Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
wives, assertive teens, and even dutiful daughters traveled to towns across the continent in pursuit of particular goals and opportunities and how, despite the odds, they built not only personal homes and individual families but also communities and the social and economic institutions that sustained them. Today’s scholars take as an unspoken premise the fact that Africans shaped the physical and social structures of the urban environment. State officials may have deemed African housing or leisure activities illegal, but rarely did they succeed in keeping people from building, drinking, dancing, selling, playing music, or raising their children in town. This study adds to this vibrant tradition of scholarship by examining how cinemas—as a particular form of urban space—figured in these negotiations between authorities, entrepreneurs, and urban residents over the shape that Tanzanian cities would take. It also demonstrates how individuals and groups utilized cinematic space to create social and intellectual communities and bring joy to their individual and collective days and nights.
Going to the movies provided people with far more than a legal pretext for walking the streets after dark; it gave them a reason to inhabit areas beyond their immediate neighborhoods and a means of establishing both a physical and an emotional bond with the city at large. Walking through the streets on their way to a show with friends, family, and lovers transformed their relationships with urban space, binding people and place together with affective ties. As they laughed with friends on the way to the movies, wiped tears from their eyes outside the theater after the show, or filled alleyways with the sounds of filmic love songs, moviegoers transformed abstract urban spaces into places imbued with sensual, aesthetic, and emotional attachments.22 Theaters—and the urban streets in which they were enmeshed—became invested with tangible, deeply personal meaning. These residual affective bonds between people and place remained long after a fleeting show had passed. In the interviews I conducted for this book, recollections of nights at a favorite theater brought tears of joy and longing to many people’s eyes. Others smiled deeply and said, “That’s where I spent some of the happiest, most meaningful days of my life.” Cinema halls were not lifeless chunks of brick and mortar; they resonated with soul and spirit. They were places that gave individual lives meaning, spaces that gave a town emotional life.
Cinemas were considered by many to be the anchor of the community, and in fact, entire neighborhoods were frequently known by the cinemas in their midst. Urban landmarks, rather than street names and addresses, served to orient one around town. North and south, east and west meant very little to most; far more meaningful directionals in the capital city of Dar es Salaam were the Avalon, the Empire, the Odeon, the Amana, and the New Chox. These were points on urban mental maps that resonated; these were spots that everyone knew.23 In Mwanza, Dodoma, and Mbeya too, a visitor could ask anyone he or she met and be pointed to a family member’s house or a business in the vicinity of the Liberty, the Paradise, or the Enterprise. These were not banal, soulless spaces surrounded by acres of empty parking lots left lifeless after customers walked out the door. These were buildings in the heart of urban neighborhoods, deeply integrated with adjacent homes, schools, mosques, markets, and ports. Disparate urban spaces and people were linked together through the city’s cinematic beating heart.
Across generations, cinemas were central to community formation. It was there, more than at any other place in the city, that a diverse array of a city’s population came into contact. Going to the movies together in no way erased class, gender, race, or religious differences; indeed, at the movies many were forced to acknowledge the immense diversity among people in their town. But through the process of enjoying the same leisure activity and then talking about the same films at work, in the shops, and on the streets, urbanites created “in-commonness,” doing something much bolder than ignoring or eliding difference, creating something shared despite it.24 At the movies, older, established urban residents met on a weekly basis and many new urban immigrants were introduced to people who could help them find housing, work, and scarce materials of all sorts (see chapters 2, 5, and 7). These networks then extended into the larger physical and social landscape of the town, as those who gathered at the cinema returned to their respective neighborhoods and shared their new insights, friends, and connections with others who were sociologically more like themselves.
Boundaries of gender were also negotiated in the interest of attending the movies. In colonial urban Africa, public recreation was largely gendered male; cinemas were sometimes an exception to this general rule. Where cinemas were located, women’s historical relationships with urban space, as well as local cultural and religious norms, were decisive factors affecting female attendance at shows—and not just in Africa but across the globe.25 These issues are explored in detail in chapters 3, 5, and 7, with particular attention paid to how cinemas and cities were perceived across the country as well as how women’s attendance changed over time and varied according to the types of films screened. Typically, however, Sunday shows were family affairs in Tanzania. Everyone, everywhere, regardless of gender or age, attended these shows. Sunday screenings often gave women and children their sole opportunity to venture downtown. Along the coast, theater owners went a step further and responded to women’s clamoring for additional public leisure opportunities by offering gender-segregated, ladies-only (zanana) shows. There was nothing inherently immoral about moviegoing or watching films; it was the possibility of encounters with random men that threatened a woman’s respectability. The ladies-only shows provided women with the opportunity to enter the public realm without jeopardizing their reputations. These all-female matinees, attended by hundreds each week, were a blessing to women who otherwise found few patriarchally sanctioned opportunities to cavort downtown. In Zanzibar, women from the royal family joined with hundreds of less prominent citizens to watch Indian and Egyptian films. Such outings were the highlight of the week. Whether women lived in purdah or not, ladies’ shows gave them a chance to dress up, stroll through town, and make public space their own (see chapters 3 and 5). Thus, even being in purdah did not prevent women and girls from participating in the film-inspired debates that engulfed households, kitchens, and shops.
Cinematic content came to life in the city, further enlarging the networks of people brought and bound together through their engagement with film. One could spot other fans of a favorite star at the market or on the street if they rolled up their pants just like Raj Kapoor did in Awara (Kapoor, 1951) and Shree 420 (Kapoor, 1955); donned a hat like Dev Anand’s in Guide (Anand, 1965); or coifed their hair like Elvis, Geeta Bali, or Pam Grier. In the 1960s, two men who were utter strangers might meet at a shop because they were both in hot pursuit of limited, underground supplies of James Bond underwear with “007” emblazoned on the elastic band. Later, when they met again at a football match or on the city bus, they might nod and acknowledge that they had more in common than the obvious. Men who dared to sport “Pecos pants” (wide bell-bottoms) when such transgressions often resulted in public assaults by members of the Youth League or Green Guards or even a stint in jail signaled, as they walked down the street, not only their love of Guliano Gemma and Italian westerns but also their membership in a larger group of youth at odds with the socialist state’s efforts to control the most mundane aspects of life (see chapters 5 and 7).26 Across generations, fans adopted looks, stances, and language from the movies, but as they did so, the audience they had in mind for their performative engagement was always local. Adopting the latest in cosmopolitan fashion demonstrated their knowledge of global trends and at the same time conveyed their desire to set their own city’s style.
Figure I.1 Jaws Corner.