Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
capital were deemed good for socialism. Meanwhile, political rhetoric vilified cinematic entrepreneurs as bloodsucking, alien capitalists because nearly all the men in the business were of South Asian descent.
The racist rhetoric of the postcolonial era paid no heed to the facts that not all Asians were capitalists and that capitalists came in immense varieties. The South Asians who immigrated to East Africa were diverse in terms of religion, class, caste, and region of origin. There were also huge variations in the relative degrees of economic success they achieved in East Africa. Some rose to become the captains of industry, but others worked as dhobis (clothes washers) whose daily labor earned them little more than their daily bread. As Richa Nagar has pointedly argued, racial stereotypes often erase the class diversity found within the South Asian communities of East Africa.49 Post-colonial racist rhetoric lumped all Asians into the category of dukawalla (petty, conniving shopkeepers) or economic saboteurs, completely ignoring the class and personal diversity within the Asian community: neither all Asians nor all shopkeepers were greedy racketeers.50 The literature on minorities in East Africa tends to emphasize racial antagonisms between Africans, Asians, and Arabs. Fueled by the racism of the nationalist era, the historiography has sought to explain why East African minorities have been stigmatized as “blood enemies,” to quote James Brennan, stereotyped in political discourse and journalistic accounts from the independence era as ruthless exploiters, slave traders, and foreigners who did not belong.51
There were certainly Asians and Arabs who exploited Africans economically or whose actions aided imperial or subimperial conquest. And extrapolating from these cases to entire populations served the political interests of many early African nationalists. Vilifying minorities, political leaders from Zanzibar, Tanganyika, Uganda, and to a lesser degree Kenya were able to craft a common enemy and distract attention from other concerns. This discourse fueled racial antagonisms, hatred, and assaults. In Zanzibar, in addition to the thousands of Arabs who were murdered, the Asian population of the isles dropped from 18,000 to 3,500 due to persistent assaults in the first decade after independence.52 Many initially joined family and friends on the mainland, but after the Acquisition of Buildings Act of 1971 nationalized property, tens of thousands once again felt compelled to move on.
The personal and collective impact of racism directed at Tanzanian Asians was enormous, but it is also only part of the picture regarding Asian experiences in Tanzania. Equally important were the personal bonds and social networks that allowed immigrants to transform foreign soil into home. By and large, cinema owners were not, to use Gijsbert Oonk’s term, settled strangers—people who lived within African communities but not among them and who remained, even after generations, somehow “other.” Cinema owners and managers were individually named and personally known by nearly everyone in their communities. They were recognized for their individual foibles, quirks, passions, and acts of kindness. As critical members of their local social community, they were deeply integrated, not segregated, and perhaps this helps explain why the vast majority of cinema owners remained in Tanzania long after their buildings were nationalized and most of the Asian population had left the country. Like those who fled between the 1960s and the 1980s, these men endured immense personal and communal trauma. They watched as homes and businesses were seized, daughters and sisters were raped and forcibly married, fathers and sons were imprisoned, and most of their family and communal members went into exile. But for reasons that even they have difficulty explaining, they could not leave. This was home.
I refer to the men who built and ran the cinema industry as they considered themselves: Zanzibaris and Tanzanians. This is not to deny their status as minorities descended from immigrants but to emphasize how they worked to build institutions where anyone who wanted it had access to a seat and to foster communities where people mobilized not only around difference but also around what they had in common. The literature on Asian and Arab immigrants and minorities in East Africa is paltry, given the size of these communities and the fact that they have lived in the region for some two hundred years.53 It is also surprising how dominated the literature is by images of othering minority populations. Our failure to fully examine the diversity of immigrant experiences in Africa, combined with the preponderance of studies emphasizing conflict, has granted normativity to the racism of nationalist rhetoric. Reel Pleasures elucidates how South Asian immigrants and their children developed not only businesses but also social and cultural institutions that built bridges rather than divides.
Socialism, like capitalism, is both an ideology and an economic system that exists only because human beings animate it and bring it to life. Socialists, like capitalists, also come in many different colors and stripes. The political economy of the cinema industry changed enormously after independence, but different actors within relevant state bureaucracies and ruling parties had varying interests that were often at odds. These complexities and contradictions are explored in chapter 6 in the context of the state-owned drive-in theater and in chapter 8 where struggles between industry bureaucrats and others are highlighted. The state was no monolith, nor was the party all-powerful. Socialism had different meanings and measures, and individuals invoked the term with particular outcomes in mind. Race also had little bearing on political predilections. There were Asians and Arabs who were staunch socialists and Marxists and many Africans in the postcolonial governments who were neither. Being a self-described Marxist also did not necessarily mean that one disavowed cinematic pleasure or even Hollywood: a leading comrade in the Tanzanian Defense Force was known by his self-chosen nickname, Tony Curtis, and Hafidh Suleiman, a hard-line member of the Revolutionary Council in Zanzibar, adopted the nom de guerre Sancho after a villain he idolized in Italian westerns.54
The study of moviegoing allows us to hear variety in the voices of postcolonial socialists and see the complicated and divergent ways in which rhetoric and reality intertwined. If some of the narratives presented here seem contradictory, that is because they were. The world is messy, and history no less so. You will not find the straight lines and neatly mapped socialist world depicted in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State here.55 Examining postcolonial cinema policy is more like looking through a kaleidoscope. Every time you turn the lens, you see a different image, distinct but entangled in some difficult-to-discern way with the images before and after. Socialists did not all agree.
CINEMATIC MODERNITY AND MOVIEGOING: GLOBAL TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHENOMENON
This book focuses on the issues and practices that made the business and pleasures of moviegoing in Tanzania distinctive, but it is vital to recognize that in many ways the Tanzanian experience was also part of a much larger global phenomenon. All too often, Africa is ignored or marginalized in studies of worldwide developments. The continent is consigned to the “global shadows,” as if Africa were tangential, rather than central, to the unfolding of truly global experiences.56 This exploration of the cinema industry in Tanzania destabilizes historiographies of underdevelopment and depictions of Africa and Africans as always scrambling to catch up to the rest of the world. Instead, we see that Tanzanians’ experiences were actually commensurate with global trends in technological appropriation, the rise of commercial public leisure, and engagement with transnational media flows. From enraptured nights enveloped in the cocoon of a picture palace in the early twentieth century to midcentury evenings in the family car at the drive-in to late-century retreats to the couch to watch a video or DVD on the family television, Tanzanians’ film watching was in step with both the aesthetic and the technological standards of the time.
Films and stars that took other regions of the globe by storm were equally popular with Tanzanian crowds. Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy delighted silent-movie audiences everywhere. In the 1950s, the superb acting and impeccable production values of Raj Kapoor’s films ensured sell-out crowds not just in India and Tanzania but also in Russia and Turkey.57 By the 1960s, Elvis Presley was the hottest thing around, and youth from Mexico City to Melbourne, Memphis, and Moshi flocked to the theaters to see his latest moves on screen, which they then emulated on hometown dance floors.58 A decade later, Bruce Lee was the world’s leading screen icon among young moviegoers, including those in East Africa. In the 1980s, the disco craze took the world by storm. But from