Radio Recap: Moon Over Africa

Moon Over Africa was a radio adventure serial; not too much is known about it. It's possibly from 1935. There are 26 episodes, but no one is quite sure whether that's the full run (the story appears to be complete though).

So for the last few weeks I've been listening to Moon Over Africa here in my home in Africa. I was careful to keep my windows closed while the episodes played; it's a very old, creaky and racist depiction of Africa and I would've been ashamed to be caught listening to it.

The story's protagonists are an expedition through darkest Africa led by Professor Anton Edwards, accompanied by his daughter Lorna, his subordinate Jack and an African warrior named Nguru. They're initially guided on their journeys by a severed head which Edward alleges is speaking the language of Atlantis; really, it just seems to laugh and babble. Eventually and improbably the head turns out to contain a hidden radio and was being used by a rival to misdirect Edwards. Throughout the series the four stumble into a tribe of cannibals, a kingdom inside a volcano and a tribe who seem to be able to transform into leopards.

Professor Edwards is a fairly irritating protagonist but occasionally he's enjoyable for the brazen campiness of his character; he constantly makes wild guesses about what's going on during their travels but always assumes his guesses are correct. Like, upon finding the people in the volcano, he proposes they were descended from Crusaders who were stranded in northern Africa, wandered way south and fell under the control of a witch doctor. He backs this up with zero evidence, but behaves as though these assumptions are the only possible explanation!

You would think that Jack would be the man of action in the group - the Professor provides the brains, Jack the muscles. Actually, Jack is the professor's yes man. He exists so that the professor has a dunderhead close at hand who needs everything explained to him. Jack's dialogue consists of either asking the professor a question or agreeing with whatever poppycock the professor has just uttered.

The real muscle of the group belongs to Nguru. The performance of Nguru is pretty bad - he talks in pidgin English that sounds just like the voices white actors used to portray Native Americans - lots of "ugh" and "(verb)-um"s. The professor constantly belittles him, referring to how Nguru supposedly only lives for a fight. The professor loves to call him a "black devil," "black sinner," "black rascal," etc. Yet Nguru gets it done; he constantly has to rescue the rest of the party from whatever nonsense they've blundered into.

The series is very pulpy and pretty obviously inspired by H. Rider Haggard's stories. Nguru is a less-interesting version of Umbopa from King Solomon's Mines and the lost civilization of white people recall those found in Allan Quatermain.

You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers Group's collection of episodes at the Internet Archive.