If there was justice in this world (which there ain’t), Happy Sindane’s story would have been immortalised on the silver screen before many more moons had passed.
Word has it that a number of Hollywood studios were competing to secure the rights to the story of the foundling from Mpumalanga until doubts started surfacing about whether he actually was a white boy, as had initially been assumed.
You can picture it: another nice juicy leading role for Leonardo DiCaprio as the blond boy who miraculously escapes from his Bantu tormentors, running through the spectacular Kruger National Park (good supporting roles for Max the gorilla and the newly imported lions rescued from Uday Hussein’s private Baghdad zoo here) and makes it back to civilisation.
To soften the negative image of Bantu life in the African jungle and make it a little more “universal” in its appeal, they would have had Morgan Freeman on hand towards the end of the movie to impersonate Nelson Mandela, and have the two of them, young Happy and old Roli-hlahla, dancing off into the sunset hand in hand, a symbol of the marvellous potential for reconciliation that resides in this country, and the righteousness of the American way of life (Happy’s origins would have been changed from Afrikaans to Californian to make this fit, of course).
Imagine the story unfolding before your eyes in full Technicolor at a cinema near you. The cash tills would have been ringing wildly in box offices from Massachusetts to Moscow and Mamelodi.
Unfortunately, once it started looking like Happy was just an ordinary Ndebele-speaking coloured boy (no fault of his own), the Hollywood agents hurriedly tucked their chequebooks back in their pockets and went off looking for a more genuine African story to invest in.
Until it was debunked, it was the replay of the Tarzan myth that has gripped Western imaginations for more than 100 years. It was also the revival of a particular kind of wet dream — the possibility of the existence of a white emperor called Prester John ruling over a kingdom of dusky savages in Ethiopia, custodian of unbelievable reserves of gold. Or the story of She, the White Queen who Must be Obeyed, or Trader Horn’s fantastical white ju-ju goddess rescued from deep inside the West African jungle.
At some level you have to feel sorry for these people. And yet who’s sorry for whom? They got the power, they make the myths.
Tarzan movies were a staple for children of all ages (that is, from about three to about 90) between the 1940s and 1970s. As kids (and, yes, I’m giving away my age here, but I don’t care) we would regularly troop off to the local cinema and, before the main feature began (usually James-Bond-Nix-Nix-Seven) would have to sit through either a Zorro movie or a Tarzan short.
Tarzan and Jane spoke a kind of gruff American (“Me Tarzan, you Jane”) and the natives all around them went “Ooga-booga, ooga-booga, bwana,” and tactfully did not look on at whatever it was that Tarzan and Jane got up to when they were alone together after the lights went out.
The chimpanzees, on the other hand, went “Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee!” jumping around with their hands in their armpits (don’t ask me why).
The white kids were fooled. Us black kids were not. But what else was there to watch? Our parents did not control the movie industry. White folks did, from far away.
Tarzan movies were a useful little earner for bodybuilding actors like Johnny Weissmuller and so on. There has been a bit of a hiatus in the genre since the 1970s, I suppose because questions started being asked at agencies like Unesco about how Hollywood was portraying substantial portions of humanity, like Negroes and Indians. The Tarzan industry and the world of “ooga-booga” were put on hold.
But you could almost palpably feel the screenwriters and producers straining at the leash. All this politically correct nonsense was really starting to interfere with creativity in Hollywood.
Then came 9/11, the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and Happy Sindane, one after the other, almost like a scenario penned by Cecil B De Mille himself. It was almost too good to be true.
All at once it was cool to hate Arabs once again and fantasise out loud about Prester John, a blue-eyed, blonde Cleopatra, and Tarzan and Jane actually running the African continent. The combined nightmare of the Mau Mau, Malcolm X, Mary J Blige and Robert Mugabe could be put in context and dealt with. Bombing Baghdad and simultaneously putting out a Hollywood movie about a true-life, genuine white African prince emerging from the forests of Mpumalanga seemed to be the answer.
Happy blew it by turning out to be just a run-of-the-mill, common-or-garden darkie. Hollywood was no longer interested. There was no role in this kind of movie for DiCaprio. Nor was there anything that could be written up to accommodate Denzel Washington or Halle Berry either, even though they had both been given Oscars in carefully stage-managed Hollywood scenarios in the post-9/11 world.
So it’s back to the drawing board for the carefully orchestrated Hollywood dream. The fact that there are far more interesting stories aching to be explored in the ongoing drama of Africa makes no difference. The blond child raised on the bosom of an African monkey remains the only thing Los Angeles really wants to hear out of the Dark Continent.
So no more happy, fairy-tale ending out of the Happy Sindane story.
All Hollywood weeps—not for Happy, but for themselves.
I’m sure it’s not all over yet.
Watch this space.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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