1Fame is but a fleeting shadow. The remnants of Zanzibar town’s three former cinema theatres, up to ten years ago the patronized sites of a favourite pastime, probably remain undetected by most visitors to Stone Town’s architectural heritage. This is hardly surprising since the names of these cinemas have disappeared with the shifting sign of the times, beginning with the old Empire that is now a supermarket, and the Sultana – a name considered inappropriate in the course of revolutionary re-conversions and hence renamed Cine Afrique – that is likely to survive merely as the picturesque façade of a stylish shopping mall now under construction. And finally there is the Majestic, the still-striving-to-survive-modestly venue where B-videos made in India are screened on a regular basis. Notwithstanding these obvious signs of decay, the history of cinema in Zanzibar largely remains to be written.

2The aim of this article is to assess the cinema as a significant historical phenomenon of Zanzibari popular urban culture since the early 1920s by exploring cinematographic exhibition in Zanzibar from its beginnings in the late 1910s and its evolving programme patterns and changing audience preference trends in as much as they can be reconstructed from archival sources [1]. The findings presented here constitute a first historical survey of a locally established and translocally integrated cinematographic infrastructure as well as the general patterns of exhibition, censorship and reception. It focuses on the one hand on the social space generated by the promoters of the cinematograph – the merchants and businessmen who erected Zanzibar’s cinematographic infrastructure and screened “travelling pictures” from all over the world – and by heterogeneous local urban audiences for whom cinema-going became a favoured leisure activity that allowed for the specific forms of sociability they considered significant to their being modern town dwellers. Attention is also given to the authorities that control and police this social space. Colonial government representatives, autochthonous members of censorship boards, and agricultural employers all deployed strategies to prevent what they saw as the harmful effects of commercial cinema and to provide the masses with audiovisual productions of a “sounder” educative nature. The fact that the latter were identified as “Africans” both mirrored and fed British colonial designs to create a dual society along “racial” lines, split between the more advanced and urbanised “Arabs” and “Indians”, and the “Africans” who were allegedly in need of tutelage as a result of their recent emergence from a tribal and rural background and their lack of moral judgement.

3Simultaneously informed by dichotomous conceptions of Zanzibari society, colonial urban planners aimed at further consolidating and codifying the geographical division of Zanzibar town, which had emerged during the rise of the sultanate to a large commercial empire. Recent research has revealed how, from the first decades of the twentieth century, British colonial planning schemes, laws and building rules tried to fix an emerging but in many respects still fluid socio-spatial distinction between the urban centre, the Mji Mkongwe (Swahili : Old Town), characterised by its imposing historical architecture composed of Arab and Indian style stone buildings and inhabited by light-skinned “Caucasians”, and, separated by a creek, the periphery, known as the Ng’ambo (Swahili : the Other Side) or “native” quarter, distinguished by mud and wattle huts that sheltered the urban masses of predominantly “African” origin [2].

4Similar to colonial projects of socio-spatial engineering in many other African regions, the reshaping and reframing of Zanzibar’s capital [3] sought to implement territorial control, the intention of which was “to fashion new kinds of urban subjects, arranged properly in space [4]”, and, not least, neatly repartitioned by “ethnic” origin. Not unlike in many other urban areas, this ambitious hegemonic project was contested or undermined by one part or the other of the urban population, and eventually doomed to failure as a result of either financial or bureaucratic constraints. This outcome does not, however, exempt us from assessing its “crucial impact on both spatial form and social relations [5]”, which, as the works of Myers and Bissell convincingly demonstrate, outlasted the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar insofar as the “colonial legal context that shaped the city as a place of inequality” was reinstated after the consolidation of post-colonial state power [6].

5On the conceptual level, this article seeks to explore the intricate relationship between (post)colonialism, space and power, on the one hand, and the tensions arising from the response of those “to be put in space”, on the other. It asks, first of all, how urban residents, who were solely united by their search for pleasure and their leisure practices, interfered with or simply bypassed scenarios of territorially defined, i.e., “racially” segregated urban order advanced by representatives of the colonial and post-colonial state. Following the inspiring work of Brian Larkin [7], cinema audiences – volatile, anonymous, and interchangeable casual groups – could be considered partakers of a “transformative urban modernity that is deeply disruptive of relations of gender, class, and individuality [8]”. While cinema-going itself had certainly no part in deregulating local social relations or deactivating social inequality articulated along “racial” lines, it nevertheless constituted a place where contested social norms and practices were potentially acted out on another plane. It is thus argued that audience leisure practices constituted, as it were, a variant reading of the urban landscape and of their place therein, a process informed as much by the film providers as by the audiences themselves. In a wider sense, this implies interpreting the cultural and consumption patterns that evolved between the 1920s and the 1960s as signifiers of a non-territorially defined and “ethnically” blurred social space made up of assembled spatial and temporal layers, through which people redefined their connectivity with the wider world within and beyond the Indian Ocean [9]. As an element of ongoing research, this essay still by and large begs the question as far as the social organisation of relations between cinematic narrative and specific conditions of audience reception and translation of content and message are concerned [10].

6The following paragraphs deal with the evolution of a local cinematographic infrastructure that eventually made infinite audience “travel(s) without movement [11]” possible.

The Beginnings

7One of the first cinematographic performances in Zanzibar took place one evening in May 1916 at Victoria Gardens, a venue opposite the British Residency in Unguja where concerts, stage plays and other social events were organised regularly and attended by a predominantly European public. Under the auspices of a certain Rear Admiral Charlton, commander of the H.M.S. Vengeance visiting Zanzibar, “a large and varied programme of films was enjoyed by a large audience” that evening. “Considerably adding” to the “unqualified success” of the event held in aid of the Zanzibar War Society was the ship’s band, which played at intervals during the programme [12].

8Around the same time, Hassanali Adamji Jariwalla, a Bohora merchant in silk and fancy goods who had come to Zanzibar in the late 1890s, “(b)eing of enterprising nature embarked upon a fresh venture [13]”. His investment in cinematographic entertainment, merely a sideline at first, made him Zanzibar’s foremost cinema pioneer in the course of the next two decades. From August 1916, the date of the first licence accorded to him for a theatrical performance, he managed the Zanzibar Cinema / White Tent in the Mnazi Mmoja quarter, and from December 1916, the Merry Theatre / Alexandra Cinema, both located in one building in the neighbourhood of Mchambawima / Mkunazini on the same site as the future Empire Cinema [14].

9Recommending itself as “The Pioneer Cinema of Zanzibar & Mombasa”, the White Tent, or Khaki Tent as it was referred to by the Protectorate Government, held cinema shows every night from 9 p.m., “exhibiting only the best and latest releases from home”, i.e. the United Kingdom, with programme changes on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tickets cost 1 rupee, 8 and 4 annas respectively [15], depending on the distance from the screen, with soldiers and sailors paying only half price. Comparable to programmes in European and North-American cinemas of the time, the films shown at the White Tent and the Alexandra were relatively short-running silent films entitled The Lady of the Lake, Children of the Sea or Neath Lion’s Paw, most of them nine-day wonders of 2 000 to 3 500 feet, and usually screened in two or three parts. Programmes likewise included the crowd-pulling “Famous Charlie Chaplin”. “World-famous” serials such as The Broken Coin were shown in the attempt to attract audiences on a regular basis, with episodes showing daily for a week or a fortnight [16].

10Although the sources are unfortunately silent on the figures for attendance frequency and audience composition during these early years, we can conclude from the ticket prices that apart from the prosperous “old” town-dweller elite cinema-going was only affordable for the medium and upper strata of the urban population and wage labourers [17]. From Laura Fair’s observations on wage discrimination in Zanzibar we can also assume that going to the cinema was a gendered pastime, since women’s wages in the urban sector generally amounted to no more than between half and two-thirds of what their male counterparts were paid [18]. Although going to the movies under these conditions was plainly an expensive pleasure for the bulk of the urban population, it did not dampen the growing appeal of the new medium during the 1920s, as will be detailed below. In this context, the success of the cinema as a popular pastime must be correlated to a broader social movement in post-abolition Zanzibar, in which subaltern groups of former slaves and/or rural residents strove to become part of modern urbanity. Analogous to their participation in social and cultural urban networks such as religious brotherhoods, dance societies, and football clubs [19], attending or even talking about the cinema constituted an investment for their social and cultural integration and upgrading, an assumption that seems not least corroborated by Zanzibar’s rapidly developing cinematic infrastructure.

11In 1921, presumably induced by the profitable prospects of his cinematographic venture, Jariwalla erected a large cinema palace in what was described as the better part of Zanzibar town : the Royal Cinema in Vuga. Others appear to have followed in his footsteps. From about 1917 on, a third cinema was operated in a large corrugated iron sheet building located in Malindi, a quarter close to the harbour, and thus probably in the immediate vicinity of what was to become the Sultana Cinema in 1951. The sources vaguely point to a certain Mahommed Husein as the operator of this Excelsior Cinema (later Zanzibar Cinema ?), which eventually closed its doors in 1930 [20]. Apart from an unconvincing photograph, not a trace of this cinema remains.

12Prior to 1928, the island of Pemba was furnished with movies “at infrequent intervals (by) Indians travelling with a cinematograph”, the most prominent among them being a certain Hassanali Nazarali Punja, who from 1928 operated the Regal Cinema in Wete, which seated an audience of 500 and was attended by an average of 800 people per week, followed by the Imperial in Chake-Chake with a capacity of 400 and an average weekly attendance of 700 people, which was run by Soni Narandas Zaverchand, a goldsmith and pawnbroker [21].

13While the colonial authorities apparently approved the increase in cinematic amusement in the urban surroundings of Unguja and Pemba provided cinema owners paid their license fees and observed the fire security rules, they were not prepared to tolerate a similar development in the rural areas. This became obvious in 1939 when, dismayed by the growing popularity of “moving pictures” among the rural workers, clove plantation owners in Pemba petitioned the British representatives “that no licence [for a travelling cinema, B.R.] be issued, which, in 1934, caused considerable loss to them and to pickers who flocked into the cinema at all hours of the day and night”. Complying with their request, the District Commissioner of Pemba consequently rejected Hassanali Nazarali Punja’s application “to carry on a portable travelling cinema in Pemba” and to erect a temporary cinema tent in Mtambile, a township particularly busy during the clove season. He hastened to add that “a campaign has been carried on and broadcast throughout Pemba advising people to save their money : a cinema in the clove area would not be, in my opinion, to the best interests of the public [22]”. Repeated attempts by the indefatigable Punja and his legal advisers, a law office based in Unguja, were similarly unsuccessful. Nor was the patriotic promise made by Punja in 1941 to “get war films and to show shambas [sic !] people and out of the income of war Films [sic !] show I will pay 20 % from the net income to the Fighter Fund Aid [23]” likely to win the favour of the protectorate government and the clove growers. Their spokesman was the influential Sheikh Said bin Ali el-Mugheiri, “Arab” representative on the Pemba Film Licensing Board, a body that consequently confirmed its unanimous opposition “to the showing of films in country districts at the present time [24]”. In a corresponding move, the protectorate government decreed to limit ngomas and other public performances in Pemba to one session a week, and to restrict the venues to the three townships of Wete, Chake-Chake and Mkoani [25].

14The fact that the efforts of the clove plantation owners to keep the leisure activities of their rural workers under tight control were subsequently backed by British administrators can be explained by their shared political interest in preventing the social unrest that might emerge from the spontaneous gatherings of a seasonally shifting and heterogeneous group of lower-class “Africans” composed of former slaves and migrant workers from the mainland. Fears of colonial officials and members of the local “Arab” landed gentry in this matter were nourished by racial stereotypes of the “primitive man”, as Africans were commonly perceived. Regarding the audiovisual medium as unsuitable for the emotional and mental apparatus of this group, the protectorate government deemed it necessary to prevent them from uncontrolled access to the commercial cinema, preferring to use the “pictures” as a transmitter of educative issues, as will be shown below. Containment policy directed at the desire for cinematic amusement and distraction of the rural lower classes was thus one of the main causes for the rural-urban divide as far as the spreading of the cinema in Unguja and Pemba is concerned. A similarly restrictive policy would however have been impossible to implement in an urban milieu for several reasons.

Royal and Majestic Delights, Programmes and Audiences

15Not unlike many of the palatial picture houses that came into fashion in the United States, Europe and India in the late 1910s, the Royal Cinema Theatre [see illustration No. 1] responded to certain aesthetic preferences and social patterns of the burgeoning leisure culture of the period. It was designed by John H. Sinclair, the then British Resident and a trained architect, whose conception of “Saracenism” was expressed in quite a number of Zanzibari public buildings, such as the Residency, the High Court, and the former Aga Khan Secondary School that eventually became the State University of Zanzibar Institute of Kiswahili and Foreign Languages [26]. Comparable to its overseas counterparts in many respects, the Royal Cinema provided an ideal surrounding for a cinematic culture that subsequently focused on the aspect of performance, the “immediate social, sensory, performative context of reception [27]”. It thus fulfilled multiple functions ascribed to cinema during the period from the 1920s to the beginning of the Second World War, when cinema-going generally spread also among the higher social classes of the population as a favoured pastime. The cinema houses were frequented by growing audiences, not simply for the purpose of watching films but to socialise in surroundings characterised by sometimes bizarre architectural and design allusions to exotic cultures, its capacious public spaces, its air conditioning in the summer, and its auditorium which may have been decorated to resemble the exterior of a Moorish palace [28].

Illustration No. 1

The former Royal Cinema, Zanzibar Town, Vuga, around 1940.
On its right, the former Aga Khan Secondary School.
Photography by Ranchhod T. Oza.
Courtesy Rohit R. Oza, Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar.

16The Royal was no exception with respect to the multiple cultural and social activities generally hosted by cinemas of the time, in so far as its public was presented in turn with musical entertainment, stage plays, lectures of all kinds, and – a common practice observed at least up to the early 1950s – a venue for gatherings of political and social associations.

17When H.A. Jariwalla liquidated his business in Zanzibar in 1936 and moved to Dar-es-Salaam, where he subsequently opened three further cinema houses, the Royal Cinema Theatre was leased in December 1937 to Kassamali Jaffer Hameer, a prominent member of the Ismaili community. He renamed it Majestic and, as a joint proprietor of the Majestic Kinema [sic] Company Ltd. (later Zanzibar Theatres Ltd.), eventually purchased it in 1942 [29]. Completely destroyed by fire on 8^th February 1954, it was re-opened on 20^th October 1955 under the same proprietorship and name [30], but now bore witness to a modern style of building with only minor traces of the “Saracenic” outline of the previous structure [See illustration No. 2].

Illustration No. 2

The new Majestic Cinema, shortly after its opening in 1955.
Photography by Ranchhod T. Oza. Courtesy Rohit R. Oza, Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar.

18In a similar change of hands and name, the Alexandra – renamed Darajani Cinema and managed by a certain Ebrahim Sheikh Esmailji [31] – was eventually purchased by Sawakshaw H. Talati, a joint proprietor of the Dar-es-Salaam registered Indo-African Theatres Ltd., and operated as the Empire from 1940 onwards. S. H. Talati also opened the Sultana Cinema in Malindi in December 1951 after protracted negotiations and a rather difficult building procedure [32]. Renamed Cine Afrique in 1964, only the façade of this cinema has survived [See illustration No. 3].

Illustration No. 3

The Sultana Cinema, Zanzibar Town, Malindi, in early 1952.
Photography by Ranchhod T. Oza. Courtesy Rohit R. Oza, Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar.

19With a seating capacity of 850 and an average weekly attendance of 500 for the Royal Cinema, and of 400 seats and a weekly attendance of about 800 for the Alexandra alias Darajani Cinema [33], these two cinemas provided pleasure to an audience that according to a census taken for one week in 1926 by the Protectorate Government was composed of “4.35 % Arabs, 46.10 % Indians and 49.55 % Natives”, adding up to a total attendance of 2 672 [34]. These figures can be compared to the proportion of the different ethnic groups given in the 1931 census for the Zanzibar Protectorate [35], according to which “Arabs” constituted 14.18 %, “Indians” 6.47 % and “Natives” 78.17 % of the Zanzibari population [36]. This indicates that Indians as the most assiduous audience were overrepresented, and secondly, a more surprising phenomenon, that a relatively high proportion of “Natives” had a lively interest in the pictures from early on.

20Although almost all of the 120 odd films imported annually to Zanzibar during the second half of the 1920s were Hollywood and UK productions, it was observed that

21

“There is a noticeable increase in the number of films obtained direct from India. Many of these represent historical tales and scenes taken from Hindu mythology. Others tend more and more to depict aspects of modern life in large cities which are often unsuitable for exhibition [37]”.

22Import statistics available from the 1940s onwards demonstrate that this trend was further established and reinforced. Roughly 55 % of the approximately 260 films imported annually between 1 941 and 1949 were US productions, while 35 % came from India. The latter thus superseded UK productions, which now constituted no more than 5 %, while the remaining 5 % were Egyptian and European (continental) films [38]. The same proportion was more or less maintained for the period from 1954 to 1963, when annual imports rose to 390 films on average [39]. The growing popularity of Indian mythological epics, social dramas and comedies, most of them made in Bombay, among Zanzibari audiences, was particularly obvious during the peak years 1956-58, when 420 or 30.7 % of a total of 1,369 films imported were Indian movies – a virtual boom undoubtedly due to the advent of directors Mehboob Khan and Raj Kapoor, as well as to emerging film stars such as Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Nimmi, Nutan and the unforgettable Nargis [see illustrations No. 4, 5, and 6]. Comical characters were prominently featured by Master Bhagwan, also known as the “Indian Charlie Chaplin [40]”, and his female counterpart Uma Devi alias Tuntun. The first Kiswahili dubbings probably appeared in the late 1950s – an innovation that certainly added to the popularity of some Indian comedies among Zanzibari and East African audiences, now able for the first time to catch the dialogues of their favourite stars [41].

Illustration No. 4

Poster for Birha Ki Raat (Hindi, 1950).
Source: Filmindia, Vol. 15, No. 11, November 1949, p. 64.
Courtesy: National Film Archives of India, Pune.

Illustration No. 5

Poster for Aan (Savage Princess, Hindi, 1952), a hit at the box office also in Zanzibar.
Source: Filmindia, Vol. 18, No. 8, August 1952, p. 18.
Courtesy: National Film Archives of India, Pune.

Illustration No. 6

Mother India in Zanzibar, around 1958. Cinema advertisement in Darajani Market area. Photography by Ranchhod T. Oza. Courtesy Rohit R. Oza, Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar.

23The question as to what extent film imports and cinema programmes were affected by the Zanzibar Revolution and its aftermath can be at least partially answered by the figures available for the years 1966-68. Against all expectations, they plainly belie the fervently declared objective of eradicating “imperialist and feudalist culture [so that] the people of Zanzibar will never again want to see the filthy films of U.S. imperialism [42]”. Of a total 280 films imported annually on average, 38 % were, after all, US productions, 7 % came from the UK, and 24 % were of Indian origin. While Italian movies in the western, espionage and gladiator genre accounted for a sizeable 24 %, a small number of imports from friendly Socialist brother states such as Vietnam, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were among the remaining 7 %. These estimates, however, should not obscure the fact that political measures behind the scenes seriously altered the cinematographic landscape in post-revolutionary Zanzibar. The renaming of the Sultana in Cine Afrique was the least drastic of the surprise coups the Revolutionary government directed against Zanzibari cinema proprietors. With their premises confiscated “for the benefit of the people”, as the expropriation without compensation was euphemistically referred to, they were left with the alternative of either going into exile or contenting themselves with being mere employees. Both options were availed of. Kassamali J. Hameer, former owner of the Majestic, which was nationalised in November 1964, appealed in vain from Lindi on the Tanzanian mainland for the return of his property or adequate compensation for the loss. Others, such as the Talati and Thaver families, resolved to cope with the increasingly intricate situation of managing the meanwhile state-owned premises [43].

A Cosmopolitan Cinema Landscape and the Men Behind It

24Zanzibari audiences’ early acquaintance with and their later predilection for Indian and Egyptian films might not have occurred to the same extent had it not been for the numerous business networks established by local cinema pioneers with prominent Indian and Egyptian production and distribution companies. As early as 1919, it was mentioned that H.A. Jariwalla had bought his films from the Alexandra Company in Bombay and later sold them to Mombasa and Nairobi [44]. He thus entertained a first-hand partnership with Khan Bahadur Ardeshir M. Irani, the pioneering Indian producer, distributor, exhibitor, director and cinematographer. Preceding Jariwalla by a mere two years, Irani began his career in 1914 by acquiring the Alexandra Cinema in Bombay, the “first up-to-date theatre built in those days”. His “administrative drive and dynamic energy” earned him an appointment as local representative of the US film company Universal Pictures. He also pioneered Indian silent films and as of 1920 launched his own production companies, Star Films Ltd., Majestic Film (1923) and Imperial Film (1926), the leading silent era studio. In 1931, Irani finally set another landmark by producing Alam Ara, India’s first full-blown talking picture [45].

25While pointing to an early translocal film marketing network between Western India and the East African coast, where Indian expatriates emerged as a driving force, the sporadic sources available so far unfortunately do not allow for an in-depth exploration with regard to the nature and volume of these business links and their distribution itineraries. It was not until 1935 that these seemingly personally based transactions gradually developed more formal organisational features and joint venture activities, as the setting up of the above-mentioned Majestic Kinema Ltd. and Indo-African Theatres Ltd. indicates. By establishing proper East African distribution circuits, these import-cum-exhibition companies subsequently provided Indian movies for cinema theatres in Kampala, Mombasa, Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar [46].

26A similar evolution can be observed with regard to Egyptian films. Cinema advertisements in Zanzibari newspapers point to their increasing popularity among local audiences from the second half of the 1930s [47]. Since the capacity for production was limited, however, film imports from Cairo never exceeded 8 % of the total amount of films shown in Zanzibar throughout the 1950s [48]. There was a great demand among Zanzibari audiences for musicals starring Oum Kulthum (in Wedad), Muhammed Abdul Wahab (in Dumuil el Hob also known as Tears of Love), and Nadra (The Song of the Radio), and, subsequently, comedies featuring Farid el-Attrache and Ismael Yassin. Egyptian films were shown during the 1930s at the Royal/Majestic, but subsequently became a speciality of the Empire and the Sultana, owing to the Zanzibar-based distribution company of A. M. Thaver. Abdulla M. Thaver, better known by his nickname Abdulla Masi, a joint partner of the Indo-African Theatres Ltd. and a managing director of the Empire Cinema, promoted the regular import of Egyptian films to British East Africa from the early 1940s [49].

27These observations, however, should not lead to an underestimation of the preponderate market shares of influential North American or British production-cum-distribution companies, such as the South African-based “Schlesinger” company that operated in East Africa for Metro Goldwyn Meyer, 20 ^th Century Fox and Arthur Rank Corporation [50]. Cinema managers such as Abdulla Thaver were well aware of their dependence “upon the income derived from showing English films”. Aiming at “maintain[ing] the Cinema business as a paying concern” necessarily meant acknowledging that

28

“75 % of the income is derived from natives and the balance of 25 % from Indians and Europeans. It is therefore important that films appealing to the natives should be obtained by us. (…) Only those films containing light music, love stories and comedies, detective stories easy to understand containing excitement, thrills and stunts appeal to them [51].”

29In fact, Thaver had not reckoned with the rapid development of the Indian film entertainment industry, which was in the course of the 1950s to produce its own appealing versions of Hollywood jungle adventures, Rock n’ Roll musicals, love story melodramas, and the like.

30All in all, the cosmopolitan cinematographic landscape in Zanzibar can be considered a result of the diversified business strategies of local initiators and their involvement in translocally integrated networks at cross-currents with the powerful hegemonic North-South distribution circuits. This established tripartite cinematic infrastructure made it possible to offer Zanzibari audiences a wide selection of travelling pictures from overseas, one that greatly exceeded the choice available to North American or European audiences of the time.

Controlling Pictures and Educating Audiences – Government Interventions

31Censorship in Zanzibar was practised right from the beginning of the cinematographic era. Motivated by the same reservations as political authorities in Europe who worried about the negative effects that films exerted on urban populations from lower classes, the British Protectorate Government showed a keen interest in controlling the programmes. The local commandant of Police was charged with censoring the films to be screened, a task the latter – obviously not a passionate cinema-goer – was not eager to fulfil, as he himself admitted :

32

“I tried censoring films some years ago and found it occupied so much of my time that I had to give it up. Some fourteen films are shown every week – they are changed on Wednesdays and Saturdays – very few of which have passed the British Board of Censors so that each one has to be exhibited on the screen during the afternoon as they cannot be shown for censoring purposes at a public performance, obviously. This would take up some three hours on two days a week and would mean that I have to sit in a dark hall alone on two afternoons each week watching these extremely silly films on the chance of their being immoral.
I think it might be left to the proprietor who is a very intelligent and reasonable man and who has nothing else to do in the day but see to his cinema business and who probably takes a professional pride in it [52]”.

33The censor’s repeated insistence that “the films exhibited at the local cinemas are harmless and nothing is there to which the Police could take exception [53]” was not, however, destined to satisfy his superiors. In order to amend the missing provision by law for the exhibition of films, the Stage Plays and Cinematograph Exhibitions Decree was passed in October 1920 giving power to the District Commissioner of Zanzibar or any “Licensing Officer” appointed by the British Resident (or the Senior Commissioner on his behalf) to inspect films and stage plays as well [54]. Reported incidents seemed to call for a more thorough and professional control of imported films. Arguing in the same vein as its contemporary European counterparts, the Protectorate Government attributed these incidents to the

34

“very strong influence which the exhibition of cinematograph films especially depicting burglaries and other forms of crime has exercised on the minds of young Arabs and Swahilis which has led them to commit a number of foolish acts, and which has recently developed into holding up motor cars containing Arabs or Indians or Goans and even beating and robbing the occupants.
(…) the Police report that there is a noticeable tendency amongst some natives to copy the dress and gestures of the cowboy outlaw as represented in such films. Other activities attributed by the Police to the effect of the cinema consists in fights between gangs which often adopt names derived from films, certain classes of housebreaking, an attempt to blow open a safe with gunpowder, attempts to open safes with tools, the illicit importation of revolvers, and organised dacoity [55]”.

35In 1924, the Stage Plays and Cinematographic Exhibition Decree was accordingly amended, and a regular Board of Censorship appointed under the Chairmanship of the Senior Commissioner. As of this date, all films to be exhibited in Unguja – and in Pemba from 1926 onwards – were to be submitted to and inspected by the Board, which consisted of the “Senior Commissioner for Zanzibar, the Assistant District-Commissioner, the director of education, a police officer, two Indians, and one Arab” for the town and district of Zanzibar (Unguja), and likewise for the two districts of Pemba, Wete and Chake-Chake [56]. According to the censorship rules upheld until 1964, notwithstanding some minor amendments, scenes were declared harmful and subject to excision, which depicted

36

1. The excessive use of lethal weapons as well by the hero as by the villain [sic !],
2. Crimes which in their methods offer original ideas capable of execution by the population,
3. Enlistment of sympathy for the villain,
4. Subjects which might offend the racial or religious susceptibilities of any section of the population,
5. Cruelty to man and beast,
6. Immorality,
7. Anything unduly morbid e.g., executions,
8. Excessive love making [57].

37Before the nomination of the Honourable Ameri Tajo as a representative to the censorship board in 1948, no member of the “African” population [58] had ever been appointed, an aspect that deserves further attention, particularly since it was widely acknowledged that the “Natives” attended cinema shows as frequently as everyone else. Despite the repeatedly observed fact that Zanzibari audiences – heterogeneous in their social and professional background – consisted of “sophisticated town-dwellers [59]” whose preference for certain films was by no means discriminated along “racial” lines, government representatives insisted on implementing a segregated cinema policy that not only ran counter to cosmopolitan cinema-going habits, but also denied “African” audiences the faculties of moral judgement :

38

“Arabs censor the Arab films, Indians censor the Indian films, and Europeans censor the European films. Is an African to be given the power to bann [sic] a British or American film, which has probably already been shown in Kenya and Tanganyika ? Surely we can rely on our European censors not to allow films to be shown which are unsuitable for the local population [60] (…)”.

39Obviously motivated by a crude paternalist attitude, they also declared the “corrupting and demoralising effect[s]” of films “shown in the Town Cinemas” to be far more harmful for “Africans” than for any other “stratum of the population”, calling thus for a “double censorship [61]”. The fact that this approach was not based on actual observation of the mental disposition of Zanzibari movie-goers but on a preconceived and commonly held stereotype among (British) colonial officials is corroborated by historical case studies dealing with the spread of feature films and colonial film policy in Northern and Southern Rhodesia. In this respect, Charles Ambler argues that “deeply held assumptions about the powerful, emotional effect of films on Africans” sustained race-defined censorship from the origins of film showing in the colonial territories [62]. Available archival sources on film censoring in colonial Zanzibar unfortunately do not inform us of the practical consequences of these restrictive guide-lines, described for Northern and Southern Rhodesia as veritable “celluloid butchery (which) apparently left many movies devoid of discernible narrative [63]”. From an early statement we might duly assume that the heterogeneity of Zanzibari audiences in terms of “ethnic” ascription probably prevented similar distortions and called for a more calculating practice :

40

“(…) the Censoring Board actually has power to make special conditions and restrictions, but so far as is known this power has never been applied in such a way as to differentiate between races. No specific general restrictions are placed on the exhibition of films to Africans or others; the Censoring Board has its own guiding principles, and acts on them [64]”.

41Although incomplete, the records kept by the Zanzibar Licensing and Censoring Board over the years allow for a general overview with regard to the number of films banned or “passed conditionally”, meaning cut to a certain extent, from 1941 to 1949, from 1954 to 1963, and for the post-revolutionary period from 1966 to 1968. In some instances, short annotations were given concerning the reasons for the rejection [65]. By and large, surprisingly few films were banned generally throughout the whole period. Only one or two films per annum between 1 941 and 1949, and between two and five from 1954 to 1963 were “considered unsuitable for public exhibition in Zanzibar”, almost all of them US-made movies. Unexpectedly, only 14 from a total of 787 imported films were banned between April 1966 and December 1968, with the minor variation that Italian and US productions were equally hit by the ban. Throughout the entire period, the Board rejected only three Indian films (1942, 1945, and 1954) and not a single Egyptian film.

42From the titles of banned films or the short annotations by individual censors we can conclude – for the 1950s – an undesirable “sex factor”, as the ban of movie productions such as Girl of the Year, or Because of Eve suggests. Second in line was an unsuitable “political factor”. A whole variety of films was subsumed for one reason or another under this category : an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities (due to an alcoholic as the main character or the revolutionary setting ?), Thunder in the East (because it painted a very dark portrait of independent India ?), the UK produced Cry the Beloved Country, an adaptation of Alan Paton’s novel on Apartheid in South Africa (due to its portrayal of racial conflict ?) and finally The Black Pirates, a movie showing fierce buccaneers who haunt the Caribbean (“sympathy with the villain [66]” ?).

43A review of the film censorship files from 1966-1968 [67] confirms by and large Burgess’s remarks on the ongoing political ambivalence that prevailed in post-revolutionary Zanzibar. This means, on the one hand, that

44

“The search for cultural authenticity and unity was (…) especially urgent as a result of the continuing presence after the 1964 revolution of significant populations hostile to the new regime, and who represented Zanzibar’s unresolved racial, economic, and cultural conflicts. (…) not all Zanzibaris, particularly not all youth in the capital, were fully devoted to the construction of an African, socialist, and Muslim society [68]”.

45Consequently, the general verdict on films was one of pervading revolutionary nation-building ideals and the fear of youth being lead astray by the “American way of life”, which was equated with loitering, theft, and delinquency of all kinds. As Burgess rightly assesses, this extremely moralizing rhetoric demonstrated a direct “continuity with colonial-era censorship policies [69]”.

46On the other hand, the titles and provenance of films passed by the censor, obviously without serious cause for rejection, speak a completely different language. Among the total 770 odd imported films censored : Sodom and Gomorrah (USA, passed 16/11/1966), An American Dream (USA, passed 25/04/1967), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (USA, passed 06/07/1967), Django Shoots First (Italy, passed 22/07/1967), The Spy in Lace Panties (USA, passed 26/07/1967, after excisions of disrespectful allusions to the Kremlin and mentions of Russia), Frankenstein Created Woman (UK, passed 19/10/1967), For a Few Dollars More (Italy, passed 23/10/1967), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (USA, passed 06/03/1968), Valley of the Dolls (USA, passed 22/05/1968 [70]). Among the 14 films rejected figure From 007 with Love [71] (USA, banned 07/03/1967), Two Gladiators (Italy, banned 26/04/1967), Strait Jacket (USA, banned 29/09/1967), Valentine’s Day Massacre (USA, banned 30/10/1967), A Cowboy in Africa (USA, banned 14/11/1967), and finally Antonioni’s Blow Up (Italy, banned 18/09/1968). Since comments on the censors’ amendments were only included as an exception, it can be assumed that slight nuances were mostly the decisive factors. The theme developed in Two Gladiators, for instance, where a brave centurion leads a victorious upheaval against the dreaded Roman imperator, could have been considered from the censors’ perspective as too allusive to the local regime’s lack of enthusiastic support.

47Reiterating Burgess’s argument, it can therefore be concluded that “despite periodic outbreaks of official anger, Western films maintained their pre-eminent position in Zanzibar throughout the 1960s and 1970s [72]” and that it was rare for censorship practice to openly declare moralizing aspirations “to prohibit cinematic images of violence, sex and drunkenness, or those that encouraged disrespect for the government [73]”. This evident gap between revolutionary rhetoric and a censoring practice characterised by inefficiency – according to its own aims – can be explained in several respects. Firstly, there was an obvious lack of feature and documentary films that heightened “the earnest desire” of Zanzibaris “to build their country in a revolutionary spirit”, following in the tracks of the one-and-only home production from 1964 entitled The Zanzibar People March Forward. Had such “new and effective weapon[s] [74]” ever emerged, it can still be duly doubted that they would have been able to compete with the likes of Django. In a situation characterised by a general shortage of consumer goods people had already been accustomed to during the pre-revolutionary period, and in a city often described by both islanders and foreigners as an abandoned and ghost town in decay, where shops were shut and street lights missing, cinema-going was one of the few remaining leisure activities especially for young people, as Burgess argues. They “looked to cinema as their primary amusement in the evenings, seeking in the anonymity of the crowd, and in the series of exotic images on the screen some sort of fantasy world free from supervision [75]” – a form of amusement which was shared by adults, including even partisans and representatives of the revolutionary government [76].

48From these observations it can be concluded that there was an implicit compliance with the widespread desire of urban residents for an intermittent escape from the paucity of everyday life in post-revolutionary Zanzibar, at least during the initial years of the new political conjuncture. Without playing down harassment and humiliation by police or revolutionary youth guards and more serious punitive measures, such as forced labour, applied to “deviant” youth and adults alike, there is reason to argue that cinema-going and the related leisure culture – articulated, among others, in forms of sociability [77], fashion and hairstyle – were finally tolerated as a social “security valve”. For the “silent majority” of the Zanzibari town population, both young and old, who persevered with one of their favourite pastimes and sources of pleasure during these years, cinema-going became something of a subculture under these conditions. It not only helped to compensate for local material and political deprivation, but also gave them a feeling of being close to the outside world. According to the impressive findings of Laura Fair’s investigation, their audiovisual preferences clearly show that the desire to keep in touch was not confined to the North American and Western European universe, but also embraced India via Hindi films, which “from the 1950s through the 1990s (…) attracted the largest audiences to island cinemas” and were thus of particular significance to both “Africans” and “Asians” in Zanzibar [78]. Ironically, these links seem to have been largely ignored by the representatives of the new regime, obsessed as they were with the harmful effects of capitalist propaganda. While refined analysis is still required to differentiate gender and generational patterns of preference, and to explore the particular appeal to audiences of plots, songs, and dances, the point can be made that Zanzibari audiences articulated much more autonomy in appropriating and making meaning of films than colonial and post-colonial forces of order could possibly have imagined. This holds true for their silent persistence in “immoral” pleasures as well as for their successful escape from counter-educative initiatives, as the last paragraph will show.

Re-Spacing African Audiences ?

49British officials in Zanzibar shared the convictions of their mainland colleagues that African populations needed special teaching in order to develop soundly. Worried about the popularity of “useless” and “harmful” pictures among both urban and rural audiences, they advocated that “Africans” be shown films with an educational goal. This translated into the documentary productions of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE) initiated in 1935 and the educational film strips produced by the British Colonial Film Unit (CFU) set up in 1939 with the aim of training African populations on issues concerning hygiene, medical health, and moral and civic behaviour [79]. The prospects were considered good “for the Zanzibari long ago became a film fan” and

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“provided the films are not too obviously mission-coloured or too exclusively concerned with the life of the “shenzi” up-country, they should make a ready appeal to our natives. The very third-rate Indian films shown here draw appreciable native audiences : it is unlikely that films played by Africans and taken in Africa for Africans will be less popular [80]”.

51However, Geoffrey Latham, former Director of Native Education in Northern Rhodesia and one of the propagators of the BEKE, had expressed his fears on a visit in 1935 “that most of our early films will not be suitable for exhibition in Zanzibar. They will be designed for the less sophisticated natives of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. We hope that later on we may be able to do some films which appeal to the Zanzibar and coastal natives [81]”.

52It is difficult to say whether locally produced films for instruction and propaganda, such as those on the two topics drawn up in February 1938 entitled The Work at the Women’s Outpatient Department and Agricultural Methods at the Experimental Station of the Agricultural Department, were in any way more highly appreciated by Zanzibari audiences than the 16 mm silent strips the protectorate was otherwise provided with by the British Film Institute in London, such as Amazing Maize, The Flea, Bug and Louse, Denizens of the Shore or the unavoidable and long-lasting 1928 classic Unhooking the Hook-Worm [82].

53A variety of factors account for the failure of BEKE and CFU in Zanzibar. Plans to set up a local film production unit were finally abandoned as a result of the “unwillingness of Government to meet the initial cost of […] training and of the necessary equipment”. Again for financial reasons, it was not until 1950 that the first cinema van for Unguja was put into service, although bad road conditions prevented it from reaching villages in the Northern and Western parts of the island. The purchase of a second van for Pemba was still in progress in 1955 [83]. After years of fruitless experience the propagators of educative cinema finally had to admit that “town dwellers, who are thoroughly accustomed to cinema-going, are said to disdain film-strips (…); even some of the country people turn up their noses at what they call the ‘Children’s cinema [84]’”.

54Notwithstanding the pronounced Zanzibari dislike of these heavy-handed – mostly black and white – productions that even cinema managers were reluctant to screen lest they loose their patrons, the Protectorate Government decided that the Raha Leo (Swahili : Happiness Today) civic centre inaugurated in Ng’ambo in January 1947 as part of the Protectorate’s development scheme for the community-betterment, mass education, and social advancement of “African” residents, was an appropriate screening venue. According to the equation Ng’ambo = Other Side = African, the civic centre was thought to be the spatial landmark of the government’s segmented policy that sought to promote civic responsibility along neatly segregated “ethnic” lines, and as such followed the temporary establishment of separate town councils in 1944, one for “Arab” and “Indian” Stone Town, and one for “African” Ng’ambo [85]. Although screening films made for Africans in a centre built for the “sound” development and recreation of Africans may have seemed a deceptively simple idea at the time, the experience proved to have little effect and was not without irony. The Raha Leo cinema was closed down temporarily in 1952 due to deficits in basic safety and emergency requirements [86]. When it was re-opened after a four-year lawsuit initiated by the cinema manager against the Protectorate government for compensation of lost earnings, the programme was more in tune with what was screened on the other side of town, and now featured the full range of crowd-pulling movies.

55Educative cinema was, however, to enjoy an after-life in post-colonial Zanzibar. While the Zanzibari revolutionaries followed in the footsteps of their predecessors, demonstrating an unaltered moralist state of mind, the cinema van continued to circulate on the outskirts of Zanzibar town and in the villages within a radius of 15 kilometres, now supplying the population with People’s Republic China News, Defence in Cuba, Vietnam ya Kusini (South Vietnam) and, of course, Zanzibar Yasongy Mbele (The Zanzibar People March Forward [87]).

Conclusion

56Zanzibar’s cinematographic history may seem to be particularly local at first sight. From the beginning, however, it was closely connected to the development of the global film industry where European and North American production and distribution companies played a preponderate albeit not an all-decisive role. As a result of business strategies and ongoing translocal links across the Indian Ocean developed by the pioneering propagators of commercial cinema as well as the particular cultural openness of this group, there were more routes than one through which the new medium could spread. Zanzibaris were thus not only enabled to develop a taste for cinema-going in general, but also to take in, as it were, as much world as possible. This in turn allowed for their “intense and immediate receptivity of ideas that were communicated to (them) through this medium” – to reiterate a statement made by the Zanzibar Board of Censorship in 1927.

57Against the backdrop of (post)colonial socio-spatial engineering aimed at enframing and policing an urban landscape comprised of complex and transforming social relations that bore the marks of inequality and contested prerogatives, it can be said that cinema-going not only allowed for a variant reading of this landscape, but also for the temporary – and tentative – negotiating of one’s position on the shifting and uncertain ground of post-abolition Zanzibar. Examining the historical background and venues that allowed Zanzibari audiences multitudinous “travels without movement” gives an initial impression of how this variant landscape was designated by those involved in the spreading, appropriation and consumption of the audiovisual medium. From the findings presented here, it can be concluded that cinema as a favoured leisure activity responded to the widespread desire of the Zanzibari people to express and perform their modern urbanism. While offering themselves as it were fares to areas beyond the shores of the Indian Ocean, the programmes induced them as much, or perhaps even more, to further exploring the waters within its confines. And finally, persevering as they did in their search for pleasure, the Zanzibari people were obviously not prepared to accept the artificial cinema projects subsequent governments presented to them, as they plainly failed to meet their expectations.