Jaffas in the aisles

Every country I have been to so far in Africa has the phenomena of the mini-cinema. Across the continent from little shacks that a decent gust of wind would blow over to large, public halls there are little cinemas or movie houses shocking the latest in Hollywood blockbusters, a small selection of Bollywood hits, classic shoot'em up action movies like Rocky, Rambo or anything with Chuck Norris or Jean Claude Van Damme, some Chinese or Hong Kong martial arts epics of very dubious quality and sometimes European football. They are usually easy to spot because they have hand painted pictures of gun totting action heroes or suave male leads all over the front entrance.

Inside they range from a small TV with the volume turned up to full distortion, surrounded by a few chairs, to a huge screen, the full stereo system and rows of seats. The daily schedule is usually put up out the front on a blackboard, but a few I have seen look like the schedule hasn't changed since last century. Some buildings are purpose built but most are simple shacks, the walls covered in old plastic sacks to try and keep the light out.

After spending a whole day in a minibus in Kenya, I rolled in to Archer's Rest, what could be only described as a frontier town. The frontier here is between the paved road and the corrugated, potholed rock strewn, dusty nightmare that stretches another thousand kilometres to the border with Ethiopia and is sometimes optimistically called a road. However, it also sees to be the frontier between lawful Kenya and the Wild West like country of the tribal pastoral lands of the north, a region surrounded by unstable neighbours - Somalia to the east, Sudan to the west and Ethiopia to the north, and filled with cheap guns - every shepherd carries an AK47, cattle thieves, violence and revenge. The night before two young shepherd boys had their throats slit by Somali cattle rustlers, and the whole town was talking about it. The settlement is filled with soldiers, who all wander about with automatic weapons slung over their shoulder. The bar I walked through had ten tables all filled with soldiers, in various states of undress, each with a weapon in one hand and beer or whisky in the other. The soldiers have an unenviable jobs, supposedly providing protection to the people, they are often required to take cattle from one group who have allegedly stolen them and return them to their original owners. Theft is so prevalent, and military intervention so apparently capricious that neither those they are sent to protect nor the enemy respect the Kenyan military, and out of the constant fear of attack the soldiers never put down their guns - I saw a few take them to the toilet, As we were drinking we heard a few gunshots ring out in the distance and the local guy who had befriended me on the bus explained that sometimes some soldiers got a little drunk and let a few rounds off. Needless to say I went to bed fairly early that night. The Chinese, who are there to build the road -the modern equivalent of the goldfields, roll in to town in their huge dump trucks every evening to complete the Wild West picture.

As I was sauntering through town looking for dinner I stumbled across the local cinema, easily spotted by the groups of kids surrounding the squat, square building, peering in through the gaps in the walls to catch a glimpse of a Hong Kong martial arts fight 'em action thriller. The doorman let me peer inside, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim light inside it was like looking back through time. I imagined this is what the picture houses in rural Australia, in which my father used to describe he rolled jaffas down the aisles during the Saturday evening pictures, looked like. There were three columns of seats, arranged in rows of around twenty, filled to the brim with locals who seemed to be more entertained by what was going on in the audience than any of the action on the screen. I didn't see anyone making out or holding hands, but then I wonder if even that was allowed in socially conservative post war Australia. The movie came to an end, the house lights came up, and people had that same wistful look of wishing the fantasy could have distracted them from their mundane lives a little longer as they filed out the door.

Whilst the past may well be a foreign country, sometimes a foreign country is the past.