Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair

       Chapter 1

       BUILDING BUSINESS AND BUILDING COMMUNITY

       The Exhibition and Distribution Industries in Tanzania, 1900s–50s

      THE ENTREPRENEURS who built the exhibition and distribution industries in East Africa were businessmen, and like their counterparts the world over, their aim was to turn a profit. But business cultures everywhere are also historically situated and socially constructed. In early twentieth-century East Africa, the capitalist profit imperative was tempered by local cultural norms and religiously sanctioned obligations that made sharing wealth and investing in community corollaries of individual accumulation. Wealth was revered—but all the more so when it was shared. “Big men,” esteemed women, and respected families earned their social status by financing cultural troupes, religious festivals, or large public parties that brought the community together. Privately investing in public infrastructure (such as wells, waterworks, schools, mosques, and hospitals) was another common means of redistribution. Immigrants and the children of immigrants abided by these customary standards as much as the native born did, for this was an effective way to signal their commitment to belonging and to foster social bonds in their new home.¹

      For the men who built the exhibition industry in Zanzibar and Tanganyika in the early 1900s, one critical factor in evaluating business returns was the degree to which a capital investment helped build a good city and put one’s town on the map. As of the 1930s, only nine towns were able to boast of regular film screenings (see map I.1). These towns were in their infancy at the time—a small fraction of their size and population today—and were built largely of impermanent materials such as mud and stick and thatch. Investing in a building like the Royal in Zanzibar, the Regal in Tanga, or the Tivoli in Mwanza signified a man’s belief in the solidity and prosperity of the future, as well as his commitment to the beautification of a town’s built environment. Cinemas were among the largest and most architecturally innovative buildings in any town, and bringing the latest global media to the community added a touch of cosmopolitan spark to local life. Building a public space where hundreds came together demonstrated one’s willingness to invest in urban civic and artistic culture.

      The men who built the industry incorporated elements of preexisting leisure and business customs into cinema’s commercial culture. Like turning a profit, the desire to outdo a rival was a basic business motivation. But in East Africa, the rivalry between theaters was infused with elements from local song, dance, and football competitions. Leisure group competitions were at their most intense when a club had a known competitive rival, and the same was true for cinematic exhibition. Through innovative architectural styles, technological acumen, and the display of the best and most recent films, rival exhibitors continuously strove to win the contest for loyal fans, and moviegoers benefited as a result. This may sound like business competition anywhere, but in the small, face-to-face environment of East African towns, it took on a distinct quality. Business relationships between distributors and exhibitors also incorporated elements of the patron-client relations that infused nineteenth-century business and leisure networks. Building social capital and enhancing a reputation as a trustworthy, dependable individual were deemed far more critical to business success than amassing quick profits. And in the industry in Tanzania, unlike in some other capitalist cultures, the goal was never to eliminate one’s rival but rather to outclass him.

       BUILDING HOMES AND INVESTING IN PLACE

      The earliest displays of moving pictures were introduced to East Africa by merchants, traders, and sailors traveling the oceans aboard British and Indian vessels. By 1904, if not before, exhibitions of moving pictures had become an exciting and regular feature of urban nightlife in Zanzibar Town.² Local audiences could never be sure when a man carrying a hand-cranked projector and a few reels of film along with his other goods would arrive, but when he did, word quickly spread.³ Little was required to muster a crowd other than finding a place to hang up a sheet as a makeshift screen: by nightfall, a sizable audience was virtually guaranteed. Given the public’s enthusiasm, what began as an itinerant sideshow quickly grew into a permanent venue with regularly scheduled displays.

      Hassanali Adamjee Jariwalla began as an itinerant showman when he was barely twenty and went on to pioneer the formal industry in East Africa. Jariwalla was actually employed by a firm in Bombay as a cloth merchant and traveled by dhow on the monsoon winds taking goods from India to Madagascar and Zanzibar each year. On one trip, according to his grandson, someone in Bombay offered him films and a portable projector to carry together with his other wares,⁴ and just for fun, he took them along. Soon, he was providing itinerant shows when the dhow he was traveling on reached port, and the enthusiastic welcome that greeted his arrival each season encouraged him to start putting on regular shows. In 1914, he settled permanently in Zanzibar, choosing to make it his new home. That same year, he opened the region’s first semipermanent exhibition hall inside a khaki tent adjacent to the central market, in the neighborhood of Mkunazini. He named the theater the Alexandra, and Zanzibar’s Official Gazette proudly advertised that the latest releases from India, Europe, and the United States could be seen there each night. Within two years, Jariwalla was operating two such venues in Zanzibar, as well as a third in the Upanga neighborhood of Dar es Salaam.⁵

      Business was brisk, inspiring him to draw up plans to transform his exhibition venues from makeshift tents into rock-solid picture palaces. He took what certainly must have seemed a crazy risk, investing his hard-earned savings from the cloth trade in erecting East Africa’s first luxurious cinema—the Royal Theater, which opened in 1921 on the site now occupied by the Majestic Cinema. The Royal was one of the grandest public buildings in Zanzibar and certainly the only piece of architecture of its stature devoted to entertainment.⁶ Designed by the British resident, J. H. Sinclair, who was trained as an architect, the theater was built in the Saracenic style popularized across the British Empire by those who sought to incorporate so-called Muslim domes and Indian arches into imperial design.⁷ Sinclair may have dictated the facade, but Jariwalla insisted on the content. The Royal was a large and modern theater on a par with the best operating anywhere in the world at the time. With room for nine hundred seated patrons, as well as box seats and a balcony, the latest projection equipment, and new releases from three continents, the Royal was as impressive as its name implied.⁸

      Figures 1.1 a, b Alexandra Cinema, Dar es Salaam, c. 1916. Images courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University

      Why would a young South Asian merchant risk his savings by sinking everything into an unproven industry and an outlandishly expensive building in Zanzibar? To be sure, the crowds drawn to the moving pictures in the town seemed insatiable, and Jariwalla was clearly of an entrepreneurial spirit. But if it was possible to make people happy showing them silent films inside a tent, why invest something on the order of a million dollars to build a picture palace?⁹ This was Africa, after all. Wouldn’t a makeshift