town, and delivered it to the second theater in line. The second theater would then send its first reel to the third cinema in the line, after starting the second reel that had just arrived by bicycle from the first cinema. All nine to twelve reels of a film would be sped around town in this way.72 Moving-picture technology may have been somewhat standardized across the globe, but it required the ingenious application of indigenous tools to overcome local constraints when operating in Tanzania.
In most respects, however, Tanzanian exhibition practices were commensurate with global standards of technological sophistication and modernity. Local exhibitors brought talkies, CinemaScope projection, spring-loaded seats, air-conditioning, and stereophonic sound to their theaters as soon as they were able to do so, often within months of an innovation’s debut in New York or London. The latest global architectural trends were also featured at movie theaters in East African towns. Cinematic entrepreneurs consciously built dynamic regional and transnational networks to keep abreast of the world’s latest developments in the art, craft, and industry of film and exhibition, and they were committed to giving local audiences access to the best product they could possibly deliver.
The glamour and sophistication exuded by the film industry accentuated East African entrepreneurs’ innate predilections for using their businesses to project not just films but modernity, elegance, and style as well. Modernity was a prominent discursive and developmental category of the twentieth century, as important in Tanzania as anywhere in the world. But how the modern was defined, measured, valued, and imagined was open to considerable debate. Drawing on a rich Africanist scholarship exploring the contested nature of modernity, successive chapters in this book illustrate how differently positioned historical actors conceived of the modern; how they imagined and gave form to their place within it; and how, to cite Lynn Thomas, they used the term to make political claims for inclusion or articulate visions of “new—often better—ways of being.”73
Figure I.4 Plaza Cinema, Moshi, c. 1947. From the personal collection of Chunilal Kala Savani
SOURCES AND METHODS
My first waged job, when I was thirteen years old, was working as a ticket and concession stand girl at a small local theater. Years of working at this theater clued me in to the fact that a lot more goes on at the show than watching films. This was where uptown girls met downtown boys and relationships crossed the tracks, often behind parents’ backs. Bold young couples sneaked upstairs to the baby cry room—a soundproofed enclosure with seats and a large glass window looking out on the screen—to make out. Teens too young to purchase alcohol found willing buyers among the slightly older men who hung out at the adjacent hot dog stand. Those with cars, tricked-out bicycles, and hot stereos to sell positioned themselves on the streets outside the theater to take full advantage of the crowd. Adults probably socialized and made deals too, but none of us teens paid much attention to them. The owner taught me how to sell a single ticket over and over again, but it was only while doing this research that I came to appreciate how critical such acts of subterfuge were to the economic survival of American small exhibitors. The mysteries of projection were also first revealed to me there, although our projectionist was gruff and rather creepy and deemed us girls unworthy of learning the trade. But the older girl who filled in for the owner each Monday, his sole day off, more than made up for the creepy projectionist. She spiked the orange fountain drink with gin for employees and let us dance in the lobby after the patrons were gone. She also took me to my first rock concert, Bruce Springsteen’s, and later helped me learn how to drive. My job at the theater later spurred me to ask Tanzanian cinema employees not only about the movies they screened but also about the characters they worked with and the people in the neighborhood they got to know from working at the show.
Data gathered from beyond the traditional archive form the bedrock on which this book is built. Interviews turned my attention from the films people went to see to what going to the movies meant and how people made use of films in their own lives. Kiswahili terms such as mshabiki (fan, fanatic), mpenzi (lover), or mteja (addict) were often used by people to describe their relationship both to particular genres of film and to the filmgoing experience in general. A surprising number of Tanzanians went to the movies at least once a week, and many self-described fans went two times a week or more. I also sponsored an essay contest by distributing flyers, in English on one side and Kiswahili on the other, outside schools, businesses, and bus stops. Respondents were able to write on one of eight different prompts. My fantasy was that this exercise would inspire young people to talk to their elders about the past, but in neoliberal Tanzania literate youth scoffed at the paltry prize money I offered. Older people, however, responded enthusiastically, providing detailed descriptions of nights at the drive-in, fashions borrowed from films, and the place of moviegoing in their lives.
Places are containers of memory; as Annette Kuhn has beautifully shown, memories have topography.74 Walking down memory lane might be a cliché, Kuhn argues, but getting people to take such steps is incredibly useful to the oral historian, providing a pathway into the past. In her own study of moviegoing in 1930s Britain, Kuhn found that encouraging respondents in their seventies and eighties to speak of walking to the cinema had the effect of transporting them back to their early years. In the process, films became situated in a larger network of physical, social, and emotional experiences. Setting the scene in this way gave events and facts a context, without which there would have been no purpose for recall. In the United States, nursing homes have recently started making extensive use of music from years gone by to revive the memories of patients plagued with dementia. The sound stirs regions of the brain that trigger physical, mental, and emotional ties to more vibrant times in elders’ lives. My own research revealed that memories of the cinema and moviegoing were surprisingly vivid for many Tanzanians, which I suspect is because such memories activate and draw on so many different parts of the brain. Thinking back to significant films triggered visual, aural, sensual, emotional, and physical recollections for many respondents. Thus, memories of the drive-in made more than one person salivate because the drive-in was intimately connected with a favorite food that was consumed only there. Others began to sing or dance while recalling a particular Egyptian or Indian film. And several cried and many laughed in remembering the antics of a partner, sibling, or age-mate with whom they went to see films. Memories of moviegoing were often powerful because they were not just about a film but also about the emotional relationships that were forged—between families, peers, and lovers—in the process of going to the show. Cinema memories went well beyond celluloid. They were infused with sensuality and affect; they were poignant, sentimental, and nostalgic.
Nostalgia loomed large in these recollections of nights at the show. This nostalgia was informed by specific longings and cultural desires, needs that “the future can no longer supply.”75 Nostalgia for nights at the movies combined deep yearnings for a lost time and a distant place, and in these recollections, the personal and the political were often intertwined. For many of those who were interviewed, childhood, adolescence, or the early years of parenthood corresponded with the hopeful years leading up to or immediately following national independence. These were years of triumph for many, as well as faith that the future’s promise would be fulfilled. Nights at the movies were remembered nostalgically in part because they were associated with the fleeting glories and excitement of youth, a time in both individual and national life cycles that could never be retrieved. Like parents who have grown estranged from their adult children, Tanzanians looked back to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and longed for the confidence and closeness of those early years. Nostalgia for the golden years of moviegoing was also filled with longing for large public outings. For elders who rarely left the house anymore except to attend funerals, this hunger for public sociability and laughter was particularly strong. Critics might argue that interview data cloud my interpretation precisely because facts and feelings are intertwined. But my interest is not just in what happened in the past; I also want to know what it meant to live that past—how experiences produced feelings that gave meaning and pleasure to life.
