Still Dreaming of Africa: Hollywood and the
Hallucinatory Power of Kenya
As a herd of elephants wallow across a river, the camera slowly and
lovingly draws back to reveal a magnificent landscape that dwarfs man and beast.
Thus the film I Dreamed o f Africa (2000) introduces Kenya as it proceeds to tell
the story of how nature preservationist Kuki Gallmann and her husband Paolo
(played by Kim Basinger and Vincent Perez) created a home out of a derelict
100,000-acre cattle ranch in Kenya. Gallmann’s struggle to save the African
wilderness provides the sorry narrative for this film (more on that later), but the
theme of Africa’s vastness, beauty, brutality, and mystery appears constantly, and
if any drama at all is to be found in I Dreamed o f Africa, it is visual. Hollywood
and the camera love Africa. It always has.
Hollywood had noticed the hallucinatory power of Kenya as far back as
1929 when director W.S. Van Dyke spent seven months there and in nearby
Uganda and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) filming one of MGM’s first talkies,
Trader Horn (1930). Van Dyke dazzled moviegoers with images (which, by the
way, were recycled for countless other Hollywood African films) of everything
from yawning lions and thundering herds of wildebeest to exotic tribal
ceremonies including bare-breasted African women. This highly profitable film
sparked wonder and wanderlust in the mass population. The film tells the story of
two men—legendary ivory trader Alfred Aloysius Horn (Harry Carey) and his
naive protege Peru (Duncan Renaldo of later Cisco Kid fame), who has to have
won the prize for wearing the biggest sombrero pith helmet in any African
movie—and their struggle to reclaim a beautiful white woman (Edwina Booth)
who was lost in the jungle as a baby and raised by indigenous tribes. Time
magazine proclaimed Trader Horn, which did receive an Oscar nomination for
1930/3 l ’s Best Picture, to be “Incomparably the best jungle picture . . . will stand
high among the pictures of this or any year.”1 Van Dyke went on to use his
immense stockpile of footage in 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man, which he shot
mostly in Hollywood studio sets. The success of these