Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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to only some ten films annually out of India, which was less than half the number they needed to be able to change films each week of the year. Moreover, not all the films were top-class productions, which did not help them build public enthusiasm for regular evenings out at the show. So the partners built bridges to Jariwalla’s contacts in India and reached out to friends and encouraged them to either import what films they could or help them make additional connections to some of the hundreds of independent distributors operating in India. By the 1950s, the Majestic Theater Company was able to supply some forty Indian films a year to the East African market.
Business models from the cloth trade also influenced sales and marketing in film. Jariwalla and Samji Kala made their initial fortunes importing and distributing cloth; they knew that the kanga cloths worn by East African women sold best when they were attractive and of good quality but available for only a limited time. The most successful cloth merchants carried high-quality, limited-edition prints—limited not necessarily in quantity but in the time they were sold in local shops before being shipped off to partners in smaller towns—in order to boost demand. This strategy was applied to film exhibition. Distributors aimed to give East African audiences access to a new Indian film each week, and in towns with more than one cinema, they wanted each to offer a different product. By pooling their collective supply of films and changing them out after only one or two days of screening, the distributors enticed the public to go to the theater to see “the latest,” just as women rushed to the shops to purchase the newest limited-edition kanga cloths. If you wanted to see a film, you needed to go to the theater on opening day or risk missing the film entirely.
Indo-African Theaters, discussed earlier in this chapter, was another group that became a major film supplier in East Africa. Like Hameer Hasham and Samji Kala, the men who formed this group had been given a leg up by Jariwalla, and they too ventured into film import and distribution because they needed to supply their own theaters. Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati, the lead partner, purchased the Cinema ya Bati from Jariwalla and showed silent films there until 1939, when he and his partners—Abdullah Mohammed Thaver, M. S. Sunjit, and Manilal Madhavji Suchak—opened the Empire in Zanzibar. To make a success of the Empire, they needed to attract patrons by showing films that rivaled those screened at the neighboring Majestic. But by the time Talati and his group got into the business of screening talkies, Jariwalla and Hameer Hasham already had an established network of theaters that they were obligated to supply with films. If the Empire wanted these same films, they would have to wait at the back of the line. Meanwhile, their chances of attracting patrons to see repeats months after their initial screening were about as good as the odds of getting Zanzibari women to pay full price for last season’s kangas.76
Figure 1.11 Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati, born in Zanzibar in 1889. Talati partnered with Abdullah Mohammed Thaver, M. S. Sunjit, and Manilal Madhavji Suchak to open the Empire Cinema in Zanzibar in 1939.
To secure enough new movies to compete with the Majestic, the partners pooled their resources and worked with their connections in India, Egypt, Japan, and Europe to get films. Rather quickly, they developed a reputation as premier suppliers not just of Indian films but also of films from regions of the world no one else had yet tapped. Thaver’s connections to the Egyptian film industry, in particular, were widely praised.
The partners in Indo-African were then left with the same conundrum that faced others: a single, 400-seat venue could not earn enough to cover the cost of importing good films. Clearly, they had to secure additional venues, and with the profit-sharing ratio as it was, owning or leasing the theaters was the most lucrative option. In the 1940s, they brought Kassum Sunderji Samji into the group. He built the Avalon and leased it back to the partners to run, and in the 1950s, he also financed the New Chox and the Amana, where he appointed his son and another client as managers.77 Harbanslal Sohanlal Ghai, from Nairobi, joined the group after the war, and with his connections and collateral, the company secured a loan for TSh 300,000 to construct a beautiful theater in Mombasa, the Naaz.78 As Asian businessmen across Tanganyika built theaters during the 1950s, Indo-African brought them into the group, renting to up-country theaters films they themselves imported and first screened in their own cinemas in Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, and Mombasa. Eventually, the Indo-African partners owned some of the premier theaters in the most lucrative markets in Tanzania, but unlike Schlesinger in South Africa, they made no effort to push others out of the exhibition business. They were quite content running 10 percent of the theaters in Tanzania (four out of forty) and earning a reasonable profit. Over a little more than two decades, Shavekshaw Hormasji Talati’s business burgeoned from one modest, tin building showing silent films to a firm with international partners and investors operating world-class theaters in Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Kenya.
In the 1950s, Dar es Salaam became the top market for cinematic entertainment, generating half or more of the industry’s total earnings in the country.79 Before the war, the city had only three theaters: the Empire, the Odeon, and the Azania, with a combined seating capacity of a “mere” 1,400. With the addition of the Avalon, the New Chox, the Amana, and the Empress in the 1950s, the available seating increased nearly threefold: with the exception of the New Chox, each of these venues sat between 750 and 800 patrons. The theaters competed wildly, not only in terms of size and architectural style but also for films to delight their fans. Diversity, variety, and novelty were highly prized by citizens in Dar es Salaam, so distributors did their best to make every theater a first-run venue, with each offering a unique film. Exhibitors could ask to keep a film or show it again after a few months, but they were offered a steady supply of new product. Only later did reeling and running the same film at multiple venues became increasingly common.
The number of films that moved through the Tanganyikan capital during any given week in the 1950s was truly astounding. There were seven different theaters, and each changed its pictures three to four times a week. From Monday through Friday, when crowds were smaller, American and British films filled the bills. On Sundays, each theater typically offered a different Indian or Egyptian musical feature, and the Avalon, the Azania, the Odeon, and the Empress frequently held their feature over for an afternoon ladies-only screening. Indo-African and Majestic were the main local suppliers of films for the Sunday market, importing more than a hundred films a year through Zanzibar by the 1950s.80 Their selections were augmented by a similar, if not larger, number of films coming from other small, independent local distributors as well as large conglomerates out of India with subsidiaries in Nairobi. Exhibitors took movies from whichever distributor offered the best films on the best terms. Although the Majestic and Indo-African groups were rivals, the Azania—built by Jariwalla and thus part of the Majestic group—frequently screened Egyptian films provided by Indo-African. Rivalry did not preclude cooperation.
Dar es Salaam was a key market, but distributors could rarely turn a profit on films screened in just this single town, even when they owned the venues. Consequently, they needed to secure additional playing time for their products up-country, and to that end, they competed in culturally specific ways. Like a bachelor seeking a lady’s hand, they had to woo and charm to get their films shown in other men’s venues, and they also had to fulfill their promises. More than one up-country exhibitor I interviewed likened these relationships to marriage, suggesting that business partners were chosen based upon reputation and that relationships remained strong only when they were mutually beneficial. As one exhibitor put it, “You see, everyone had their connections, their personal connection to get movies, good movies. If your man couldn’t fulfill your needs you looked for another who could.”81 An exhibitor was not bound by exclusive, long-term contracts to any one supplier. When a new exhibitor opened a theater, he talked to elder “uncles” with experience in the industry, who shared their knowledge of players’ reputations and began making inquiries and offering proposals to distributors on the junior man’s behalf. As with marriages, there were occasionally partners who lied, cheated, or disrespected their vows, but the community of exhibitors and film suppliers in East Africa was small and tightly knit. If a man was dishonest or disloyal, others were sure to find out. Gossip served to discipline and punish. A good reputation was as critical to success as good product. Many experimented with distribution, but only