By illustrating how Africans have continued to provide for their own most important daily needs—from housing materials to food, clothing, transportation, and leisure—this literature recognizes and gives credit to the plethora of small-scale entrepreneurs who have built the continent.31 Historians have given renewed attention to studies of business, and literatures on the “varieties of capitalism” have burgeoned, but to date, these varieties include few people of color and even fewer from the African continent. Historical studies of business and capital in Africa are necessary to illustrate how economic change has occurred over time, how cultural matrixes impacted business practices, and how individual and communal values structured the accumulation of profit. Neither capitalism nor socialism is a fixed system; both change over time and vary across cultures. And no economic system exists without the individuals who bring it to life. This examination of the cinema industry in Tanzania over the course of the twentieth century allows us to see the concrete ways individuals in specific places and times influenced the forms that capitalism and socialism took, illuminating variations, inconsistencies, and contradictions that force us to rethink the norms presumed by economic isms.
The men who built the exhibition and distribution industries in Tanzania during the first half of the twentieth century were businessmen, of course, but also showmen and civic boosters. Profit was important for them, but equally significant was the desire to enhance the splendors of urban life and show their friends and neighbors a good time. As chapters 1, 2, and 8 elaborate, returns on investment in a cinema were slow to materialize at best, but the personal satisfaction gained by sharing a passion for film and turning others into fans was immense. The admiration entrepreneurs earned by building beautiful, prized cultural institutions was also priceless. Colonial officials gave little attention to enhancing the aesthetic qualities of urban Africa, but the entrepreneurs who built theaters created architectural forms that were not just functional but also attractive, innovative, and inspiring. Cinematic capitalists wed their desire to earn money with an equally powerful desire to endow their community with an effervescent social, cultural, and built environment.
A related component of Tanzania’s cinematic capitalism involved building social ties and feelings of reciprocity between entrepreneurs and people in the community at large. In many parts of Africa, there were generalized expectations that economic power came with communal obligations. Precolonial chiefs accumulated wealth through taxes and labor, but if they wanted to be seen as legitimate political officeholders, they needed to redistribute some of the wealth they amassed; this was often accomplished through periodic feasts or alms to the destitute. This ethos was carried into the twentieth century and applied to capitalists. A “good businessman”—and certainly not all were good—shared his wealth via ritual gifts or endowments to public institutions. In his pioneering work on East African philanthropy, Robert Gregory notes that many of the first libraries, gardens, hospitals, and sports grounds to welcome members of all races in colonial East Africa were financed by gifts from successful businessmen and their families.32 Cinematic entrepreneurs gave to their communities by building places where people came together to find pleasure. They also gave to individuals—and particularly children and youth—by letting them into the shows for free. Cinema seats were a commodity to be sold, but the passions and ethics that guided many entrepreneurs pushed them to share rather than to hoard. Selling a seat was certainly the most preferable option, but an exhibitor made no money by letting a seat go empty—yet he earned social capital as a good man if he gave it to someone with pleading eyes and empty pockets. In the words of Bill Nasson, who was well ahead of his time in writing about the significance of local theaters to community life in African towns, this was “penny capitalism with a chubby face,” where cinema owners represented family-owned businesses deeply integrated into the social fabric of urban neighborhoods.33
Figure I.2 Sultana Cinema in Zanzibar, c. 1953. Photo by Ranchhod T. Oza, courtesy of Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar
Situating the business history of exhibition and distribution in Tanzania within a larger context highlights that there was nothing inherently generous about the cinema industry at large; the varieties of capitalism that permeated the business varied immensely across the globe, the continent, and even within Tanzania over time. In the United States, exhibition, distribution, and production became a vertically integrated industry dominated by a small oligarchy of players in the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, five large monopoly producer-distributor-exhibition chains controlled 75 percent of box office receipts in the nation by 1930.34 In Britain, the industry was not quite so integrated, but three major exhibition circuits (Gaumont, ABC, and Odeon) controlled the rights for the first-run releases of all the major studios.35 In Australia and South Africa, vertical integration of distribution and exhibition also held sway. In South Africa, the industry came under the monopoly control of Isador William Schlesinger, an American-born Jewish immigrant who relocated to Johannesburg in 1894. Schlesinger made a quick fortune in insurance, real estate, and citrus before turning his attention to building an entertainment empire that eventually included film production as well as print and broadcast journalism.36 In 1913, Schlesinger began buying up South African theaters. He then moved to consolidate the seven independent suppliers of film in South Africa into one organization in which he was the dominant partner.37 He continued the process of centralizing the industry through the 1940s. According to David Gainer, by the time of World War II Schlesinger controlled the first-run release of nearly all the major British and American studios in South Africa; in addition, he owned the vast majority of the most lucrative theaters in the country and had exclusive distribution contracts with all but twenty of the four hundred cinemas outside the major metropolises.38 He also made valiant and repeated efforts to monopolize distribution across the entire African continent.
In South Africa, independent theaters and film importers had no chance against the economic and political power exercised by Schlesinger’s monopoly. He made a sport of forcing men out of business if they dared challenge his power to determine what films they screened or the terms of their rent.39 According to Gainer, if an exhibitor ever dared to show a film provided by an independent importer or did not follow the screening schedule set by Schlesinger, he would be “starved” of product until he left the business. Others were denied films because they dared to purchase new projectors from someone other than Schlesinger, who dominated equipment sales in South Africa as well.40 Even two of the major powerhouses from Hollywood—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and 20th Century Fox—fought lengthy, costly, and largely unsuccessful battles to break Schlesinger’s monopoly. By the late 1930s, both studios capitulated to Schlesinger’s terms, finding it more profitable and easier to work with him than against him. Together, “The Big Three” came to control 90 percent of the South African market, leaving little room for importers of films from India, continental Europe, or elsewhere.41 The monopoly capitalism and vertical integration of the Gilded Age was on full display in the cinema industry in many corners of the globe.
But the monopoly model was not the only way to organize the industry. Denmark, for one, took an aggressive stance against vertical integration, legally banning related practices in 1933.42 There, distributors were explicitly prohibited from owning cinemas. In India too, individual proprietorships held sway. In neither case did the lack of consolidation hinder the development of robust film production and exhibition industries. Actually, India has always rivaled, if not exceeded, Hollywood in terms of the number of films produced. By the mid-1920s, Indians were producing 100 films a year, a figure that grew to 300 per annum by the 1950s and peaked at more than 900 a year by 1985.43 The number of exhibitors, distributors, and producers in India was similarly large. By the late 1940s, there were more than 600 producers actively making films. In the 1990s, the number of producers was beyond count. As film distribution consolidated in the United States, it democratized in India, growing from 11 distributors in the 1920s to more
