Hollywood, California;
1963

In I Was a Savage, Prince Modupe tells of his childhood in French Guinea. He describes how his father, "a mahogany tree of a man," returned from trading on the Niger, exhausted, muddy, smelling of spices & hides, and telling of river adventures.

At mission school, Modupe was so impressed by a map of the Niger he determined to take one back to his village as a gift for his father:

My father thought the whole idea was absurd. He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him. ...Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled. ...I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured in tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magniture of his cargo-laden heat-weighted treks.

At school, Modupe learned to read: "The one crowded space in Father Perry's house was his bookshelves. I gradually came to understand that the marks on the pages were trapped words. Anyone could learn to decipher the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech. The ink of the print trapped the thoughts; they could no more get away than a doomboo could get out of a pit. When the full realization of what this meant flooded over me, I experienced the same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the bright lights of Konakry. I shivered with the intensity of my desire to learn to do this wondrous thing myself."

Modupe left Africa for the United States where he studied anthropology, then worked for MGM as an actor & consultant. To avoid offending African governments, MGM insisted that no film on Africa resemble Africa. Modupe's task was purely creative: design buildings, songs, shields, dances, masks, even "languages," all of which Americans would accept as authentically African but which no African would recognize as his. Modupe was so successful in this that he convinced even Africans & they modified their art accordingly.

Modupe often phones me late at night when one of his old films is showing on TV. We watch on our separate screens while he provides a running background. Tribes, he tells me, were generally named after directors by adding vowels to their last names. Hair styles, while not authentically African, were real hair. Extras protested that long hair prevented them from dating girls. Their demands for additional pay were ignored until they began wearing, in the cafeteria, large rubber lips made by the prop department.

I urged Modupe to write a second volume, calling it Now I Am Civilized, but his interests are elsewhere & though he laughs about making these films, he never laughs at the films.