cinema was a space of encounters—a borderland if you will—where Tanzanians engaged with media cultures from across the globe and a diverse range of people from their own towns.
CINEMA, CITIES, AND COLONIALISM
By the late 1950s, Tanzania had more cinemas than any country in eastern and southern Africa—with the notable exception of South Africa—and one of the richest African and Asian moviegoing cultures on the continent. At the end of the colonial era, Tanzania boasted nearly forty theaters, the rough equivalent of all the theaters in French West Africa combined.3 Uganda had only twelve theaters, the Rhodesias (today’s Zimbabwe and Zambia) eleven, and Malawi a mere four.4 Every major Tanzanian town had at least one theater, and many towns had several. Kenya was a far richer colony, but it had only half as many theaters. What accounts for this disparity?
Map I.1 Tanzanian cinemas
The relative degree of urbanization is one important factor that helps explain such variations. Zanzibar—the epicenter from which cinema spread throughout the region at the turn of the twentieth century—had the most urbanized population in sub-Saharan Africa, with more than 50,000 people living permanently in town long before the British Empire claimed the isles.5 The first records we have of cinema attendance indicate that by the mid-1920s, some 2,700 people were going to the cinema in Zanzibar each week, and in the neighboring isle of Pemba, a somewhat smaller but no less impressive 1,500 patrons took in a show weekly.6 According to historian James Burns, in neighboring Kenya and nearby Zimbabwe going to urban cinemas was largely unheard of among Africans at the time.7 In Kenya, less than 8 percent of the population was urban at independence, which partly explains why many Kenyans only began going to the cinema in the 1960s (and many actually never went at all). By the 1960s, one-third of Zanzibar’s population was living in the capital city; by contrast, only 2 percent of all Ugandans were living in Kampala.8 Moviegoing was an urban phenomenon.
Africans’ historical relationship to the city was an equally important factor impacting who went to the show and how often. Tanzanian towns with permanent cinemas in the 1920s—including fairly small ones such as Chake-Chake, Tanga, and Ujiji—existed well before European arrival on the continent: they had permanent populations who considered the town home; many residents who earned their living independent of European employers; and long historical traditions of large-scale, urban, public entertainment at night. When entrepreneurs began offering itinerant shows featuring moving pictures in these towns, crowds welcomed the new arrivals with the enthusiasm they historically extended to dhows pulling into port or caravans marching into a market square.9 Traders brought not only goods but also news, stories, music, dance, and other cultural styles from across the region and indeed the world. Urban residents of these trade-based towns had long been engaged connoisseurs of the cosmopolitan. Moving pictures were a novel form of cultural product in the first decades of the twentieth century, but urban residents appropriated them and made them their own just as earlier generations had done with Islam, the kanga, (cloth) or the msondo and unyago drums. After World War II, the number of cinemas in mainland Tanzania grew exponentially, as up-country entrepreneurs diversified their holdings and invested their capital assets to put their towns on the cinematic cultural map. The fact that cinemas sprang up all across the country illustrates the immense value Tanzanians placed on enjoyment of this cultural form. Local exhibitors delighted in their ability to bring global media products to local doorsteps and also in their capacity to bring their community together and their town to life at night.
All across the continent, people appreciated celluloid spectacle and drama, but the nature of colonialism, capitalism, and urban civic life was not always conducive to the growth of a vibrant moviegoing culture. The literature on screenings offered by colonial film units and mining compounds demonstrates that film and collective viewing were widely appreciated all across the continent.10 But as Odile Goerg’s 2015 book on commercial cinema in colonial French West Africa reveals, audience size varied greatly from town to town.11 It was not that Africans in Dakar, Bamako, or Cape Town did not appreciate this form of leisure as much as their counterparts in Tanga or Ujiji; the issue was having the opportunity to take in a show.
Settler colonies had stringent policies restricting Africans’ access to town. Urban housing was limited, and pass laws and police harassment constrained Africans’ freedom of movement at night. Many towns were also largely colonial creations. The Kenyan towns of Nairobi and Kisumu, for instance, were established by Europeans and relied on a largely migrant labor force. Structurally and administratively, Africans were made to feel as though they did not belong. In Nairobi, they needed a special, government-issued permit before they could buy a ticket to a show. A patronizing list of rules and expectations—detailing a dress code and mode of comportment while in a theater—handed out with the special pass also hampered Africans’ desire to go to a film.12 In the 1950s, as moviegoing blossomed in Tanzania, Kenya was largely under lockdown due to Mau Mau. One can only imagine that in the tense political climate of the Emergency—with more than fifty thousand Kenyans arrested in a single week in Nairobi during Operation Anvil—few were venturing downtown to see what was playing at the cinema. In Zambia and the Belgian Congo too, Africans were prohibited from entering commercial, indoor theaters until just a few years before independence.13 In many cities across the continent, mining compounds, colonial social centers, and church facilities served as the primary venues for Africans’ engagements with film.
Tanganyika’s status as a League of Nations Mandated Territory and Zanzibar’s status as a Protectorate, rather than as formal colonies, gave Africans in these areas a few more protections than those living in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the Congo, but colonialism was never benign. Across the continent, official colonial opinion was that unless they were required for menial labor Africans belonged in the countryside. Most authorities were convinced that urban Africans were idle or lazy or, worse still, criminally inclined.14 Tanzanian officials were no exception. Efforts to “protect” the sanctity and security of the cities were constant. Africans had to struggle to make their housing legal, and common strategies for earning an independent living in town—such as selling food on the street, raising a few goats or chickens, hawking fish door to door, or selling beer and sex—were criminalized. Offenders were not only arrested or fined but also frequently returned to “where they belonged.” According to Andrew Burton, the capital city of Dar es Salaam was regularly hit by allegedly curative purges to cleanse the city of so-called undesirables.15 But despite official efforts, Dar es Salaam’s population grew, from approximately twenty-five thousand when the British took control from the Germans after World War I to nearly one hundred thirty thousand at the end of colonial rule.16 Colonial authorities had the power to criminalize African urban lives and livelihoods, but clearly, they could not control them.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzanians also fought for Africans’ rights to go to the movies. James Brennan and Andrew Burton have written masterfully of Dar es Salaam as viewed and imagined by colonial officials and urban planners, where urban space was neatly divided into exclusive racial zones. The city center—where the cinemas were located—was officially outside the “‘African zone,” and any African found there by police after dark was subject to arrest.17 But thousands of Africans went to the cinemas in Dar es Salaam nonetheless, pursuing their pleasures as they desired and giving little heed to administrative imaginary lines. Cinema patrons and owners protested against colonial efforts to keep Africans away from the show, and within a few years of the British takeover of the territory, they had won certain concessions pertaining to Africans’ rights to the city (see chapters 1 and 5). By the 1930s, one of the few “legitimate” excuses Africans could offer to escape arrest when caught in the city center after dark was that they were coming from the cinema or escorting a friend home
