personal and business records are another set of sources I used to enhance the image of cinematic history projected by official archives. The largest cache of written documents was a vast trove of box office receipts kept by Abdulhussein Marashi, owner of the Majestic Cinema in Zanzibar. Abdul meticulously preserved the box office receipts presented to distributors and state officials between 1972, when he took over the business from his father, and 1993, when he screened the last 35 mm film. These records provide detailed accounts of attendance over time, as well as information on every film that was screened. They also give information on changing tax rates and the relative earnings of the Majestic, the state, and the distributors. Abdul’s was one of the last theaters operating in Tanzania when I began this project, and many other proprietors said they had burned their remaining records just a few years (and in one case just weeks) before my arrival. If only someone had dared to follow in Bill Nasson’s pioneering footsteps back in the 1980s, we could have amassed and preserved countless personal memories and business records that are now forever lost.82 Asad Talati, owner of United Film Distributors—the largest and most important provider of films for Tanzanian theaters after independence—was another exceptionally generous source of knowledge and documentation. For years, he responded to my e-mail queries and provided details on international suppliers of films, costs of prints, and relative earnings. He also shared family and business archives and photos dating back to the 1930s. A list of films distributed during the waning years of commercial 35 mm exhibition, from 1992 to 2002, and returns and attendance details were also provided by his associate in Zanzibar. Members of the Savani family in Kenya and Tanzania also shared business records from their film distribution and exhibition companies. Without these individuals’ willingness to share their personal archives and knowledge, I would know almost nothing about the economics of the industry, and I would not be able to corroborate the rich oral evidence on audiences’ cinematic preferences with precise numbers of ticket sales.
This book joins a very small number of studies examining commercial exhibition, distribution, and cinemagoing in Africa. Now, the tide of neglect is beginning to turn, and scholars have started to publish books on what was obviously a significant form of leisure on the continent. In 2013, James Burns published Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940, a pathbreaking, comparative study of the growth of cinemas and moviegoing cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. Burns documents that the enthusiasm for commercial film and moviegoing was widespread throughout the tropics, and he makes us wonder how academics could have ignored such a vibrant facet of leisure life for so long. His book also emphasizes that we have only begun to scratch the surface in understanding film and audiences, as well as business across the British Empire.
The myriad ways in which local factors influenced the development of commercial cinema are further highlighted in Odile Goerg’s Fantômas sous les tropiques: Aller au cinéma en Afrique coloniale. Published in 2015, this is the first book-length study of commercial cinema and urban audiences in sub-Saharan Africa. Goerg makes clear that Tanzanians’ affection for film was far from exceptional. In western Africa too, urban Africans became avid moviegoing fans early in the twentieth century. The composition of the audience, the genres of films that were popular, and how people appropriated visual images and made use of them in their own lives are topics we have only begun to appreciate. And, as Gareth McFeely has argued, historians have neglected a significant component of African urban lives by ignoring the forty thousand people who went to the movies each week in Accra in the mid-1950s. Examining the Ghanaian businessmen who ran the theaters, he asserts, also fundamentally transforms our understanding of the economy.83
I am the first to concede that a regionwide study like Goerg’s for East Africa could quite conceivably destabilize some of the claims I make about Tanzanians’ unique position in the regional cultural economy. My initial aim was to do a comparative study of Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, but once I began doing the research with two small children in tow, that plan was quickly revised. Until we have detailed studies of Uganda and Kenya, as well as Mauritius, Comoros, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, it is impossible to say how the Tanzanian experience compares. The works of McFeely and David Gainer, on African moviegoing and the cinema industries in Ghana and South Africa, respectively, highlight the critical importance of detailed country-specific studies. These scholars illustrate the immense variations in business practices and cinematic experiences between the two countries, each of which in turn differed quite markedly from Tanzania, Senegal, and the Congo.84 And as Lakshmi Srinivas demonstrates in her recent book, Full House, we urgently need more ethnographically rich and varied studies of moviegoing to destabilize both the textual approaches that have dominated examinations of film and traditional reception studies. Reel Pleasures offers just a glimpse at what will eventually become a more complex, colorful, and nuanced picture of moviegoing in Africa through the contributions of others.
There are few advantages to taking as long to write a book as I took in finishing this volume. But one of the good things that has come from spending over a decade with this project is that a new media technology—the internet—has developed, allowing readers to access nearly all of the films mentioned. Whereas I spent extensive amounts of time and money in the first decade of the 2000s hunting down copies of Indian classics, Italian westerns, Hong Kong action films, and German soft porn, today you can go to YouTube and watch everything from the remaining reels of the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra (Phalke, 1913), to the Tanzania Film Company’s Vita vya Kagera (1980)—with live footage of the Tanzanian war against Idi Amin in Uganda—from the comfort of your own couch.
Chapter 1
BUILDING BUSINESS AND BUILDING COMMUNITY
The Exhibition and Distribution Industries in Tanzania, 1900s–50s
THE ENTREPRENEURS who built the exhibition and distribution industries in East Africa were businessmen, and like their counterparts the world over, their aim was to turn a profit. But business cultures everywhere are also historically situated and socially constructed. In early twentieth-century East Africa, the capitalist profit imperative was tempered by local cultural norms and religiously sanctioned obligations that made sharing wealth and investing in community corollaries of individual accumulation. Wealth was revered—but all the more so when it was shared. “Big men,” esteemed women, and respected families earned their social status by financing cultural troupes, religious festivals, or large public parties that brought the community together. Privately investing in public infrastructure (such as wells, waterworks, schools, mosques, and hospitals) was another common means of redistribution. Immigrants and the children of immigrants abided by these customary standards as much as the native born did, for this was an effective way to signal their commitment to belonging and to foster social bonds in their new home.1
For the men who built the exhibition industry in Zanzibar and Tanganyika in the early 1900s, one critical factor in evaluating business returns was the degree to which a capital investment helped build a good city and put one’s town on the map. As of the 1930s, only nine towns were able to boast of regular film screenings (see map I.1). These towns were in their infancy at the time—a small fraction of their size and population today—and were built largely of impermanent materials such as mud and stick and thatch. Investing in a building like the Royal in Zanzibar, the Regal in Tanga, or the Tivoli in Mwanza signified a man’s belief in the solidity and prosperity of the future, as well as his commitment to the beautification of a town’s built environment. Cinemas were among the largest and most architecturally innovative buildings in any town, and bringing the latest global media to the community added a touch of cosmopolitan spark to local life. Building a public space where hundreds came together demonstrated one’s willingness to invest in urban civic and artistic culture.
The men who built the industry incorporated elements of preexisting leisure and business customs into cinema’s commercial culture. Like turning a profit, the desire to outdo a rival was
