at shows—and not just in Africa but across the globe.25 These issues are explored in detail in chapters 3, 5, and 7, with particular attention paid to how cinemas and cities were perceived across the country as well as how women’s attendance changed over time and varied according to the types of films screened. Typically, however, Sunday shows were family affairs in Tanzania. Everyone, everywhere, regardless of gender or age, attended these shows. Sunday screenings often gave women and children their sole opportunity to venture downtown. Along the coast, theater owners went a step further and responded to women’s clamoring for additional public leisure opportunities by offering gender-segregated, ladies-only (zanana) shows. There was nothing inherently immoral about moviegoing or watching films; it was the possibility of encounters with random men that threatened a woman’s respectability. The ladies-only shows provided women with the opportunity to enter the public realm without jeopardizing their reputations. These all-female matinees, attended by hundreds each week, were a blessing to women who otherwise found few patriarchally sanctioned opportunities to cavort downtown. In Zanzibar, women from the royal family joined with hundreds of less prominent citizens to watch Indian and Egyptian films. Such outings were the highlight of the week. Whether women lived in purdah or not, ladies’ shows gave them a chance to dress up, stroll through town, and make public space their own (see chapters 3 and 5). Thus, even being in purdah did not prevent women and girls from participating in the film-inspired debates that engulfed households, kitchens, and shops.
Cinematic content came to life in the city, further enlarging the networks of people brought and bound together through their engagement with film. One could spot other fans of a favorite star at the market or on the street if they rolled up their pants just like Raj Kapoor did in Awara (Kapoor, 1951) and Shree 420 (Kapoor, 1955); donned a hat like Dev Anand’s in Guide (Anand, 1965); or coifed their hair like Elvis, Geeta Bali, or Pam Grier. In the 1960s, two men who were utter strangers might meet at a shop because they were both in hot pursuit of limited, underground supplies of James Bond underwear with “007” emblazoned on the elastic band. Later, when they met again at a football match or on the city bus, they might nod and acknowledge that they had more in common than the obvious. Men who dared to sport “Pecos pants” (wide bell-bottoms) when such transgressions often resulted in public assaults by members of the Youth League or Green Guards or even a stint in jail signaled, as they walked down the street, not only their love of Guliano Gemma and Italian westerns but also their membership in a larger group of youth at odds with the socialist state’s efforts to control the most mundane aspects of life (see chapters 5 and 7).26 Across generations, fans adopted looks, stances, and language from the movies, but as they did so, the audience they had in mind for their performative engagement was always local. Adopting the latest in cosmopolitan fashion demonstrated their knowledge of global trends and at the same time conveyed their desire to set their own city’s style.
Figure I.1 Jaws Corner. Photo by Sabri Fair, December 2014
Films were also physically inscribed on urban space. Jaws Corner is certainly one of the more enduring examples. Jaws Corner is a well-known baraza, or neighborhood spot where men meet, drink coffee, play board games, socialize, and debate local and world events. This corner, where six major streets intersect in the narrow, winding way of Zanzibar’s famed old town, had long been a major meeting spot. In the 1970s, the area was renamed by a group of young men after they watched the blockbuster hit Jaws (Spielberg, 1975).27 The following day, they painted the first shark on a wall and christened the area Jaws Corner. Forty-some years later, this area is still referred to by that name, and the symbol of Jaws is still regularly repainted on the walls of the buildings to mark the territory.
Jaws Corner powerfully illustrates the complex ways global film products are interpreted, inscribed, and given meaning at the local level. Like audiences across the globe, these young men in Zanzibar were thrilled, scared, and fascinated by Jaws, one of the first movies to successfully employ mechanical stunts. The film became a global cult classic, filling theaters on return runs not just in the United States but also in South Africa, Australia, and Tanzania.28 When Jaws made a two-day repeat run at the Majestic in Zanzibar in 1978, it filled the theater with a midweek crowd of more than twenty-five hundred fans, marking it as one of the most popular Hollywood films ever screened in the isles.29 Some of the young men who established Jaws Corner were fishermen; others swam regularly at the nearby waterfront. They teased and terrified each other, screaming “JAWS!” or humming the infamous tune that foreshadowed the shark’s attack while they worked and played in the water.30 They engaged each other as well as anyone who stopped for coffee or a board game at this busy corner in debates inspired by the film. Was Jaws real or fake? Could a shark really chomp a boat in half? How did those fishermen in the village of Nungwi, known for catching the sharks regularly sold in the market, manage? What mistakes did the old fisherman in the film make that resulted in his defeat? Did Zanzibari fishermen have better strategies for outsmarting the fish?
But these young men who painted Jaws on the walls of their baraza and pestered everyone with their incessant questions about how to defeat a shark also had some big local fish in mind. According to people I interviewed, Jaws was a fitting metaphor for political life in the isles. Like many in Zanzibar in the 1970s, the lead character in the film was a fisherman who had to use his wits to stay alive and remain a step ahead of his adversary. He had to be constantly prepared for an unexpected assault and continually rethinking strategies and new ways to maneuver. Although this character was killed in the end, he provided the knowledge and inspired tenacity that allowed his younger compatriots to defeat the shark.
Many residents and shopkeepers in the neighborhood of Jaws Corner were targeted in the pogroms that wracked the isles after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, and relations between actors of the state and neighborhood residents have been tense ever since. The trauma suffered by families, friends, and neighbors in the 1960s was kept from healing by regular assaults, both petty and grand—a situation that has persisted to the present day. The founding members of Jaws Corner were politicized by the initial attacks on their community, and many have been harassed, arrested, and imprisoned over the years. Jaws Corner eventually became synonymous with vocal opposition to the ruling political party. In the topography of urban place-names, it became a landmark, an emblem of a collective resolve to kill the monster who attacked the defenseless. In the 1990s, during the early years of multiparty politics, Jaws Corner was one of the first public spaces associated with the opposition Civic United Front (CUF), and often, there were more posters for CUF in the vicinity of Jaws Corner than there were in the rest of the city combined. For decades, then, Jaws has served as a local metaphor for the relentless, bone-crushing power of the state. But like Quint, the rugged fisherman and less-than-noble hero of the film, those who inhabit Jaws Corner refuse to concede to naked, terrorizing power. They have resolved to defeat the beast or die trying.
CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, AND RACISM
Examining the role of Tanzanian entrepreneurs in building, running, and sustaining the cinema industry provides a necessary counter to broad-based stereotypes of Africa as a continent in need of external aid to foster economic development. In this book, we see instead men who recognized an opportunity and ran with it. They provided a service their townspeople clamored for and earned a respectable living in the process. Like the wealth of literature on the African “informal economies” that burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s, this study highlights how local businesspeople mobilized vast local, regional,
