Lessons from Bond films

British actor Roger Moore in Deauville, France on September 7, 1985. PHOTO | MICHELE DANIAU | AFP

What you need to know:

  • As we see off Roger Moore, the bigger lesson the Bond films have taught us is that wars are not really won on the frontlines.

  • They are won in the mind – or at least the imagination.

  • If you can not dream it and weave it even in a fictional tale, you will struggle to turn it into reality.

I am a near film addict and the death of Roger Moore, who played the British secret agent James Bond in seven feature films between 1973 and 1985, came as very sad news.

However, I am also quite fascinated by its politics and ideology, the areas where American and British films are simply decades ahead of everyone else and where our African offerings fall terribly short.

The hugely successful James Bond series revolves around a fictional British spy by the same name, created by English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming. The James Bond spy novels are reported, to date, to have sold more than 100 million copies.

Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1952. The first film was Dr No in 1962, based on the 1958 novel. In it, James Bond foils a Chinese scientist, who is working on a sinister to wreak havoc on American rocket launches.

In the second one, From Russia with Love, a beautiful Soviet female agent masquerades as a defector with a plan to finish off Bond. Inevitably, he gets her to turn against the Soviets and there is the inevitable trip under the sheets.

And here is the lesson for African film. The Bond films are a product of the Second World War, the end of British Empire and the rise of the Cold War. The West’s claim to be the leading civilisation at the time, fell apart in the face of the horrors of the war.

EASTERN VILLAINS

The world also entered the costly Cold War race between the East and the West and the Bond films were rich with Eastern villains.

Bond became a glamorous symbol of an upper class that had, otherwise, failed. But because in those days, the upper classes actually did send their men to die in war, they laid claim to a messiah role by having one of their own running around the world, beating down evil men bent on the destruction of the world.

The British Empire might have collapsed, but Bond kept it alive in the popular imagination of the superiority of the “British way”.

The rewards were a beautiful woman, a flashy car, tuxedos, yachts, Martinis (shaken, not stirred), all of them very materialistic bourgeois spoils, not the proletarian promises of socialism – housing for all, equal pay and other revolutionary amenities.

In many ways, the West dominated the 20th century because its films, music and fashion did a lot to help imagine that that greatness was possible.

And it has been good at responding to the demands of the time. A beautiful woman by Bond’s side, or taken as a prize, became anachronistic, although film being film, there is still always a beautiful woman.

“M”, Bond’s boss and head of the Secret Intelligence Service (M16) was always a man, but after Margaret Thatcher had been UK prime minister and feminism had continued its relentless match, that was no longer tenable. In 1995 Judi Dench entered the scene as “M” in GoldenEye and remained in the role until 2012 with Skyfall

DECLARED WAR

The nature of war had now changed. The upper classes declared war but didn’t fight them. The poor and working class did. Democracy has advanced and the mass market has risen.

And so from 2006 Daniel Craig as the new James Bond in Casino Royale has shepherded that transition. He still does the fancy cars, tuxedos and beautiful girls, but he also falls from grace and stays in seedy places.

Casino Royale from 2006 was the first Bond film with a “proper” African, when the spy briefly takes on the murderous Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army band.

But perhaps the most successful recasting of a Bond as the gritty daredevil with a conscience, the kind of guy whom many kids in the slums can realistically dream of becoming, has been in the American Jason Bourne series starring Matt Damon.

Bourne doesn’t own a car or a proper home and doesn’t gamble at casinos. But he has an uncanny ability to defeat and all the tricks that a corrupt Establishment will throw at him.

And as we see off Roger Moore, the bigger lesson the Bond films have taught us is that wars are not really won on the frontlines. They are won in the mind – or at least the imagination. If you can’t dream it and weave it even in a fictional tale, you will struggle to turn it into reality.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of the Africa data visualiser 'Africapedia.com' and explainer site 'Roguechiefs.com'.

Twitter: @cobbo3