This is not to dismiss the importance of data gleaned from colonial archives. Without these records, I would have few dates indicating when cinemas were established, and without the obsessive compulsion of British censors in recording the name and origin of every film that entered the country, I would have no idea how many movies were imported or how diverse their origins were. Yet as Charles Ambler asserts in his work on moviegoing on the Zambian Copperbelt, censor records tell us a lot more about European anxieties than about the pleasures Africans derived from watching films.78 Published newspapers are also invaluable, but like every type of source, these too skew our attention in particular ways. According to newspaper ads, Hollywood films dominated Tanzanian screens, accounting for more than 80 percent of what was shown during the colonial era. Based on this evidence, it would be easy to conclude that Hollywood shows were what most Tanzanians went to see. But my three months of fieldwork in Zanzibar, Wete, and Tanga, in 2002, shattered this image. None of the interviewees who went to the movies during the 1950s and 1960s could name a single American film, and the names of American actors were nearly as difficult for people to recall.79 The issue was not failing memories or a lack of interest in films: at times, the names of Indian films and directors and favorite Indian stars rolled off the tongues of respondents more readily than the names of their own children and grandchildren. The point is that even though Hollywood films dominated the press, they were not, by and large, what Tanzanians chose to see. Talking to people about their moviegoing experiences and film preferences during that initial exploratory phase of research completely transformed this project.
Reading newspapers alone and being largely unfamiliar with Indian films before I began this study, it would not have occurred to me that Indian movies were what everyone went to see. From the 1920 through the 1950s, these films were often not even advertised, since newspapers were not most urbanites’ principle source of information about what was happening in town. And rarely did any town but Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar make the press. Yet as it turns out, in the 1950s and 1960s East Africa was the most lucrative overseas market for Indian films in the world. By 1960, export earnings on Indian shows screened in East Africa totaled some $700,000 (or $5.4 million in 2016 dollars, after adjusting for inflation).80 In the 1960s, India films garnered a mere 5 percent of global screen time, and producers typically realized less than 2 percent of their box office earnings in foreign markets. This was largely because Hollywood screen contracts kept competitors out of many markets.81 To get Hollywood films, exhibitors generally had to agree to forgo all others. Not one of the sixteen thousand theaters in the United States screened Indian films at the time, and the situation in Europe was little better. In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s Indian films earned ten times as much in East Africa as they did in the United Kingdom. Audiences in East Africa were obviously a critical—and lucrative—overseas market for Indian producers. This region is where Bollywood first really went global.
Private personal and business records are another set of sources I used to enhance the image of cinematic history projected by official archives. The largest cache of written documents was a vast trove of box office receipts kept by Abdulhussein Marashi, owner of the Majestic Cinema in Zanzibar. Abdul meticulously preserved the box office receipts presented to distributors and state officials between 1972, when he took over the business from his father, and 1993, when he screened the last 35 mm film. These records provide detailed accounts of attendance over time, as well as information on every film that was screened. They also give information on changing tax rates and the relative earnings of the Majestic, the state, and the distributors. Abdul’s was one of the last theaters operating in Tanzania when I began this project, and many other proprietors said they had burned their remaining records just a few years (and in one case just weeks) before my arrival. If only someone had dared to follow in Bill Nasson’s pioneering footsteps back in the 1980s, we could have amassed and preserved countless personal memories and business records that are now forever lost.82 Asad Talati, owner of United Film Distributors—the largest and most important provider of films for Tanzanian theaters after independence—was another exceptionally generous source of knowledge and documentation. For years, he responded to my e-mail queries and provided details on international suppliers of films, costs of prints, and relative earnings. He also shared family and business archives and photos dating back to the 1930s. A list of films distributed during the waning years of commercial 35 mm exhibition, from 1992 to 2002, and returns and attendance details were also provided by his associate in Zanzibar. Members of the Savani family in Kenya and Tanzania also shared business records from their film distribution and exhibition companies. Without these individuals’ willingness to share their personal archives and knowledge, I would know almost nothing about the economics of the industry, and I would not be able to corroborate the rich oral evidence on audiences’ cinematic preferences with precise numbers of ticket sales.
This book joins a very small number of studies examining commercial exhibition, distribution, and cinemagoing in Africa. Now, the tide of neglect is beginning to turn, and scholars have started to publish books on what was obviously a significant form of leisure on the continent. In 2013, James Burns published Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940, a pathbreaking, comparative study of the growth of cinemas and moviegoing cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. Burns documents that the enthusiasm for commercial film and moviegoing was widespread throughout the tropics, and he makes us wonder how academics could have ignored such a vibrant facet of leisure life for so long. His book also emphasizes that we have only begun to scratch the surface in understanding film and audiences, as well as business across the British Empire.
The myriad ways in which local factors influenced the development of commercial cinema are further highlighted in Odile Goerg’s Fantômas sous les tropiques: Aller au cinéma en Afrique coloniale. Published in 2015, this is the first book-length study of commercial cinema and urban audiences in sub-Saharan Africa. Goerg makes clear that Tanzanians’ affection for film was far from exceptional. In western Africa too, urban Africans became avid moviegoing fans early in the twentieth century. The composition of the audience, the genres of films that were popular, and how people appropriated visual images and made use of them in their own lives are topics we have only begun to appreciate. And, as Gareth McFeely has argued, historians have neglected a significant component of African urban lives by ignoring the forty thousand people who went to the movies each week in Accra in the mid-1950s. Examining the Ghanaian businessmen who ran the theaters, he asserts, also fundamentally transforms our understanding of the economy.83
I am the first to concede that a regionwide study like Goerg’s for East Africa could quite conceivably destabilize some of the claims I make about Tanzanians’ unique position in the regional cultural economy. My initial aim was to do a comparative study of Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, but once I began doing the research with two small children in tow, that plan was quickly revised. Until we have detailed studies of Uganda and Kenya, as well as Mauritius, Comoros, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, it is impossible to say how the Tanzanian experience compares. The works of McFeely and David Gainer, on African moviegoing and the cinema industries in Ghana and South Africa, respectively, highlight the critical importance of detailed country-specific studies. These scholars illustrate the immense variations in business practices and cinematic experiences between the two countries, each of which in turn differed quite markedly from Tanzania, Senegal, and the Congo.84 And as Lakshmi Srinivas demonstrates in her recent book, Full House, we urgently need more ethnographically rich and varied studies of moviegoing