with other East African Asians committed to running a proper enterprise.
During World War II, they took what was then a rare legal step for East African businessmen: they incorporated into a limited company, Indo-African Theaters Ltd. This allowed them to protect their families and personal property from liability for any calamities at their theaters, and moreover, it enabled them to seek other investors with capital to build proper, modern cinemas and secure business loans from banks.32 The Zanzibari founders of Indo-African had the entrepreneurial spirit and technological knowledge to advance the cinema industry in East Africa, but as civil servants and small shopkeepers, they lacked the capital to turn their vision into reality. They saw great market potential in the Tanganyikan town of Dar es Salaam, whose population and wealth grew substantially during the war. They approached Kassum Sunderji Samji, a politically prominent and economically successful Ismaili businessman in Dar es Salaam, and offered him a share in Indo-African Theaters. Kassum Sunderji was a known film fan who made something of a habit of attending the cinema after evening prayers. He recognized the need for an additional venue in the mainland capital in the 1940s, so when the partners of Indo-African approached him, he readily agreed to finance their expansion to Dar es Salaam. He funded the transformation of a godown near the port into the Avalon Cinema, which he leased back to Talati and his partners to run.
Figure 1.4 Avalon Cinema, Dar es Salaam, c. 1945. From the personal collection of Asad Talati
Kassum Sunderji was precisely the type of partner the men from Zanzibar needed to expand onto the mainland: he was wealthy and had liquid assets on hand; he was politically connected and well regarded by Europeans, which would help in getting building plans approved; and he was the head of the Ismaili community—a man with a well-deserved reputation for marshaling resources to support public infrastructure and charitable institutions. He personified the rags-to-riches success story that generations of South Asian immigrants passed on to their children and grandchildren. He had left his family of cowherds in India at the tender age of fifteen. Alone and uneducated, he immigrated to Dar es Salaam in the 1890s, where he found work as a shop assistant with a German company. After the war, he opened his own shop, catering to European tastes for cheese, chocolate, alcohol, and other imported goods. He did well financially and politically. He became the president of the Ismaili Council of Tanganyika and was made a count by a close friend, the Aga Khan. He was also appointed as an unofficial member of the Legislative Council by the British governor in the 1940s, another rare honor in those days.33 Having a prominent business, religious, and political leader in their group allowed the owners of Indo-African Theaters to quickly and dramatically expand their operations. With World War II still roiling, their business brought a bit of comfort to the citizens of Dar es Salaam. They opened the Avalon in 1944 with the premier East African screening of Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942), a film about a British officer’s dual lives and loves induced by shell-shocked amnesia, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson; the movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards and represented the high-caliber films the Avalon became known for offering.34
Map 1.1 Cinemas of Dar es Salaam city center
Map 1.2 Cinemas of Dar es Salaam and key neighborhoods
The accolades Kassum received from his connections to the Avalon spurred him to finance the building of two additional cinemas in Dar es Salaam in the 1950s: the Amana and the New Chox. According to his son and his projectionists, Kassum’s affiliation with the Avalon significantly enhanced what was already a very solid reputation, making his name known to even wider segments of the population. The New Chox, like all theaters, was multiracial, but it came to be regarded as the premier cinema for the European community in Dar es Salaam, featuring films that catered to that crowd.35 The Amana, located in the African suburb of Ilalla and adjacent to the football stadium, was the only theater ever built during the colonial era away from a city center. Kassum Sunderji’s goal in financing the construction of the Amana, his son reported, was to provide a lower-priced venue where the urban poor could take in a film. At the opening of the Amana, Kassum argued that cinema was “a necessity of modern times” that should be available to all. Unlike the colonial authorities who built Raha Leo, he was fully committed to providing Africans on the outskirts of the city with a first-class venue, complete with a grand balcony seating 250 patrons. Enthusiasm for the Amana was overwhelming. Attendance at the Wednesday night opening was estimated at more than 1,000, well exceeding the theater’s generous seating capacity of 750.36 And when films were not being shown, the facility doubled as a community center and social hall.
In up-country towns, building a cinema enhanced a benefactor’s self-esteem and buttressed his family’s social value at least as much as it did along the coast. One benefactor, known as Mr. Khambaita, told me with pride about his escapades designing and constructing the Everest, which opened in Moshi in 1953 when he was a mere lad of twenty-nine. “I built the Everest all by myself! It is 60 by 40 feet without any I-beams. Myself I built that! It was quite an architectural feat for the time, and it is still standing in the center of town,” he declared, positively glowing as we spoke.37 From the age of thirteen, when he still lived in India, Khambaita regularly went to the movies, and he became an avid reader of film magazines. During the war, he joined the British service as a construction contractor and was sent to Tanganyika. He had extended family in Moshi and decided to stay after the war, in large part because he managed to convince his elders, who had a transport business and auto repair shop, to invest a small fortune in building the Everest. As a civil engineer, he oversaw the construction of countless buildings in future years, but none made him feel as accomplished as an architect or as proud as a citizen as his work on the Everest. And as for Khambaita’s family, though they had long been well known in Moshi, they acquired regional fame after the Everest opened. “People would come from fifty, even seventy miles, to see a movie on Sunday!” he recalled. “They waited all week for that day! On Saturdays too, farmers would come. Instead of just doing business, they could now bring their families. For women and children who spent nearly all their time on the farm it was wonderful to come to town and enjoy entertainment.”
Figure 1.5 Everest Cinema, Moshi, opened 1953. Photo by the author, 2005
Back in the 1920s, Moshi had had a venue for the occasional screening of silent films, and it acquired a dedicated theater, the Kilimanjaro, by 1940. But like many of the earliest cinemas, that was a small, makeshift affair in a converted garage, and neither the venue nor the films attracted a particularly enthusiastic crowd. This changed dramatically after the war. In the early 1940s, Moshi’s population and economic stature grew as the town became a regional trade and transport hub. This growth in turn spurred local entrepreneurs to invest in new venues for public leisure. The Plaza Cinema opened in 1947, followed by the Everest in 1953 as already described. Thus, in just a few years the seating capacity at Moshi’s cinemas increased from under two hundred to nearly one thousand. The new structures were bold and beautiful, and the proprietors knew enough about film to select movies that would attract a crowd. Khambaita, for example, drove each week to Nairobi for other business and to pick out English films from the stock of Warner Brothers and MGM. He made a similar trip twice a month to Mombasa, where he loaded up his 1-ton truck with general goods in the morning and stopped by the warehouse of a film supplier to pick up Indian films in the afternoon.
Figure
