While negotiating with planning authorities and other officials, the partners temporarily rented a facility from the colonial government, at the newly constructed Raha Leo Civic Center on the outskirts of town. But from the beginning, this venture was plagued with difficulties and endless professional compromise. The partners were interested in running a proper business that would cater to the local demand for good films and thus turn a profit. The colonial officials, by contrast, tried to control and contain the venture and make it fit with their own visions of a cinema appropriate for Africa and Africans. The partners had to negotiate hard for the right to screen 35 mm commercial films, rather than merely 16 mm educational materials. They also fought administrative efforts to subject films previously screened at the Empire to additional censorship in order to make them “appropriate” for the largely African audience attending Raha Leo. Beyond that, colonial administrators tried to limit the number of nights per week the theater could operate as well as the hours of operation, two additional points on which the partners refused to budge.31 The authorities ended up conceding on nearly every point in these negotiations, but it was exasperating for the partners to have to argue what seemed obvious: if you planned to open a theater or run a business of any type, you had an obligation to give your customers the best available—otherwise, they would look for better options, and you would fail.
The partners ran the cinema at Raha Leo for less than three years because in many ways it remained utterly below the standard they and their public demanded. Opening night foreshadowed the difficulties that would be faced by the partners: shortly after the first film, King Kong (Cooper, 1933), got rolling, the electricity failed, leaving the audience in the dark for more than an hour. The electricity started and then failed, started and then failed, frustrating everyone and potentially damaging new and costly projectors. By the time the power was restored, the crowd was in an uproar, and most people demanded their money be returned. Inadequate electrical service continued to plague Raha Leo throughout the cinema’s remaining years, for the government flatly refused to upgrade the service to the degree required. In addition to losing money every time they had to cancel a show because the electricity failed, Talati and his partners lost face before their audiences. As owners of the Empire with plans to build a new picture palace for Zanzibar, Talati, Suchak, Sunjit, and Thaver had reputations to uphold, so they got out of their lease with the colonial government as soon as possible and forged partnerships with other East African Asians committed to running a proper enterprise.
During World War II, they took what was then a rare legal step for East African businessmen: they incorporated into a limited company, Indo-African Theaters Ltd. This allowed them to protect their families and personal property from liability for any calamities at their theaters, and moreover, it enabled them to seek other investors with capital to build proper, modern cinemas and secure business loans from banks.32 The Zanzibari founders of Indo-African had the entrepreneurial spirit and technological knowledge to advance the cinema industry in East Africa, but as civil servants and small shopkeepers, they lacked the capital to turn their vision into reality. They saw great market potential in the Tanganyikan town of Dar es Salaam, whose population and wealth grew substantially during the war. They approached Kassum Sunderji Samji, a politically prominent and economically successful Ismaili businessman in Dar es Salaam, and offered him a share in Indo-African Theaters. Kassum Sunderji was a known film fan who made something of a habit of attending the cinema after evening prayers. He recognized the need for an additional venue in the mainland capital in the 1940s, so when the partners of Indo-African approached him, he readily agreed to finance their expansion to Dar es Salaam. He funded the transformation of a godown near the port into the Avalon Cinema, which he leased back to Talati and his partners to run.
Figure 1.4 Avalon Cinema, Dar es Salaam, c. 1945. From the personal collection of Asad Talati
Kassum Sunderji was precisely the type of partner the men from Zanzibar needed to expand onto the mainland: he was wealthy and had liquid assets on hand; he was politically connected and well regarded by Europeans, which would help in getting building plans approved; and he was the head of the Ismaili community—a man with a well-deserved reputation for marshaling resources to support public infrastructure and charitable institutions. He personified the rags-to-riches success story that generations of South Asian immigrants passed on to their children and grandchildren. He had left his family of cowherds in India at the tender age of fifteen. Alone and uneducated, he immigrated to Dar es Salaam in the 1890s, where he found work as a shop assistant with a German company. After the war, he opened his own shop, catering to European tastes for cheese, chocolate, alcohol, and other imported goods. He did well financially and politically. He became the president of the Ismaili Council of Tanganyika and was made a count by a close friend, the Aga Khan. He was also appointed as an unofficial member of the Legislative Council by the British governor in the 1940s, another rare honor in those days.33 Having a prominent business, religious, and political leader in their group allowed the owners of Indo-African Theaters to quickly and dramatically expand their operations. With World War II still roiling, their business brought a bit of comfort to the citizens of Dar es Salaam. They opened the Avalon in 1944 with the premier East African screening of Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942), a film about a British officer’s dual lives and loves induced by shell-shocked amnesia, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson; the movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards and represented the high-caliber films the Avalon became known for offering.34
Map 1.1 Cinemas of Dar es Salaam city center
Map 1.2 Cinemas of Dar es Salaam and key neighborhoods
The accolades Kassum received from his connections to the Avalon spurred him to finance the building of two additional cinemas in Dar es Salaam in the 1950s: the Amana and the New Chox. According to his son and his projectionists, Kassum’s affiliation with the Avalon significantly enhanced what was already a very solid reputation, making his name known to even wider segments of the population. The New Chox, like all theaters, was multiracial, but it came to be regarded as the premier cinema for the European community in Dar es Salaam, featuring films that catered to that crowd.35 The Amana, located in the African suburb of Ilalla and adjacent to the football stadium, was the only theater ever built during the colonial era away from a city center. Kassum Sunderji’s goal in financing the construction of the Amana, his son reported, was to provide a lower-priced venue where the urban poor could take in a film. At the opening of the Amana, Kassum argued that cinema was “a necessity of modern times” that should be available to all. Unlike the colonial authorities who built Raha Leo, he was fully committed to providing Africans on the outskirts of the city with a first-class venue, complete with a grand balcony seating 250 patrons. Enthusiasm for the Amana was overwhelming. Attendance at the Wednesday night opening was estimated at more than 1,000, well exceeding the theater’s generous seating capacity of 750.36 And when films were not being shown, the facility doubled as a community center and social hall.
In up-country towns, building a cinema enhanced a benefactor’s self-esteem and buttressed his family’s social value at least as much as it did along the coast. One benefactor,