoek – Namibia’s capital city with a population of 300 000 – is a Ster-Kinekor three-screen complex consisting of a total of 400 seats. Here, the entrance fee is N$20 during the week and N$25 on weekends, far beyond the reach of most locals.
But in the 1960s and 1970s Katatura township had its very own cinema built by the municipality as a kind of buffer zone, to encourage blacks to socialise closer to home, keeping them away from Windhoek’s city centre at night.
Today, Nakanuku’s company Mubasen – a Nama word meaning “see for yourself” – is planning to resurrect the old cinema in Katatura.
The company was started by British-born cameraman Simon Wilkie and production manager Carla Hoffman, who met while conducting training courses at the national broadcaster. An active Swapo supporter in London, Wilkie first journeyed to Namibia to make his National Film School graduation film, That Fire Within, about a small Namibian community.
“I stayed on a homestead for six months, and after it was finished I took the film on a Land Rover around the country and projected it on church walls and community centres,” Wilkie says.
Inspired by the developing world’s successful answer to the multiplex – the travelling drive-in – Wilkie decided to resurrect the Katatura cinema. Once it’s up and running, the daily drudgery will be left to his partner, Carla Hoffman.
Hoffman grew up in Otjiwarongo as a farm girl surrounded by maize, beans and cattle before moving to Rhodes University to study anthropology and psychology. Years later, while working for the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation, she met Wilkie.
The idea of resurrecting the cinema in Katatura came last year when the two set up a project aimed at screening Namibian and other African films to the locals. Called Dipontsho (a Tswana word meaning “magical”), it was set up as a non-profit Section 21 company aimed at educating, entertaining and informing audiences who have been largely deprived of African film.
“Films are made in Africa but they’re not seen by Africans,” Hoffman says.
Initially Dipontsho had video screenings of predominantly African films at a small venue called Theatre in the Park in the Windhoek city centre. Later they held mobile video screenings at churches and community halls in and around Katatura township. It was during their work there that they made their significant discovery – the old municipal cinema.
Built in 1965, it was at one point the major social force in the area. People used to queue in their hundreds to watch the mainly American B-grade action fare. Mismanagement and the unwillingness of the municipality to invest in maintenance of the projection equipment led to the decision to close it down. It’s a beautiful building, reminiscent of the picture palaces of yesteryear.
According to a Windhoek municipality representative, the venue was running at a loss, something that “became conspicuous when the Kine Centres and drive-ins were built in the Eighties”. This, and the absence of a suitable parking lot at the cinema, lead to its inevitable demise.
Like many others, for a brief while the cinema was converted into an African Methodist Episcopal church – but that soon came to an end when the community couldn’t afford the upkeep. Nowadays, the place is looked after by a lone security guard, called Johannes.
Inside the cinema the dust lies thick on the 700 wooden seats. The screen has been torn away and there are holes in the corrugated iron roof. But the marble walls in the entrance hall, the billboards where glamorous posters used to hang, the ticket booths and the candy, popcorn and ice-cream stands are all still there – sad but beautiful reminders of a time gone by.
I went to the small mud house neighbouring the cinema and by chance discovered Mary X!Kharugab, an elderly woman who turned out to be the widow of the cinema’s projectionist, who had been buried just the week before. “Oh, the cinema’s been there for centuries,” she told me. “We used to see Bruce Lee, John Wayne, Zero [Zorro] and Charles Bronson. In 1976 we moved to this house near the cinema so my husband didn’t have to travel so far to get to work.
“In those days, man, it was 25c for kids and R1 for adults. The kung-fus were total sell-outs, so if the queue was too big they used to come to the house to get tickets and we’d sell them through the kitchen window. Hell, it was grand. We used to really dress up smart on a Saturday night.”
X!Kharugab’s daughter, in a kind of rag-doll dress, pipes up: “It was fantastic, on a Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, for the kiddies. When I came home from school I used to change my uniform and run up to the projection box to see my dad. But then I also had to help clean the cinema after the shows.” The last time they saw a movie was in 1982.
Even the Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Ben Amathila, used to go to the municipal movie-house. “I remember seeing It Came from Outer Space there as a teenager,” he says. “Johnny Weismuller and Tarzan is what we were all brought up on at that place. It was a wonderful institution: fun and in its own way very glamorous. Of course, to serve apartheid, it kept the blacks out of the white areas after sunrise.”
Now Mubasen has won the tender to buy the cinema from the municipality. They have to come up with R500 000 and after that they will have to raise about R6-million to restore it to its former glory. With the help of some donors, funders and benefactors, Hoffman hopes to get the cinema up and running in the next two years.
If she fails, it’ll in all likelihood be demolished, to make way for a faceless shopping centre. That way, residents of Katatura will have to trek into town and spend a fortune on watching the latest Hollywood imports. It’s highly unlikely that, then, they or their children will ever be exposed to the greatness of African cinema.