Long before James Bond 007 came on the scene, there was "The Spear”. Now, ‘The Spear’ was a ‘made-in-Africa’ superhero to beat all the Hollywood adventure heroes that have ever graced the silver screen!

If you read ‘The adventures of Lance Spearman’, you remember. But, no doubt, I am talking to a dying breed of ‘used-to-be’ avid readers of anything in print, hard-to-come-by as these treasured items used to be during our time. Because, mind you, "during our time” refers to the 1960s! I don’t know about other places but in the sprawling refugee camps of Uganda those days, text books were practically unheard of; comic books, alien! 

Lance Spearman was a comic with a hero of the same name, fondly referred to simply as The Spear. 

I cannot exactly remember how I first laid my hands – and eyes – on the comic which, as I came to find out later, was known as a ‘photo-comic’. But when I did, I was hooked. The Spear was a sophisticated spy, detective and superhero who was – wonder of wonders! – African. Like James Bond, he wore sharp suits, complete with bow tie and a Panama hat, and drank Scotch whisky on the rocks, to boot! 

Lance Spearman as a booklet was called a ‘photo-comic’ because the star of the story and his trusted lieutenants were not in cartoon form. We watched them in crisp clear black-and-white photos. In those photos, we watched how, when his pistol was not spitting fire, The Spear vanquished opponents with his wizardry of quick kicks, karate chops and deadly uppercuts. 

On occasions when The Spear needed assistance, his lieutenants were always action-ready: personal assistant Sonia, a karate expert in her own right; sidekick Lemmy with his catapult that never missed a target; the bulkier but equally quick-kicking Inspector Victor. The foursome made a team that kept us permanently yearning for the next edition. 

Alas, it was a yearning that was, more-often-than-not, not always fulfilled as we depended on a ‘secondhand Good Samaritan’. The overloaded phrase, ‘second-hand Good Samaritan’, meant that the person who lent us a copy had borrowed it from somebody, who had borrowed it from somebody, etc etc, so that we read it as, not second- but, tenth- or even twentieth-hand. All of which meant that by the time it reached us, it was in hardly readable tartars!

Still, how we relished those one-liners! The one-liners were written in what now I know to be called ‘air bubbles’: the uttered words in what looked like inverted water drops; thoughts in big bubbles, atop progressively smaller ones.

"Take that, you punk!” That would be from The Spear, with a karate chop. It’d be followed with: "And that, you meandering mongrel!”, with which he’d deliver a coup-de-grace uppercut that’d leave the hoodlum in the air, as in still photo, his groaning hanging over his head: "Aarrr!” The rest of how Hoodlum would hurtle down and slump to the ground was left to our imagination. 

Much as this action was gripping, however, what fascinated us most was the dialogue. As refugees fresh from Rwanda, we were new to the English language. Imagine the frustration, then, when you failed to understand the dialogue. It was that frustration that pushed us to read anything and everything we laid our hands on. 

For motivation in our days, there wouldn’t have been better. 

Even if many of us knew that we could never hope to be as martial as The Spear, we knew that through education we could aspire to dress just as smartly and live decently, if not equally glamorously. Taking to that glamour, unfortunately, also led many of us into grief!

With comics and everything exciting available at the click of a mouse these days, and almost all of it video or audio, wherefrom can young students get that impassioned and burning desire to read?