ya Bati. Thus, he began negotiating with the British resident of Zanzibar and designing plans for the Royal Theater—which would be built just down the street from the colonial court and the home of the resident. As World War I drew to an end and the Tanganyikan mainland fell from German to British hands, he also upgraded his exhibition venues in Dar es Salaam. There, he retired several of his khaki tent venues and moved the projection equipment to renovated buildings renamed the New Cinema and the Bharat (later the Globe). These venues were solid but small, seating only two hundred and three hundred patrons, respectively. Again, his vision was grander than the available architecture. So in 1929, he opened a second picture palace, the Empire, which was built in the Victorian style and was located, like the Royal, adjacent to the commercial and administrative centers of power. The Empire accommodated nearly six hundred patrons and quickly became a node of urban social life in the Tanganyikan capital.23 Like the Royal in Zanzibar, the Empire in Dar es Salaam was a rare public space drawing all ranks of urban society—from the British governor to the average urban resident—into the same place at a time when colonial policy invested heavily in reifying difference and segregating space by race and class.
During the 1920s and 1930s as theaters spread across the land, Tanzanian proprietors worked hard to provide their communities with the most up-to-date and technologically sophisticated experience possible. Few theaters erected in these years were as impressive as the Royal or the Empire, but exhibitors did the best they could given their resources and the size of their towns. Most entrepreneurs began small. The first theaters in every town were tents, converted storerooms, or parts of warehouses. Regional differences in entrepreneurs’ rates of capital accumulation and patrons’ wages and access to cash impacted the timing and extent of upgrades. In Tanga, the tents used for exhibition were replaced in 1929 with two permanent theaters: the Regal Cinema and the Novelty Cinema.24 In Pemba too, makeshift venues were replaced with permanent theaters at that time. By 1931, Pemba had three cinemas, one in Wete and two in Chake-Chake.25 Nearly as soon as synchronized sound films hit the market, Jariwalla upgraded his equipment to accommodate “talkies.” By 1932, both the Royal in Zanzibar and the Empire in Dar es Salaam featured the latest sound films. Three years later, striving to provide the most recent films to the widest public, Jariwalla also upgraded the projection equipment at the Globe to accommodate talkies.26 Keeping up with trends in global technology and style was a hallmark of the cinema industry from its earliest days.
Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati was another Zanzibari cinematic entrepreneur who dedicated himself to bringing the latest cinematic technology and the best in global films to East Africa. Born in Zanzibar in 1889, he retired from the colonial civil service in 1932 and purchased the Cinema ya Bati from Jariwalla. The cinema would provide Talati with a little income after retirement, said his son, and it would help him stay active and engaged in the community.27 After a few years of running the theater, it became clear to Talati that commercial cinema had financial potential, but he also realized that if his business was to grow and prosper, he needed to upgrade to sound and modernize the viewing experience for his patrons. So in 1939, Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati partnered with three other small businessmen from Zanzibar—Abdullah Mohammed Thaver, M. S. Sunjit, and Manilal Madhavji Suchak—and opened the Empire Cinema in Zanzibar, adjacent to the main city market. Being men of fairly modest means, they leased an old stable in a prime location and converted the interior to accommodate four hundred seated patrons. The structure afforded no room for a balcony, but what the partners’ renovation lacked in physical attraction it made up for with cinematic style. The Empire featured first-rate projection and sound equipment and easily competed for customers with the more ostentatious Royal (which had been renamed the Majestic in 1938 when a new owner, Hassanali Hameer Hasham, purchased it from Jariwalla). Making the most of their personal and business connections, the partners quickly gained a reputation for bringing some of the best and most recent films from India, Egypt, Europe, and the United States to the isles. Thaver, for instance, had connections to the Egyptian film world that rivaled Jariwalla’s in India; through the 1960s, Thaver was recognized across East Africa as the source of the best Arabic-language films in the land.28 Actually, it is a wonder that the men were able to secure any films at all, given that they opened their theater and struggled through the first years of operating a new business just as World War II was heating up and global shipping lanes were closing down. But succeed they did, and from the modest beginnings of screening silent films inside a corrugated iron godown where patrons sat on old gunnysacks on the floor, these partners became, over the next two decades, the premier exhibitors and distributors in Tanzania.
Crowds thronged to the Empire in Zanzibar, and many consistently rated it as their favorite cinema, but the owners had grander visions for their town.29 A converted barn simply did not live up to their idea of a modern cinema. The Empire lacked a balcony, which by the 1940s many patrons considered essential for theatrical savoir faire. The absence of a balcony also made it difficult to accommodate the sultan and his family, who wanted to see more movies but required semiprivate seating at public screenings. The high-class films the partners screened also frequently attracted crowds that exceeded the available seating capacity. Thus, by war’s end the owners were organizing to build a larger, more striking venue than the Empire. Ideally, they wanted to build on the site of the former Cinema ya Bati, opposite the main city market, as the spot had sufficient frontage to allow the theater’s architecture to “impress passersby.”30 They also wanted a site that was equally accessible and inviting to Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans and that could accommodate patrons arriving by foot, bicycle, bus, and private automobile. The spot adjacent to the Darajani Bridge would have been perfect, but it was never approved. It took five years of struggle with the colonial authorities to finally agree on a site. This group of showmen refused to build the small, merely functional cinema the administration deemed adequate for Zanzibar; they insisted on erecting a classy, modern theater in a prominent part of town.
While negotiating with planning authorities and other officials, the partners temporarily rented a facility from the colonial government, at the newly constructed Raha Leo Civic Center on the outskirts of town. But from the beginning, this venture was plagued with difficulties and endless professional compromise. The partners were interested in running a proper business that would cater to the local demand for good films and thus turn a profit. The colonial officials, by contrast, tried to control and contain the venture and make it fit with their own visions of a cinema appropriate for Africa and Africans. The partners had to negotiate hard for the right to screen 35 mm commercial films, rather than merely 16 mm educational materials. They also fought administrative efforts to subject films previously screened at the Empire to additional censorship in order to make them “appropriate” for the largely African audience attending Raha Leo. Beyond that, colonial administrators tried to limit the number of nights per week the theater could operate as well as the hours of operation, two additional points on which the partners refused to budge.31 The authorities ended up conceding on nearly every point in these negotiations, but it was exasperating for the partners to have to argue what seemed obvious: if you planned to open a theater or run a business of any type, you had an obligation to give your customers the best available—otherwise, they would look for better options, and you would fail.
The partners ran the cinema at Raha Leo for less than three years because in many ways it remained utterly below the standard they and their public demanded. Opening night foreshadowed the difficulties that would be faced by the partners: shortly after the first film, King Kong (Cooper, 1933), got rolling, the electricity failed, leaving the audience in the dark for more than an hour. The electricity started and then failed, started and then failed, frustrating everyone and potentially damaging new and costly projectors. By the time the power was restored, the crowd was in an uproar, and most people demanded their money be returned. Inadequate electrical service continued to plague Raha Leo throughout the cinema’s remaining years, for the government flatly refused to upgrade the service to the degree required. In addition to losing money every time they had to cancel a show because the electricity failed, Talati and his partners lost face before their audiences. As owners of the Empire with plans to build a new picture palace for Zanzibar, Talati, Suchak, Sunjit, and Thaver had reputations to uphold, so they got out of their lease with the colonial government as soon
