at the Royal (renamed the Majestic in 1938 when Hameer bought the theater from Jariwalla) and then sent to Jariwalla in Dar es Salaam, who screened them at the Empire or Azania before releasing them to other exhibitors across East Africa. Ideally, a film would be paid for entirely through screenings at the Majestic in Zanzibar and the Empire and the Azania/Cameo in Dar es Salaam; then, revenue generated through screenings in other men’s venues would accrue as profits. Jariwalla could have consolidated his hold on the industry in the 1930s by building a vertically integrated business along the South African model, but he did not do so. Instead, he supported others getting their start in the industry, including three men who would become major players—and competitors—in the 1940s and 1950s: Hassanali Hameer Hasham, Mohanlal Kala Savani, and Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati. Hameer Hasham later returned the favor, further strengthening the patron-client ties that bound the families together: he appointed Jariwalla’s twenty-one-year-old grandson, Shabir, as manager of the Empress Cinema in Dar es Salaam. Good deeds (and bad) were recalled, repaid, and reinvested over generations.
Figure 1.10 Mohanlal Kala Savani (Samji Kala), founder of Majestic Film Distributors Ltd. and Majestic Theaters, Tanga. Photo courtesy of his son, Chunilal Kala Savani
Mohanlal Kala Savani was an early entrepreneur in the cinema industry in Kenya who began as an importer of five to ten films a year into East Africa and within three decades became the key link in a family-firm chain that distributed Indian films to every corner of the world.72 But like Jariwalla, he started out quite small. He followed his brother from Gujarat to Mombasa in 1918, with only a few shillings in his pocket. Like legions of other young South Asian men at that time, he was deemed trustworthy by someone with capital in Bombay and was employed as an East African agent, receiving imports of flour and dry goods from India and forwarding them across East Africa. By 1925, he had amassed enough capital to start trading on his own. He switched from foodstuffs to textiles and, with a prod from a friend in Bombay, movies too. He had no theater of his own but screened the occasional films that arrived by clearing space in a storeroom near the port. He then passed the films on to those with cinemas, such as Jariwalla, whom he knew because they both dealt in cloth. By 1935, Mohanlal Kala Savani—commonly known as Samji Kala—had saved enough money from his cloth trade to indulge his lifelong fantasy of opening a proper cinema. With advice and support from Jariwalla, he built the Majestic Cinema in Mombasa, which he rented to Jariwalla’s protégé, Hameer Hasham, to run. Although Samji Kala obviously saw potential in the industry, according to his son all his friends thought he was insane for squandering ten years of hard-earned savings on an enterprise dedicated to projecting fantasy and providing entertainment.73 But like others who took the plunge and invested their capital in building a theater when returns were far from guaranteed, he built modestly and in such a way that the seats could be removed and the structure converted into a godown if the cinema failed. In the 1930s and 1940s, Samji Kala focused his energies on the cloth trade; film remained a pleasant diversion but only a modest source of income.
In these early years, box office receipts were split—as they were in India—with most of the proceeds going to the exhibitor. East African exhibitors kept 50 percent of gate takings, and the remaining fifty percent was shared equally between the supplier in India and the middleman who linked Indian suppliers with East African exhibitors. Samji Kala recognized that he could earn significantly more from each print he imported if he controlled more theaters, but he could not expand for several reasons. For one, he was still quite young in the 1930s and did not have the capital to build more than a single theater. Then too, the political and economic situation in Kenya impinged on the development of a vibrant moviegoing culture among the Asians and Africans who were the primary audience for the films he imported. Members of both groups had difficulty freely walking the streets of the city center, especially in Nairobi. In the 1930s, white businessmen, all integrated with the Schlesinger organization out of South Africa, also owned the main cinemas in Nairobi—the Empire, the Capital, and the Playhouse—and restricted Asians’ ability to open other venues. The best that Samji Kala could do was to lease the Empire, along with the Green Cinema next to the New Stanley Hotel, to show Indian films. And the only time when white owners were willing to concede their space to Asians was on Sundays, when Europeans were supposed to be devoting the day to church and family.74 So in Kenya, Sundays were when Indian films were screened and nonwhites went to the show. Only on the eve of independence, in 1960, was Samji Kala finally allowed to open a cinema in Nairobi, the Kenyan city with the largest and most economically empowered population.
With his extensive import-export skill and knowledge, Samji Kala amassed significant capital during the war, which he invested in building regional cinemas in the 1950s. In 1953, he opened the 600-seat Queen’s Cinema in Mombasa (renamed the Kenya after independence), followed by the nearly 700-seat Majestic in Tanga, Tanganyika, which he gave to his sons and nephew to run. Three years later, he helped a brother build the 800-seat Neeta Cinema in Kampala, which became the premier theater in Uganda.75 Another friend, also in the cloth business, built the Plaza in Moshi, Tanganyika, after the war, but by the mid-1950s, he needed to sell it, so Samji Kala bought the Plaza too, in 1955. Over the span of twenty-five years, his situation had changed dramatically. In the early 1930s, he had films but no theaters. By the mid-1950s, he had theaters but needed to step up his game significantly to supply them with films.
Securing access to enough good-quality films necessitated building transnational business networks, networks that often either began with or developed into deeply personal relationships. Back in the 1930s, when Samji Kala opened his first theater in Mombasa and Hameer Hasham bought the Royal in Zanzibar from Jariwalla, the two men formed Majestic Theater Company Ltd., a film import and distribution firm that allowed them to pool their resources and more efficiently trade films across Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Kenya. Jariwalla had been the main supplier up to that time, but he was aging (he was sixty-six in 1938) and content to see younger men build upon the foundation he laid. Independent of Jariwalla’s suppliers, Samji Kala and Hameer Hasham each had access to only some ten films annually out of India, which was less than half the number they needed to be able to change films each week of the year. Moreover, not all the films were top-class productions, which did not help them build public enthusiasm for regular evenings out at the show. So the partners built bridges to Jariwalla’s contacts in India and reached out to friends and encouraged them to either import what films they could or help them make additional connections to some of the hundreds of independent distributors operating in India. By the 1950s, the Majestic Theater Company was able to supply some forty Indian films a year to the East African market.
Business models from the cloth trade also influenced sales and marketing in film. Jariwalla and Samji Kala made their initial fortunes importing and distributing cloth; they knew that the kanga cloths worn by East African women sold best when they were attractive and of good quality but available for only a limited time. The most successful cloth merchants carried high-quality, limited-edition prints—limited not necessarily in quantity but in the time they were sold in local shops before being shipped off to partners in smaller towns—in order to boost demand. This strategy was applied to film exhibition. Distributors aimed to give East African audiences access to a new Indian film each week, and in towns with more than one cinema, they wanted each to offer a different product. By pooling their collective supply of films and changing them out after only one or two days of screening, the distributors enticed the public to go to the theater to see “the latest,” just as women rushed to the shops to purchase the newest limited-edition kanga cloths. If you wanted to see a film, you needed to go to the theater on opening day or risk missing the film entirely.
Indo-African Theaters, discussed earlier in this chapter, was another group that became a major film supplier in East Africa. Like Hameer Hasham and Samji Kala, the men who formed this group had been given a leg up by Jariwalla, and they too ventured into film import and distribution because they needed to supply their own theaters. Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati, the lead partner, purchased the Cinema ya Bati from Jariwalla and showed silent films there until 1939, when he and his partners—Abdullah
