Club Balafon

It's urban Africa: a world of French cars, Lebanese hardware stores, and American movies, not jungle and savannah-and of working-class Africans, not rich white men on safari.

It's an off-beat, violent, darkly comic window onto post-colonial Africa and the children of expatriates on a single day in a West African city in the 1970s.

Under its Elmore Leonard caper-gone-wrong thriller surface it's an examination, closer to V. S. Naipaul or Athol Fugard, of the changing and unchanging tragicomic rules of life for both Black men and White adolescents in newly independent but recently colonial Africa.

It's an abandoned nightclub at the top of an isolated hill overlooking the city: the Club Balafon.