Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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about his escapades designing and constructing the Everest, which opened in Moshi in 1953 when he was a mere lad of twenty-nine. “I built the Everest all by myself! It is 60 by 40 feet without any I-beams. Myself I built that! It was quite an architectural feat for the time, and it is still standing in the center of town,” he declared, positively glowing as we spoke.37 From the age of thirteen, when he still lived in India, Khambaita regularly went to the movies, and he became an avid reader of film magazines. During the war, he joined the British service as a construction contractor and was sent to Tanganyika. He had extended family in Moshi and decided to stay after the war, in large part because he managed to convince his elders, who had a transport business and auto repair shop, to invest a small fortune in building the Everest. As a civil engineer, he oversaw the construction of countless buildings in future years, but none made him feel as accomplished as an architect or as proud as a citizen as his work on the Everest. And as for Khambaita’s family, though they had long been well known in Moshi, they acquired regional fame after the Everest opened. “People would come from fifty, even seventy miles, to see a movie on Sunday!” he recalled. “They waited all week for that day! On Saturdays too, farmers would come. Instead of just doing business, they could now bring their families. For women and children who spent nearly all their time on the farm it was wonderful to come to town and enjoy entertainment.”
Figure 1.5 Everest Cinema, Moshi, opened 1953. Photo by the author, 2005
Back in the 1920s, Moshi had had a venue for the occasional screening of silent films, and it acquired a dedicated theater, the Kilimanjaro, by 1940. But like many of the earliest cinemas, that was a small, makeshift affair in a converted garage, and neither the venue nor the films attracted a particularly enthusiastic crowd. This changed dramatically after the war. In the early 1940s, Moshi’s population and economic stature grew as the town became a regional trade and transport hub. This growth in turn spurred local entrepreneurs to invest in new venues for public leisure. The Plaza Cinema opened in 1947, followed by the Everest in 1953 as already described. Thus, in just a few years the seating capacity at Moshi’s cinemas increased from under two hundred to nearly one thousand. The new structures were bold and beautiful, and the proprietors knew enough about film to select movies that would attract a crowd. Khambaita, for example, drove each week to Nairobi for other business and to pick out English films from the stock of Warner Brothers and MGM. He made a similar trip twice a month to Mombasa, where he loaded up his 1-ton truck with general goods in the morning and stopped by the warehouse of a film supplier to pick up Indian films in the afternoon.
Figure 1.6 (above) Playhouse Cinema (later renamed the Shazia), opened 1947, and (right) Highland Cinema, opened 1961, both in Iringa. Photos by the author, 2005
. . .
After the war, the number of cinemas on the mainland mushroomed, as countless people endeavored to elevate the social and cultural status of their up-country towns and shake off their collective status as “country bumpkins” woefully behind their coastal cousins. The vast majority of the cinemas that eventually spanned Tanzania were built in the late 1940s and early 1950s. What is truly astounding is not how widespread the desire for cinematic entertainment was but the degree to which local entrepreneurs were willing to invest in meeting the demand. Of course, many of the cinemas built up-country were substantially smaller than those along the coast, averaging between 450 seats in bigger towns and 250 seats in smaller locales. But then, many of these up-country towns were tiny in comparison to Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam. Bukoba, Mbeya, Musoma, and Shinyanga, for instance, all had urban populations that barely reached three thousand in 1948.38 And though many other towns saw their populations double or even triple between the 1930s and the end of the war, the populations of Lindi, Morogoro, Dodoma, and Moshi numbered only eight thousand each. Nonetheless, families like the Khambaitas—infused with postwar optimism and confident that a cinema would modernize the town and advance its stature as a regional economic, social, and cultural hub—invested their capital in putting on a show.39 And indeed, the bright lights and spectacles of the cinema drew endless numbers to the center of town. Businessmen who invested in building a cinema saw slow returns from ticket sales, but the social capital they amassed certainly exceeded any they might have garnered by opening a dry goods store.
The increasing number of cinemas on the mainland was part of a much larger pattern of urban infrastructural growth across East Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. I was repeatedly told by interviewees that “a lot of people made a lot of money” during the war, and after it was over, many converted their liquid cash into solid investments in property. The downtown areas of urban centers across the region exploded with new commercial, housing, and office construction, and a few people invested in building spaces for public entertainment. In some towns previously considered sleepy backwaters, businessmen either established cinemas for the first time or built up-to-date facilities to replace makeshift theaters that already existed.40 Like early investors along the coast, they hedged their bets and incorporated additional options in their designs. Thus, should a theater flop, which never really happened, the auditorium was constructed so that it could easily be converted into a storage facility or garage. Office suites and retail facilities were also integral components of building designs. Theaters along the coast incorporated office space as well, but the cinema was always the heart of the building and the main reason it was constructed. But in Moshi, Arusha, Mwanza, Iringa, Morogoro, and many other regional towns that blossomed in the 1950s, the pressures for office and retail space were nearly as intense as the demand for modern theaters. Building design thus catered to the multiple demands of the town, while simultaneously allowing investors to diversify their holdings. In these regional towns, the rent earned from office and retail space and small restaurants housed in the same building as the cinema often exceeded the theater proceeds.41
Figure 1.7 Metropole Cinema (later renamed the Shan), Morogoro, opened 1953. Photo by the author, 2005
Asian businessmen and traders generally avoided putting their savings in an established bank at that time, preferring to hide their cash, loan it to others, or pool it in communal savings societies until they had enough to do something substantial.42 Prior to the nationalizations of the 1970s, when Asians in Tanzania and Uganda lost most of their property, real estate investments were considered grounded and relatively secure. They also tended to earn rates of return that surpassed the interest offered by banks.
A fair amount of the capital used to finance the construction boom of the 1950s was acquired from the “illicit” trade and transport of food, clothing, and other items deemed nonessential by colonial authorities in the preceding years. As the British turned their attention and resources toward the war effort, steamers and railways were requisitioned to transport military supplies, materials, and personnel. East Africans’ notions of essential commodities often differed substantially from those of the British and included rice, cloth, matches, and kerosene, all of which were rationed by the state. Private traders stepped in to fill the void between consumer demand and official supply, and soon, alternative forms of transport, supply, and finance moved goods between East Africa and India, Arabia, China, and Japan. The dhow trade in and out of East Africa made a resurgence during the war, and men with lorries moved goods throughout the continent.43 Some dhows docked at established ports, where their cargoes were subject to standard duty rates, but many used smaller landing stations to avoid paying taxes. There, they were met by men with private motor vehicles who transported goods for export and traded them for imports. The risks in transporting goods across the ocean were steep, and the consequences for being caught “smuggling” on land were great; combined with a general shortage of goods, this translated into high black market prices. Individuals willing and able to provide transport earned handsome profits, and by war’s end, they had substantial cash reserves.44 Many of the men who built up-country cinemas after the war