the course of three summers and one academic year of fieldwork, I conducted over a hundred interviews with exhibitors, distributors, employees, black marketers, and men and women who went to the cinema. Interviews were typically an hour in length, but a few extended over several days. Many enthusiastic, knowledgeable, or accommodating interlocutors were pestered too many times to formally cite. With the help of research assistants, I also made an effort to do somewhat random surveys in Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Bagamoyo, Moshi, Arusha, Morogoro, and Iringa to get a larger sample of attendance patterns and cinematic tastes, including the views of those who never went to the movies at all. The plan was to conduct surveys in Mwanza, Ujiji, and Lindi as well, but life, and death, intervened. Some three hundred surveys and interviews were conducted in these towns to ascertain how the cinematic habits of local moviegoers compared to those of the larger urban population. Sociologists have every right to laugh at my “random samples”: I made no effort to survey every fifth household, but I did consciously query men and women from a range of ages, religious faiths, races, and neighborhoods. In addition, I hired research assistants to target populations different from those I was interviewing myself. My own random samples involved asking people of relevant ages—in the markets, on the streets, on buses, at restaurants, at soda stands, at football matches, at concerts, or in any public venue where I had the opportunity to engage someone in conversation—about their film and moviegoing experiences. This method gave me a way to start a conversation with a stranger while fixing a shoe or waiting for a bus. If a shop was open but had few customers, I took the opportunity to query employees. Taxi drivers too were frequently canvassed. I also stopped in restaurants, bars, and roadside eateries that catered to people of different classes and offered to buy a drink for anyone willing to chat about his or her experiences. In several cases, employees took it upon themselves to spread the word with members of their cohort, arranging hours of conversations for me over the course of several days. If people were avid cinema fans, we made plans for more lengthy formal interviews. But even with folks who never went to the movies, it was important to understand why. Without these random surveys or the help of research assistants, I would have talked only to fans.
Personal photo collections also provided invaluable insights into how films were mediated and made use of in daily lives. Scholars have studied fan magazines to understand how and why certain stars appealed to audiences, and they have explored the tactile efforts men and women made to replicate the glamour, bravado, and drama of the screen in their own lives.76 Tanzania had no fan publications, but the stories I was told by people as we looked through their photo albums resonated in significant ways with what fans elsewhere articulated in print.
Fans do not merely watch movies; they make tangible links between what they see on screen and their own emotional and material realities. Some fans collect pictures and memorabilia related to idolized stars, and Tanzanian youth were as prone to pasting their bedroom walls with images of their favorite heroes and heroines as kids anywhere. Fans also translate what they see into a cultural activity by sharing their feelings and thoughts with like-minded others. In literate cultures with commercial print media, this is often made evident by subscribing to fan magazines or joining fan clubs. In Tanzania, this type of fan engagement was more likely to take place on the streets, in kitchens, or in classrooms than in published form. People displayed their affinity for various stars by adopting hairstyles, hats, clothing, and modes of comportment modeled on a character in a film. Nearly all the self-identified movie fans who shared their photo albums with me had pictures of themselves in dresses, shirts, shoes, or hairstyles worn by film heroes or heroines and incorporated into their own fashion repertoires. Fan clubs as such did not exist, but this in no way precluded the existence of an expressive fan culture.
Much of the written data used in Reel Pleasures was found outside the official archive. The sources range from the uncollected holdings of departments, ministries, offices, and parastatals to private, personal collections of papers and business records. The potential significance of uncollected state records alone is astounding. For instance, in the national archives in Dar es Salaam the sum total of material related to the Tanzania Film Company—the parastatal that effectively took over the film distribution industry in 1968—was contained in just one file with a few pieces of paper. But in the buildings that formerly housed TFC staff, I found not only files but also films made by TFC that many, including the company’s filmmakers, presumed were forever lost. The private archives of TFC employees, as well as theses written by students at the University of Dar es Salaam, were far more useful on the topic of postcolonial state film policy and practice than the material in the national archives. Similarly, nearly all the records of the postcolonial censor board cited in this volume, including wonderfully illuminating confidential files revealing internal struggles between the party, the TFC, and the censors, were found in a closet in an office building that has since been demolished. Members of the staff generously opened the door and allowed me to spend weeks occupying one of their desks. The Office of the Registrar of Companies, part of the Ministry of Industries and Trade, was a gold mine for information on corporate accounts. As Jean Allman has argued, to produce innovative new studies of the African past scholars need to begin aggressively pursuing alternatives to what has been conveniently collected, sorted, and cataloged in the national archives.77 This is all the more true for the postcolonial period, when far less was written down and even less was collected and archived.
This is not to dismiss the importance of data gleaned from colonial archives. Without these records, I would have few dates indicating when cinemas were established, and without the obsessive compulsion of British censors in recording the name and origin of every film that entered the country, I would have no idea how many movies were imported or how diverse their origins were. Yet as Charles Ambler asserts in his work on moviegoing on the Zambian Copperbelt, censor records tell us a lot more about European anxieties than about the pleasures Africans derived from watching films.78 Published newspapers are also invaluable, but like every type of source, these too skew our attention in particular ways. According to newspaper ads, Hollywood films dominated Tanzanian screens, accounting for more than 80 percent of what was shown during the colonial era. Based on this evidence, it would be easy to conclude that Hollywood shows were what most Tanzanians went to see. But my three months of fieldwork in Zanzibar, Wete, and Tanga, in 2002, shattered this image. None of the interviewees who went to the movies during the 1950s and 1960s could name a single American film, and the names of American actors were nearly as difficult for people to recall.79 The issue was not failing memories or a lack of interest in films: at times, the names of Indian films and directors and favorite Indian stars rolled off the tongues of respondents more readily than the names of their own children and grandchildren. The point is that even though Hollywood films dominated the press, they were not, by and large, what Tanzanians chose to see. Talking to people about their moviegoing experiences and film preferences during that initial exploratory phase of research completely transformed this project.
Reading newspapers alone and being largely unfamiliar with Indian films before I began this study, it would not have occurred to me that Indian movies were what everyone went to see. From the 1920 through the 1950s, these films were often not even advertised, since newspapers were not most urbanites’ principle source of information about what was happening in town. And rarely did any town but Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar make the press. Yet as it turns out, in the 1950s and 1960s East Africa was the most lucrative overseas market for Indian films in the world. By 1960, export earnings on Indian shows screened in East Africa totaled some $700,000 (or $5.4 million in 2016 dollars, after adjusting for inflation).80 In the 1960s, India films garnered a mere 5 percent of global screen time, and producers typically realized less than 2 percent of their box office earnings in foreign markets. This was largely because Hollywood screen contracts kept competitors out of many markets.81 To get Hollywood films, exhibitors generally had to agree to forgo all others. Not one of the sixteen thousand theaters in the United States screened Indian films at the time, and the situation in Europe was little better. In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s Indian films earned ten times as much in East Africa as they did in the United Kingdom. Audiences in East Africa were obviously a critical—and lucrative—overseas market for Indian producers. This region is where Bollywood first really went global.
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