Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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even half of the patrons served by the Empire, but they remained important venues, permitting Jariwalla to circulate the same films that opened at the Empire before a wider audience. To boost his earnings further, he expanded into potentially lucrative markets in Kenya. A year after he opened the Royal, he began construction on a modest cinema in Mombasa—the Kenya Kinema, which opened in 1923. Four years later, he opened the Alexandra in Nairobi, which he leased to associates to run.71 By the time he opened the Empire in Dar es Salaam in 1929, he was operating six theaters in three territories. For reasons that remain unclear, Jariwalla later pulled out of Kenya as a direct investor, but he continued to be a prominent mentor and supplier for other Asians who entered the industry in subsequent years. As other proprietors came into the market, he rented his prints to them after screening them in his own theaters, beginning the circuit in Zanzibar.
In the early 1930s, Jariwalla updated his two picture palaces, the Royal in Zanzibar and the Empire in Dar es Salaam, to show talkies; although this was great for local audiences, keeping them engaged with the latest developments in the industry, it made his distribution business significantly more expensive. Now, Jariwalla needed to import two types of prints, one featuring synchronized sound and another for theaters that could only show silent films. In the early 1930s, distributors across the world were facing this same conundrum. The best theaters in the largest urban markets updated to talkies by the middle of the decade, but many small-town and rural theaters took years to make the transition. Most studios therefore produced dual versions of their films, one with sound and one without. Jariwalla imported both types of films, beginning his circuit in Zanzibar, where silent films were screened at Cinema ya Bati and sound films premiered at the Royal.
For Jariwalla and many of the entrepreneurs who entered the industry in the ensuing decades, cinema was a side business, a way to indulge and share one’s passion for film and earn a little extra money in the process. But by the 1930s as the East African industry began to take off, Jariwalla partnered with another Zanzibari, Hassanali Hameer Hasham (commonly known as Hameer Gozi, from the Kiswahili ngozi, meaning “skin,” because his main line of business was trading in hides). Hameer harnessed additional networks with producers in India to augment Jariwalla’s supply. These films were screened first at the Royal (renamed the Majestic in 1938 when Hameer bought the theater from Jariwalla) and then sent to Jariwalla in Dar es Salaam, who screened them at the Empire or Azania before releasing them to other exhibitors across East Africa. Ideally, a film would be paid for entirely through screenings at the Majestic in Zanzibar and the Empire and the Azania/Cameo in Dar es Salaam; then, revenue generated through screenings in other men’s venues would accrue as profits. Jariwalla could have consolidated his hold on the industry in the 1930s by building a vertically integrated business along the South African model, but he did not do so. Instead, he supported others getting their start in the industry, including three men who would become major players—and competitors—in the 1940s and 1950s: Hassanali Hameer Hasham, Mohanlal Kala Savani, and Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati. Hameer Hasham later returned the favor, further strengthening the patron-client ties that bound the families together: he appointed Jariwalla’s twenty-one-year-old grandson, Shabir, as manager of the Empress Cinema in Dar es Salaam. Good deeds (and bad) were recalled, repaid, and reinvested over generations.
Figure 1.10 Mohanlal Kala Savani (Samji Kala), founder of Majestic Film Distributors Ltd. and Majestic Theaters, Tanga. Photo courtesy of his son, Chunilal Kala Savani
Mohanlal Kala Savani was an early entrepreneur in the cinema industry in Kenya who began as an importer of five to ten films a year into East Africa and within three decades became the key link in a family-firm chain that distributed Indian films to every corner of the world.72 But like Jariwalla, he started out quite small. He followed his brother from Gujarat to Mombasa in 1918, with only a few shillings in his pocket. Like legions of other young South Asian men at that time, he was deemed trustworthy by someone with capital in Bombay and was employed as an East African agent, receiving imports of flour and dry goods from India and forwarding them across East Africa. By 1925, he had amassed enough capital to start trading on his own. He switched from foodstuffs to textiles and, with a prod from a friend in Bombay, movies too. He had no theater of his own but screened the occasional films that arrived by clearing space in a storeroom near the port. He then passed the films on to those with cinemas, such as Jariwalla, whom he knew because they both dealt in cloth. By 1935, Mohanlal Kala Savani—commonly known as Samji Kala—had saved enough money from his cloth trade to indulge his lifelong fantasy of opening a proper cinema. With advice and support from Jariwalla, he built the Majestic Cinema in Mombasa, which he rented to Jariwalla’s protégé, Hameer Hasham, to run. Although Samji Kala obviously saw potential in the industry, according to his son all his friends thought he was insane for squandering ten years of hard-earned savings on an enterprise dedicated to projecting fantasy and providing entertainment.73 But like others who took the plunge and invested their capital in building a theater when returns were far from guaranteed, he built modestly and in such a way that the seats could be removed and the structure converted into a godown if the cinema failed. In the 1930s and 1940s, Samji Kala focused his energies on the cloth trade; film remained a pleasant diversion but only a modest source of income.
In these early years, box office receipts were split—as they were in India—with most of the proceeds going to the exhibitor. East African exhibitors kept 50 percent of gate takings, and the remaining fifty percent was shared equally between the supplier in India and the middleman who linked Indian suppliers with East African exhibitors. Samji Kala recognized that he could earn significantly more from each print he imported if he controlled more theaters, but he could not expand for several reasons. For one, he was still quite young in the 1930s and did not have the capital to build more than a single theater. Then too, the political and economic situation in Kenya impinged on the development of a vibrant moviegoing culture among the Asians and Africans who were the primary audience for the films he imported. Members of both groups had difficulty freely walking the streets of the city center, especially in Nairobi. In the 1930s, white businessmen, all integrated with the Schlesinger organization out of South Africa, also owned the main cinemas in Nairobi—the Empire, the Capital, and the Playhouse—and restricted Asians’ ability to open other venues. The best that Samji Kala could do was to lease the Empire, along with the Green Cinema next to the New Stanley Hotel, to show Indian films. And the only time when white owners were willing to concede their space to Asians was on Sundays, when Europeans were supposed to be devoting the day to church and family.74 So in Kenya, Sundays were when Indian films were screened and nonwhites went to the show. Only on the eve of independence, in 1960, was Samji Kala finally allowed to open a cinema in Nairobi, the Kenyan city with the largest and most economically empowered population.
With his extensive import-export skill and knowledge, Samji Kala amassed significant capital during the war, which he invested in building regional cinemas in the 1950s. In 1953, he opened the 600-seat Queen’s Cinema in Mombasa (renamed the Kenya after independence), followed by the nearly 700-seat Majestic in Tanga, Tanganyika, which he gave to his sons and nephew to run. Three years later, he helped a brother build the 800-seat Neeta Cinema in Kampala, which became the premier theater in Uganda.75 Another friend, also in the cloth business, built the Plaza in Moshi, Tanganyika, after the war, but by the mid-1950s, he needed to sell it, so Samji Kala bought the Plaza too, in 1955. Over the span of twenty-five years, his situation had changed dramatically. In the early 1930s, he had films but no theaters. By the mid-1950s, he had theaters but needed to step up his game significantly to supply them with films.
Securing access to enough good-quality films necessitated building transnational business networks, networks that often either began with or developed into deeply personal relationships. Back in the 1930s, when Samji Kala opened his first theater in Mombasa and Hameer Hasham bought the Royal in Zanzibar from Jariwalla, the two men formed Majestic Theater Company Ltd., a film import and distribution firm that allowed them to pool their resources and more efficiently trade films across Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Kenya. Jariwalla had been the main supplier up to that time, but he was aging (he was sixty-six in 1938) and content to see younger men build upon the foundation he laid. Independent of Jariwalla’s suppliers,