in negotiations: if a percentage deal was offered, it was 70 percent to the distributor and 30 percent to the exhibitor, but more typically, flat-rate MG rentals prevailed. Contracts, rather than negotiated personal relationships, were the rule. Whenever possible, Tanzanian exhibitors kept their supply relationships with local men.
Direct communication and the ability to negotiate over needs and desires were two other components of local business relationships that partners on both sides of the equation valued. Each exhibitor had a primary supplier, but rarely was this a strictly exclusive relationship. The manager of the Azania took most of his films from the Majestic group, but if Indo-African had a film he wanted, he usually could contact someone and get what he sought. If there was an opening in his program that local suppliers could not fill, he would turn to one of the Indian distributors to complete his bill. Theaters primarily supplied by Majestic also sometimes wanted to screen Egyptian or other films imported by Indo-African. And again, with a little face-to-face negotiation, a manager could clear a spot in his monthly schedule for the film he wanted, without being punished by his main supplier. Independent exhibitors in South Africa, by contrast, were bound by block-booking contracts and could not take a film from another supplier. Those who tried to do so found themselves in court for breach of contract and were often subsequently forced out of business entirely.84 Shabir Jariwalla reiterated what I was told by many when he described business arrangements in Tanzania, “We did not write things down. We talked, we came to an agreement, and that was that. We did not need papers or a court. Business was done man to man.”85
Good-natured rivalry between locally based suppliers—fueled by exhibitors—served the interests of the grassroots moviegoing public. By the 1950s, many towns in Tanzania had two cinemas, each of which was independently owned, largely supplied by a different distributor, and equally invested in being voted “the best” by local fans. Exhibitors paid close attention to what their local competitors were screening and pushed their distributors to provide them with films of a similar or superior quality. Again, if their man could not deliver, they looked to someone who could. To keep their clients, the distributors worked tirelessly to provide the best films. Managers at Indo-African Theaters Ltd., working with someone in Raj Kapoor’s studios, secured a deal in the 1950s that gave them exclusive rights to distribute Kapoor’s films—arguably some of the most popular of the era—in East Africa. This meant that fans of Raj Kapoor (and other stars linked to him) were drawn to theaters supplied by Indo-African. In response, the Majestic group worked out a deal with Bhagwan—who was also a director, producer, and actor and famous for his comic antics and allegiance to the proletariat—to become his exclusive East African distributor.86 If a theater supplied by Indo-African screened Awara (Kapoor, 1951), starring Raj Kapoor and Nargis, the rival theater supplied by the Majestic group countered with Bhagwan’s Albela (Bhagwan, 1951), featuring Bhagwan and Geeta Bali. On such days, nearly everyone in town was at the movies.
In his nostalgic recollections of this era, Natwar Joshi recalled how this competitive rivalry between theaters and distributors enhanced the options for local fans. Before the Naaz opened its doors in Mombasa in the early 1950s, he reported, “Samji Kala and their company Majestic Theaters ruled the roost.” He claimed that without competition, “films lay canned in Samji Kala’s warehouse [for ages] before being released.”87 But when Indo-African opened the Naaz, “Majestic declared an all-out war—fortunately to the advantage of the film going public.” Like men’s football clubs and women’s dance troupes during this era, each theater and its core fan base wanted to be able to claim they put on the best show. Having patrons sitting on soda crates in the aisles or standing for three hours along the back wall meant that both exhibitors and distributors had met their mark. The fact that an average cinemagoer like Joshi took the time to write an extended Internet posting about these competitions some sixty years after the events indicates how long these reputations could last and how invested local citizens were in their relationships with neighborhood cinemas.
Tanzanian exhibitors’ relationships with suppliers of English-language films were categorically different from their relationships with local distributors, but even in this regard, Tanzanians exhibited an unusual degree of strength in negotiations over films and rental terms. In the 1910s, Jariwalla purchased used prints of American and British films from the same suppliers of Indian films that he dealt with in Bombay. Others were ordered directly from London, where many prints for English-language films could be purchased secondhand after they had finished their UK run. Most theaters around the world at the time found it cheaper and quicker to order used prints from London than to deal with American suppliers directly.88 Hollywood executives put an end to the secondhand market out of the United Kingdom in the 1920s, demanding that all American films be purchased through one of their licensed agents. Isador Schlesinger had by that time also secured the license to serve as the sole distributor for the majority of British and American studios in South Africa. By 1938, he had secured monopoly rights to distribute for these same studios in all of Africa south of the equator, as stipulated in a contract he repeatedly tried to interpret as giving him exclusive control to everything south of the Sahara.89 But through this entire period, Tanzanians maintained their rights to play the field, categorically refusing to concede to Schlesinger’s monopoly or dictatorial terms.
Jariwalla chafed at Schlesinger’s demands and set the stage for future Tanzanians’ rights to negotiate. Through the 1920s, he continued to import used prints from suppliers in India; only with the advent of talkies did he sign a limited agreement with Schlesinger. But when Jariwalla learned of the rivalry between United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and 20th Century Fox, which spent the 1930s in protracted legal and theatrical battles fighting Schlesinger’s monopoly on distribution in South Africa, he chose to deal with the three American studios instead. Jariwalla signed with United Artists and 20th Century Fox to supply the Empire in Dar es Salaam and with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to supply the Royal in Zanzibar, cutting Schlesinger out of the Tanzanian market almost entirely. When Talati and his partners switched to sound and opened the Empire in Zanzibar, they too signed with United Artists and Fox.90 Following the advice of elder “uncles” in the business, many Tanzanians who opened theaters in the 1940s and 1950s did their best to avoid dealing with Schlesinger. But his films were indeed quite good, and with all the theaters striving to offer original product, some ultimately ended up working with him—but only on reasonable terms. Rather than having exclusive agreements to show the films of just one of the distributors operating out of South Africa, Tanzanians negotiated to choose English-language films from a buffet of options. “You would take five from this guy, three from that one, four from another,” explained one exhibitor. “And each one would fight to get the end of the month dates, because that was when people got paid and when business was best.”91 Exhibitors could play distributors off against each other to get the best films on the best days and for the best terms. Typically, each theater received the bulk of its films from one agent, but East Africans refused to sign exclusive contracts during this period, which also gave them leverage in negotiating rental terms.
Block booking and blind selling were other standard features of contracts in oligopolistic markets that East Africans avoided, and as a result, Tanzanians enjoyed the best films produced by the major studios, rather than the B- and C-grade movies screened in much of the rest of the continent. Under block-booking and blind-selling arrangements, a distributor was given the power to book anywhere from twenty-six to fifty-two weeks of a theater’s schedule, sending the exhibitor films of various qualities with no guarantee that particular titles or stars would be included. Once signed, these contracts lasted for years.92 From the earliest days, Jariwalla refused to capitulate to such terms; he chose what films were screened in his theaters, and as a result, Tanzanians were treated to some of the best American product. During any given week in the 1930s, the Royal might screen an American or British drama on Monday and Tuesday followed by an Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy comedy or an adventure film such as The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) or King Kong (Cooper, 1933) on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Saturday’s bill would cater to the European crowd, often featuring a musical starring Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman, or Shirley Temple.93 Sundays were always reserved for Indian and Egyptian
