Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
Films were also physically inscribed on urban space. Jaws Corner is certainly one of the more enduring examples. Jaws Corner is a well-known baraza, or neighborhood spot where men meet, drink coffee, play board games, socialize, and debate local and world events. This corner, where six major streets intersect in the narrow, winding way of Zanzibar’s famed old town, had long been a major meeting spot. In the 1970s, the area was renamed by a group of young men after they watched the blockbuster hit Jaws (Spielberg, 1975).27 The following day, they painted the first shark on a wall and christened the area Jaws Corner. Forty-some years later, this area is still referred to by that name, and the symbol of Jaws is still regularly repainted on the walls of the buildings to mark the territory.
Jaws Corner powerfully illustrates the complex ways global film products are interpreted, inscribed, and given meaning at the local level. Like audiences across the globe, these young men in Zanzibar were thrilled, scared, and fascinated by Jaws, one of the first movies to successfully employ mechanical stunts. The film became a global cult classic, filling theaters on return runs not just in the United States but also in South Africa, Australia, and Tanzania.28 When Jaws made a two-day repeat run at the Majestic in Zanzibar in 1978, it filled the theater with a midweek crowd of more than twenty-five hundred fans, marking it as one of the most popular Hollywood films ever screened in the isles.29 Some of the young men who established Jaws Corner were fishermen; others swam regularly at the nearby waterfront. They teased and terrified each other, screaming “JAWS!” or humming the infamous tune that foreshadowed the shark’s attack while they worked and played in the water.30 They engaged each other as well as anyone who stopped for coffee or a board game at this busy corner in debates inspired by the film. Was Jaws real or fake? Could a shark really chomp a boat in half? How did those fishermen in the village of Nungwi, known for catching the sharks regularly sold in the market, manage? What mistakes did the old fisherman in the film make that resulted in his defeat? Did Zanzibari fishermen have better strategies for outsmarting the fish?
But these young men who painted Jaws on the walls of their baraza and pestered everyone with their incessant questions about how to defeat a shark also had some big local fish in mind. According to people I interviewed, Jaws was a fitting metaphor for political life in the isles. Like many in Zanzibar in the 1970s, the lead character in the film was a fisherman who had to use his wits to stay alive and remain a step ahead of his adversary. He had to be constantly prepared for an unexpected assault and continually rethinking strategies and new ways to maneuver. Although this character was killed in the end, he provided the knowledge and inspired tenacity that allowed his younger compatriots to defeat the shark.
Many residents and shopkeepers in the neighborhood of Jaws Corner were targeted in the pogroms that wracked the isles after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, and relations between actors of the state and neighborhood residents have been tense ever since. The trauma suffered by families, friends, and neighbors in the 1960s was kept from healing by regular assaults, both petty and grand—a situation that has persisted to the present day. The founding members of Jaws Corner were politicized by the initial attacks on their community, and many have been harassed, arrested, and imprisoned over the years. Jaws Corner eventually became synonymous with vocal opposition to the ruling political party. In the topography of urban place-names, it became a landmark, an emblem of a collective resolve to kill the monster who attacked the defenseless. In the 1990s, during the early years of multiparty politics, Jaws Corner was one of the first public spaces associated with the opposition Civic United Front (CUF), and often, there were more posters for CUF in the vicinity of Jaws Corner than there were in the rest of the city combined. For decades, then, Jaws has served as a local metaphor for the relentless, bone-crushing power of the state. But like Quint, the rugged fisherman and less-than-noble hero of the film, those who inhabit Jaws Corner refuse to concede to naked, terrorizing power. They have resolved to defeat the beast or die trying.
CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, AND RACISM
Examining the role of Tanzanian entrepreneurs in building, running, and sustaining the cinema industry provides a necessary counter to broad-based stereotypes of Africa as a continent in need of external aid to foster economic development. In this book, we see instead men who recognized an opportunity and ran with it. They provided a service their townspeople clamored for and earned a respectable living in the process. Like the wealth of literature on the African “informal economies” that burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s, this study highlights how local businesspeople mobilized vast local, regional, and transnational networks to meet local demand. By illustrating how Africans have continued to provide for their own most important daily needs—from housing materials to food, clothing, transportation, and leisure—this literature recognizes and gives credit to the plethora of small-scale entrepreneurs who have built the continent.31 Historians have given renewed attention to studies of business, and literatures on the “varieties of capitalism” have burgeoned, but to date, these varieties include few people of color and even fewer from the African continent. Historical studies of business and capital in Africa are necessary to illustrate how economic change has occurred over time, how cultural matrixes impacted business practices, and how individual and communal values structured the accumulation of profit. Neither capitalism nor socialism is a fixed system; both change over time and vary across cultures. And no economic system exists without the individuals who bring it to life. This examination of the cinema industry in Tanzania over the course of the twentieth century allows us to see the concrete ways individuals in specific places and times influenced the forms that capitalism and socialism took, illuminating variations, inconsistencies, and contradictions that force us to rethink the norms presumed by economic isms.
The men who built the exhibition and distribution industries in Tanzania during the first half of the twentieth century were businessmen, of course, but also showmen and civic boosters. Profit was important for them, but equally significant was the desire to enhance the splendors of urban life and show their friends and neighbors a good time. As chapters 1, 2, and 8 elaborate, returns on investment in a cinema were slow to materialize at best, but the personal satisfaction gained by sharing a passion for film and turning others into fans was immense. The admiration entrepreneurs earned by building beautiful, prized cultural institutions was also priceless. Colonial officials gave little attention to enhancing the aesthetic qualities of urban Africa, but the entrepreneurs who built theaters created architectural forms that were not just functional but also attractive, innovative, and inspiring. Cinematic capitalists wed their desire to earn money with an equally powerful desire to endow their community with an effervescent social, cultural, and built environment.
A related component of Tanzania’s cinematic capitalism involved building social ties and feelings of reciprocity between entrepreneurs and people in the community at large. In many parts of Africa, there were generalized expectations that economic power came with communal obligations. Precolonial chiefs accumulated wealth through taxes and labor, but if they wanted to be seen as legitimate political officeholders, they needed to redistribute some of the wealth they amassed; this was often accomplished through periodic feasts or alms to the destitute. This ethos was carried into the twentieth century and applied to capitalists. A “good businessman”—and certainly not all were good—shared his wealth via ritual gifts or endowments to public institutions. In his pioneering work on East African philanthropy, Robert Gregory notes that many of the first libraries, gardens, hospitals, and sports grounds to welcome members of all races in colonial East Africa were financed by gifts from successful businessmen and their families.32 Cinematic entrepreneurs gave to their communities by building places where people came together to find pleasure. They also gave to individuals—and particularly children and youth—by letting them into the shows for free. Cinema seats were a commodity to be sold, but the passions and ethics that guided many entrepreneurs pushed them to share rather than to hoard. Selling a seat was certainly the most preferable option, but an exhibitor made no money by letting a seat go empty—yet he earned social capital as a good man if he gave it to someone with pleading eyes and empty pockets. In the words of Bill Nasson, who was well