Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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or the msondo and unyago drums. After World War II, the number of cinemas in mainland Tanzania grew exponentially, as up-country entrepreneurs diversified their holdings and invested their capital assets to put their towns on the cinematic cultural map. The fact that cinemas sprang up all across the country illustrates the immense value Tanzanians placed on enjoyment of this cultural form. Local exhibitors delighted in their ability to bring global media products to local doorsteps and also in their capacity to bring their community together and their town to life at night.
All across the continent, people appreciated celluloid spectacle and drama, but the nature of colonialism, capitalism, and urban civic life was not always conducive to the growth of a vibrant moviegoing culture. The literature on screenings offered by colonial film units and mining compounds demonstrates that film and collective viewing were widely appreciated all across the continent.10 But as Odile Goerg’s 2015 book on commercial cinema in colonial French West Africa reveals, audience size varied greatly from town to town.11 It was not that Africans in Dakar, Bamako, or Cape Town did not appreciate this form of leisure as much as their counterparts in Tanga or Ujiji; the issue was having the opportunity to take in a show.
Settler colonies had stringent policies restricting Africans’ access to town. Urban housing was limited, and pass laws and police harassment constrained Africans’ freedom of movement at night. Many towns were also largely colonial creations. The Kenyan towns of Nairobi and Kisumu, for instance, were established by Europeans and relied on a largely migrant labor force. Structurally and administratively, Africans were made to feel as though they did not belong. In Nairobi, they needed a special, government-issued permit before they could buy a ticket to a show. A patronizing list of rules and expectations—detailing a dress code and mode of comportment while in a theater—handed out with the special pass also hampered Africans’ desire to go to a film.12 In the 1950s, as moviegoing blossomed in Tanzania, Kenya was largely under lockdown due to Mau Mau. One can only imagine that in the tense political climate of the Emergency—with more than fifty thousand Kenyans arrested in a single week in Nairobi during Operation Anvil—few were venturing downtown to see what was playing at the cinema. In Zambia and the Belgian Congo too, Africans were prohibited from entering commercial, indoor theaters until just a few years before independence.13 In many cities across the continent, mining compounds, colonial social centers, and church facilities served as the primary venues for Africans’ engagements with film.
Tanganyika’s status as a League of Nations Mandated Territory and Zanzibar’s status as a Protectorate, rather than as formal colonies, gave Africans in these areas a few more protections than those living in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the Congo, but colonialism was never benign. Across the continent, official colonial opinion was that unless they were required for menial labor Africans belonged in the countryside. Most authorities were convinced that urban Africans were idle or lazy or, worse still, criminally inclined.14 Tanzanian officials were no exception. Efforts to “protect” the sanctity and security of the cities were constant. Africans had to struggle to make their housing legal, and common strategies for earning an independent living in town—such as selling food on the street, raising a few goats or chickens, hawking fish door to door, or selling beer and sex—were criminalized. Offenders were not only arrested or fined but also frequently returned to “where they belonged.” According to Andrew Burton, the capital city of Dar es Salaam was regularly hit by allegedly curative purges to cleanse the city of so-called undesirables.15 But despite official efforts, Dar es Salaam’s population grew, from approximately twenty-five thousand when the British took control from the Germans after World War I to nearly one hundred thirty thousand at the end of colonial rule.16 Colonial authorities had the power to criminalize African urban lives and livelihoods, but clearly, they could not control them.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzanians also fought for Africans’ rights to go to the movies. James Brennan and Andrew Burton have written masterfully of Dar es Salaam as viewed and imagined by colonial officials and urban planners, where urban space was neatly divided into exclusive racial zones. The city center—where the cinemas were located—was officially outside the “‘African zone,” and any African found there by police after dark was subject to arrest.17 But thousands of Africans went to the cinemas in Dar es Salaam nonetheless, pursuing their pleasures as they desired and giving little heed to administrative imaginary lines. Cinema patrons and owners protested against colonial efforts to keep Africans away from the show, and within a few years of the British takeover of the territory, they had won certain concessions pertaining to Africans’ rights to the city (see chapters 1 and 5). By the 1930s, one of the few “legitimate” excuses Africans could offer to escape arrest when caught in the city center after dark was that they were coming from the cinema or escorting a friend home after a show.18 In other towns, however, African attendance was more constrained. One of the key arguments developed in Reel Pleasures is that cities have their own histories and cultures. Examining regional variations in cinema attendance allows us to see how and why Tanzanians’ experiences in cities differed, as well as how their relationships with urban space changed over time.
The nature of cinematic capitalism in Tanzania also enhanced Africans’ access to the show. All the theaters in the nation were owned by local businessmen. These entrepreneurs invested substantial sums of money building and outfitting their theaters; to make the venture profitable, they needed to sell as many tickets as possible, and many patently rejected administrative calls to restrict African attendance. Equally important, exhibitors lived in the communities where their cinemas operated. They established theaters as a sign of their investment in building social community and bringing people together through a shared appreciation of the arts. Providing attractive and enjoyable entertainment for their communities was a source of great pride. Excluding people because of race or class would have undermined these principles, as well as their bottom lines. At theaters run by industry pioneers, Africans comprised the majority of the audiences from the earliest days.19 In Tanzania, cinemas were independent enterprises, free of the constraints imposed by large exhibition and distribution chains. This too altered their relationship to people in the neighborhood. It was local customers, not distant corporate managers, who determined if a theater would succeed or fail.
Elsewhere, the industry differed. In Dakar and Accra, the first cinemas were owned by Europeans, and they used both exclusive pricing and location to deter all but the most “civilized” from taking in a film.20 Only when ownership and location diversified did audiences diversify as well. In the settler colonies of South Africa, the Rhodesias, and Kenya, white capital dominated the industry, and segregation of facilities and audiences was the norm. By the 1920s, South Africa had more cinemas than the rest of the continent’s countries combined, but it took another thirty years before people of color had regular access to theaters in many towns. The South African exhibition and distribution industries were dominated by a white-owned monopoly, and according to David Gainer and Vashna Jagarnath, even when independent theater owners wanted to offer screenings for mixed or nonwhite audiences they were hampered by the monopoly’s control of films, not to mention the enforcement of apartheid.21 Small-town theater owners had only limited control over the nature of their own shows.
Mobility was central to many Africans’ conceptions of modernity and citizenship. With the end of colonial rule, traversing earlier social, physical, and economic boundaries became a source of newfound delight. Urbanites took great pleasure in walking through previously exclusive parts of town and spending late nights downtown. In Tanzania, urban populations also soared after independence, and going to the movies became one of the premier national pastimes (see chapters 4, 6, and 7).
FILM, SPACE, AND COLLECTIVE PUBLICS
This book builds on a long and rich tradition of African urban social, cultural, and leisure history that emphasizes the vitality and creativity of average men and women and their power to fashion their own lives. Generations