Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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the social worth and deeper meaning of their characters debated. For days, weeks, and sometimes months after a premier, people talked about the message of a film and its implications for their own lives. Generational tensions, the meanings of modernity, class exploitation, political corruption, dance and fashion styles, and the nature of romantic love were just a few of the topics films raised that people avidly analyzed and discussed. As Birgit Meyer has poignantly argued, films become hits because they give form to socially pervasive thoughts, dreams, and nightmares. Movies, she asserts, “make things public”—visible, visceral, material, and thus available for tangible public debate.1 On street corners and shop stoops in Tanzania and in living rooms and workplaces, people engaged both global media and each other as they sifted and sorted, weighed and deciphered, and determined what they did and did not like about the places, the people, and the styles they encountered on the screen. Whether you went to the movies or not, said many, there was no escaping these discussions. For much of the twentieth century, films were the talk of the town in Tanzania.
From the early 1900s, when the display of moving pictures first became a regular feature of urban nightlife in Zanzibar, local businessmen struggled hard to meet audience demand. Not only were they often pressed to accommodate more fans than their venues could hold, they also had to work hard to build dynamic regional and transnational networks of film supply to secure and maintain the enthusiasm of local audiences. A steady crowd could never be taken for granted; it had to be consciously and continuously fashioned. The men who pioneered and built the cinema industry were typically avid film fans themselves as well as knowledgeable entrepreneurs. They kept abreast of the latest global developments in the art, craft, and industry of film and exhibition, and they committed themselves to providing products and services that resonated with local aesthetic demands. The East Africans who ran exhibition and distribution had to keep their fingers on both the local and the global cinematic pulses simultaneously. Building on precolonial trade links spanning the Indian and Atlantic worlds, Zanzibari entrepreneurs in the twentieth century developed networks of global film supply reaching to India, Egypt, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States. As a result of their efforts, Tanzanians enjoyed access to a far more diverse range of global media products than most audiences anywhere else in the world.2 Although Indian films were perennial favorites, each generation had different genres and national film styles that caught its fancy. During the colonial era—particularly along the coast—Egyptian musicals were nearly as popular as their Indian counterparts. Elvis, kung fu, and blaxploitation films were favorites of the young, postcolonial generation. Cowboys, from the American Alan Ladd in the 1940s and 1950s to the Italian Giuliano Gemma in the 1960s and 1970s, consistently drew a sizable young, male crowd. Globilization may have emerged in the late twentieth century as a new buzzword in academia, but the transnational movement of goods, ideas, and technologies has long been part of East Africans’ mental and material worlds. And in the case of celluloid, it was Tanzanians who were driving and directing these flows.
This book interweaves the local, national, and transnational. Some chapters offer close-ups illustrating the richly textured experiences of specific audiences and how they reworked particular films to give them meaning in individual and communal lives. Other chapters take a broader view, exploring how audience experiences varied across sociological categories, space, and time. And then there are the panoramic views that situate Tanzania within the context of twentieth-century transnational media flows and global cosmopolitan connections. Often, these local, regional, and global entanglements are brought together in a single chapter to highlight their interconnections. In other instances, such relationships are best revealed through paired chapters, one of which is more ethnographic or temporally and spatially focused, whereas the other tracks change over time. Audiences and entrepreneurs are the central characters in the story. Throughout, cinematic leisure and the political economy are viewed as two sides of the same coin; business and pleasure are intertwined. The changing social, cultural, and political context of exhibition and moviegoing is examined from the early colonial period through the socialist and neoliberal eras, demonstrating the importance of historical and political-economic context for understanding cultural consumption, leisure practices, and the relationship between media and audiences.
Films and moviegoing are the central focus of this book, but the bigger picture reveals much about key issues that have long been at the core of Africanist historiography. Gender and generational tensions and transitions figure prominently, as do states and the politics of development. The social construction of masculinities and the values and characteristics of a “good man” are examined in various contexts and across time. Cities and citizenship are also central. One prominent argument is that cinemas were major nodes of urban social and cultural life, places where urban citizenship was physically and discursively grounded. Theaters brought together young and old; rich and poor; male and female; Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Parsi; and African, Asian, Arab, and the occasional European. After the show, they took their interpretations of the film onto the streets, where they engaged others in animated debates about the movie and its relevance (or lack thereof) to local lives and society. The most popular films provided viewers with material they could blend, bend, and refashion to speak to their own dreams and desires. The cinema was a space of encounters—a borderland if you will—where Tanzanians engaged with media cultures from across the globe and a diverse range of people from their own towns.
CINEMA, CITIES, AND COLONIALISM
By the late 1950s, Tanzania had more cinemas than any country in eastern and southern Africa—with the notable exception of South Africa—and one of the richest African and Asian moviegoing cultures on the continent. At the end of the colonial era, Tanzania boasted nearly forty theaters, the rough equivalent of all the theaters in French West Africa combined.3 Uganda had only twelve theaters, the Rhodesias (today’s Zimbabwe and Zambia) eleven, and Malawi a mere four.4 Every major Tanzanian town had at least one theater, and many towns had several. Kenya was a far richer colony, but it had only half as many theaters. What accounts for this disparity?
Map I.1 Tanzanian cinemas
The relative degree of urbanization is one important factor that helps explain such variations. Zanzibar—the epicenter from which cinema spread throughout the region at the turn of the twentieth century—had the most urbanized population in sub-Saharan Africa, with more than 50,000 people living permanently in town long before the British Empire claimed the isles.5 The first records we have of cinema attendance indicate that by the mid-1920s, some 2,700 people were going to the cinema in Zanzibar each week, and in the neighboring isle of Pemba, a somewhat smaller but no less impressive 1,500 patrons took in a show weekly.6 According to historian James Burns, in neighboring Kenya and nearby Zimbabwe going to urban cinemas was largely unheard of among Africans at the time.7 In Kenya, less than 8 percent of the population was urban at independence, which partly explains why many Kenyans only began going to the cinema in the 1960s (and many actually never went at all). By the 1960s, one-third of Zanzibar’s population was living in the capital city; by contrast, only 2 percent of all Ugandans were living in Kampala.8 Moviegoing was an urban phenomenon.
Africans’ historical relationship to the city was an equally important factor impacting who went to the show and how often. Tanzanian towns with permanent cinemas in the 1920s—including fairly small ones such as Chake-Chake, Tanga, and Ujiji—existed well before European arrival on the continent: they had permanent populations who considered the town home; many residents who earned their living independent of European employers; and long historical traditions of large-scale, urban, public entertainment at night. When entrepreneurs began offering itinerant shows featuring moving pictures in these towns, crowds welcomed the new arrivals with the enthusiasm they historically extended to dhows pulling into port or caravans marching into a market square.9 Traders brought not only goods but also news, stories, music, dance, and other cultural styles from across the region and indeed the world. Urban residents of these trade-based towns had long been engaged connoisseurs of the cosmopolitan. Moving pictures were a novel form of cultural product in the first decades of the twentieth century, but urban residents appropriated them and made them their own just