1On May 13, 1951 a fire broke out at the al-Duniya theater in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano. In the ensuing panic more than half of the six hundred patrons lost their lives. A subsequent investigation revealed that the blaze began in the projection room, when a spark ignited the nitrate-based film. The flames spread rapidly along the theater’s make-shift kapok roof, which recently had been added to permit daytime screenings. Many of the dead had been trapped because the theater owner had locked the doors to prevent people sneaking in without paying. Others were caught in the crush as patrons rushed back into the burning theater to collect their bicycles. Almost all of the victims were young Hausa men, age 18 to 34 [1].

2The tragedy of the al-Duniya disaster opens a window into the obscure world of movie houses, or “bioscopes [2]”, in Britain’s African empire. Since the turn of the century these new venues had appeared in cities to service a growing community of movie fans. The first cinema for “non-white” audiences opened in 1909 in Durban, South Africa [3]. Over the next five decades bioscopes appeared throughout colonial Africa until by the time the newly opened al-Duniya burned in 1951, there were movie theaters in most major cities on the continent.

3The emergence of bioscopes went largely unnoticed in Britain’s African empire. If Europeans gave any thought to the cinema in Africa, it was focused on the screen images Africans saw, rather than the venues where they saw them [4]. Likewise many African elites ignored the bioscopes, and tended to look down on their mostly poor, frequently illiterate clientele. Thus it was only under extraordinary circumstances, such as this tragic fire, that the urban bioscope received much attention.

4However events such as the al-Duniya disaster illuminate the significance of this silent history. For example, the government inquiry into the origins of the fire attested to the cinema’s enormous popularity in Kano. On the day of the fire the cinema was packed with more than six hundred people in attendance. The manager’s fatal decision to lock the doors hints at a larger crowd trying to get in to see the show. The use of the temporary (and in the event, highly flammable) roofing suggests that the owner was trying to add day-time shows to what were presumably already popular evening screenings. Thus the new bioscope was apparently a thriving, popular pastime.

5In a recent monograph I have explored the history of colonial film-making in Britain’s African empire [5]. Between 1925 and 1980 colonial governments in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa produced hundreds of films expressly for African audiences. This ambitious effort reflected Britain’s ambivalent view of cinema’s role in their African empire. British officials believed that Africans were more “impressionable” than Europeans, and thus more likely to be positively influenced by cinema images. But they also feared that exposure to the “negative” images found in Hollywood movies would have a corrosive influence on “white prestige”, and could inspire African audiences to acts of violence. Thus these “films for Africans” programs were a kind of pro-active censorship, which reflected colonial anxieties about the medium’s influence on African societies. Building on this work, this essay attempts to take the story of the history of cinema in British colonial Africa further, by exploring the history of the movie houses where African audiences consumed the Hollywood films that their colonial masters found so threatening.

6My monograph is not the only one to ignore this important aspect of urban history. Thelma Gutsche, author of an exhaustive history of the cinema in South Africa [6], says almost nothing about African movie theaters, despite the fact that bioscopes have been a fixture of Southern African urban life since the 1920s [7]. Many studies of African urban life mention the growth of bioscope culture in passing. However, to date, only a handful of academics have made the African cinema house the focus of their investigations [8].

7Part of this neglect can be attributed to a lack of sources. Most cinema houses were begun by African, or most commonly, Middle-Eastern entrepreneurs who left few business records [9]. Because cinemas were seen as a normative form of urban development, the establishment of these businesses elicited little attention from municipal authorities. And while the colonial press announced the opening of new movie houses for settler audiences with fanfare, it paid virtually no attention when similar businesses were opened for Africans.

8This lack of attention is unfortunate, because the bioscope played an important role in British colonial Africa. Bioscopes were novel sites of social and cultural interaction. On the one hand they were social spaces that were uniquely associated with colonial rule, having no precedent in pre-colonial African cities, and being modeled and even named after European and American examples. Yet they took on a social role that was unanticipated by those colonial authorities who shaped their creation. As anthropologist Brian Larkin has argued, “Cinema theaters created new modes of sociability that challenged existing relations of space, gender, and social hierarchy [10]”. As such, it is worthwhile attempting to reconstruct and evaluate their history. This article provides a sketch of the evolution of these urban spaces, and an analysis of the unique and varied roles they played in colonial Africa. It is focused exclusively on British colonies, where the majority of cinema houses in sub-Saharan Africa were located.

9This article distinguishes between “bioscopes”, urban spaces in British colonies that were dedicated to regular film screenings, and other venues in which motion pictures were occasionally shown. These latter include missions, schools, social welfare halls, and other public places where groups could be gathered. Bioscopes were distinct locations where audiences came together on a regular basis. They were for-profit ventures that operated with little influence from urban colonial authorities. The bioscope was not the venue where most Africans were introduced to motion pictures. Ambitious government and commercial programs began bringing motion pictures to rural areas in the 1930s, before the rapid urbanization of the 1940s and 1950s that escalated the popularity of bioscopes in the cities. But bioscopes were more than just locations to see films. They were spaces that had specific cultural associations, and were patronized by people who saw themselves as participating in a unique form of urban sociability.

10Though they were often named after theaters in Europe and America (such as “Rex”, “Globe”, and “Empire”) African bioscopes had features that distinguished them from Western cinema houses. Their architecture often reflected the unique demands of a colonial city. Racial segregation in Kano, Nigeria, inspired plans for bioscopes with separate entrances, and the scheduling of separate shows, for “Africans” and “Arabs and Europeans [11]”. Colonial prejudices also encouraged plans to equip Kano theaters with wide aisles in the expectation that African audiences were likely to panic when gathered in large crowds [12]. In Kenya on the other hand, where there were no racially integrated theaters, special entrances were unnecessary. Bioscopes in Northern Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia were often open-air, reflecting the opportunities for evening shows in dry weather. In Nairobi, Kenyan government officials resisted the establishment of open-air bioscopes out of fear that evening screenings would encourage African “night-life [13]”.

11The social role of bioscopes varied over time and place as well. In post-war Cape Town bioscopes were havens where young “coloured” couples could be apart from the surveillance of their families [14]. In the South African townships of Sophiatown and Alexandria they were places where newly arrived migrant workers could learn the slang and fashion styles of American culture that dominated township life [15]. In the Kano township of Sabon Gari, the first bioscope was associated with prostitution, alcohol, and Christian migrants from the south. Muslim Hausa men could go to Sabon Gari to escape the conservative mores of Kano, or attend the bioscope in Kano, which Islamic authorities made the preserve of Hausa men [16]. In Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, cinemas were raucous, male-dominated sites associated with alcohol and violence [17].

12But there were commonalities of movie house culture that allow one to identify an “African” bioscope experience, distinctive from that found in cinema houses in the West. Virtually all contemporary discussions of bioscope audiences emphasize the sociability that distinguished them from their compatriots in Europe and America. One common criticism of African audiences was their tendency to talk incessantly during films [18]. Colonial officials usually cited such behavior as evidence of the audiences’ limited comprehension. But clearly these conversations reflect the sociability of cinemas that marked an important contrast with similar venues in the Western world. Observers throughout the continent also remarked on the vocal interactions carried out by audience members with the characters on screen. In Cape Town [19], Northern Rhodesia [20], Tanzania, and elsewhere, bioscope performances were characterized by audiences challenging, warning, and generally carrying on conversations with the figures on the screen. As an anthropologist remarked on this aspect of bioscope shows in the 1950s : “The individual’s enjoyment was heightened by the sharing of his feeling with a thousand or more others, who were shouting their reactions. There was much greater excitement and overt emotional participation at the movies than at the Sunday afternoon tribal dances [21]”. This gave the bioscope experience a performative dimension that separated it from similar shows in the West.

13Patronage of bioscopes also informed and reflected social status. In some instances bioscope attendance carried with it a social stigma. In such cases the threat of the establishment of bioscopes inspired resistance from local authorities who feared their immoral influence [22]. In other colonies bioscope patronage was a marker of “elite” or “emerged” status. In these colonies the threat of exclusion from the bioscope, through censorship or expense, frequently became a bone of contention between African audiences and colonial authorities [23].

The Birth of the Bioscope

14Cinema houses for Africans evolved relatively late in the history of film in Africa. The first movies were shown to Africans to draw them to businesses such as tea merchants in Brazzaville [24], cafés in Botswana [25], or mining compounds in South Africa [26]. Strict racial segregation was maintained at film shows, the majority of which were arranged for European audiences shown at hotels and at theaters, especially in colonies such as Southern Rhodesia and South Africa with large settler populations.

15In the cinema’s early decades entrepreneurs brought traveling bioscope shows from city to city. Though most were Europeans, one notable exception was the South African man of letters Sol Plaatje, who toured South Africa and Botswana with a projector during the early 1920s. Plaatje’s was one of the first successful efforts to bring films to African consumers. Though he ultimately despaired at making money from itinerant film shows, he was encouraged by the enthusiasm of audiences for the new medium [27].

16Plaatje was one of many individuals who recognized the potential popularity of motion pictures in Africa. During and after the First World War, the British Colonial Office received several applications from entrepreneurs eager to build movie theaters in the African colonies. All of these appear to have ended in failure, and their applications provide pathetic evidence of the ignorance of these businessmen about conditions on the continent. One of the earliest applications came from the Anglo-African Cinema Company, which ceased doing business when it ran out of money and its agent in Africa became incapacitated due to illness. Another similar venture ceased operations when its representative became a German prisoner during the First World War [28]. Little came of these schemes, and when pioneering film-maker William Sellers began showing films to Hausa audiences in the 1920s in northern Nigeria he could take it for granted that none had any previous exposure to the cinema [29]. While these applications tell us little about the actual expansion of cinemas on the ground, they reflect the growing commercial interest in opening up Africa to the cinema in the early part of the century.

17In Europe and America, the transition from itinerant movies to the creation of static theaters was relatively short. In Africa this change took place over a much longer period of time [30]. Recreation halls that initially screened films periodically evolved into de facto bioscopes as the showing of movies became more popular than other events. Mining companies which began showing movies on their compounds during the First World War were, by the 1950s, erecting movie theaters in recognition of the importance of the bioscope to the cultural life of their miners. Besides these evolving bioscopes, gradually buildings were erected in many cities whose sole function was to show commercial movies. The first of these structures built specifically to screen films for Africans appeared in West Africa during the 1920s [31].

18Evidence of the growing interest in building movie houses in Africa is seen in a 1931 proposal that was submitted to the British government by an English company that wanted to create a string of cinemas specifically for African audiences in West Africa. The plan called for an initial building of theaters “at 10 towns on the railway from Lagos to Kano in Nigeria [32]”. The application hinted that there were potential profits to be made in cinema houses in West Africa : “The territory which could eventually be covered has a population of twenty million natives to the vast majority of whom the cinema is unknown”. This untapped cinema population was not being serviced. “There are in the territory at present approximately half a dozen existing cinemas, two only of any size, and all these with one exception are located at coast towns”. The proposal ended by paying lip service to the potential value of cinema to the African people of the region : “Apart from the Commercial part of the proposition there is a vast field for British Imperial Educational work and propaganda (sic)”. In the event nothing came of this ambitious plan, which colonial officials determined was unfeasible [33].

19While English companies were drawing up ambitious plans for cinema construction, entrepreneurs in the colonies were beginning to recognize the commercial potential of urban bioscopes. Colonial governments began receiving requests to build cinemas from local businessmen in the 1920s and 30s. These applications met with mixed results. In Gold Coast an African businessman was permitted to establish the first bioscope in the 1920s [34]. In Nigeria, officials permitted a Lebanese businessman to build the first bioscope in Kano in 1937. But they rejected an application to build a similar facility in Kaduna two years later [35]. In that same year the government of Sudan rejected a local businessman’s application to build two bioscopes in Khartoum and Omdurman, despite the fact that the cities shared only one small cinema between them [36].

20By the eve of the Second World War there were two regions of Africa where bioscope construction was gathering momentum. The first was the coast of Britain’s West African colonies. Accra, Gold Coast had several cinemas as did Lagos Nigeria. The other region was Southern Africa. South Africa, which had been the site of the continent’s first “African” bioscope, had cinema houses in most urban areas. To the north, in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, the establishment of regular “bioscopes” was well entrenched by the time Kano got its first movie house. Southern Rhodesia had experienced more urbanization during the 1930s than most British colonies. Its first bioscopes evolved out of urban social welfare halls established by municipal authorities. When the first static “bioscope” opened its doors is unclear, but movie houses were a going concern in the city of Bulawayo by 1929 [37].

21What kinds of films did Africans see at the bioscope ? The answer to this question varied widely throughout the continent. In all of Britain’s African colonies White officials stringently censored motion pictures. However economics and demography at times tempered the heavy hand of government censorship. In South Africa, arguably Britain’s most racially segregated territory, cinema houses showed basically the same motion pictures to all audiences. In the African townships of Johannesburg, black audiences saw American “film noir” movies, which gave rise to the urban “Tsotsi”, or “gangster” culture which many White settlers found menacing [38]. In Cape Town, “Coloured” audiences saw the same films as White audiences, albeit several months after their initial run at segregated theaters [39]. This relatively “laissez faire” approach to censorship indicates the economic power of the cinema industry in the Union. South Africa had the continent’s largest European population, the most advanced economy, and the most densely populated urban areas. It also had its own commercial cinema industry and theater chains with ties to the big American movie studios. Thus there were powerful multi-national corporations with a vested interest in cultivating a multi-racial audience in the Union. However, to the north in Southern and Northern Rhodesia, urban areas were smaller, and the potential pool of cinema goers was much more limited. This made control of cinema segregation easier. Therefore films that were regularly shown to all audiences in Cape Town and Johannesburg were forbidden to African audiences in the Rhodesias. Until the late 1950s virtually the only films screened for Africans in these colonies were heavily edited American westerns. African elites in the 1950s tried to “improve” the quality of films shown in Rhodesian bioscopes, with limited success [40]. Similar issues influenced the types of films shown in other colonies. In the coastal West African cities, with relatively little racial segregation, and a long history of economic interaction with the Atlantic world, African audiences began seeing “mainstream” American movies in the 1930s. However in northern Nigeria, far from the economic dynamism of the coast, racial segregation, and a relatively small urban population, left African movie audiences watching the same edited Westerns found in the Rhodesias. Other factors influenced the types of films shown in a given colony as well. For example, in the predominantly Islamic towns of Tanzania, Kenya, and northern Nigeria, Southern Asian films began to displace Westerns after the Second World War.

Early Battles over the Bioscope

22Information about the establishment of bioscopes only appears in the historical record at moments when they became of concern to authorities. In Southern Rhodesia for example, little is known about African movie houses until 1929. In that year violence at a film show in Bulawayo cast light on life inside the city’s most popular movie theater. The event that brought Rhodesia’s bioscopes into the public record was a brutal “faction fight” in Bulawayo between ethnic Shona and Ndebele gangs in 1929 [41]. The ensuing investigation into the disturbances found that conflict was sparked because “MaShona” men were taking “Matabele” women to the location bioscope. What is interesting about these reports is the alacrity with which Whites involved in the Bulawayo township interceded to defend the bioscope. A clergyman named father Escher wrote to assure the authorities that that “there is no fighting or rodyism [sic] in the Hall at these entertainments”, though he did concede that “Mashona natives in the past have thrown stones through the windows at the audience [42]”. Another defender of the Bulawayo bioscope was the Chief Native Commissioner of Southern Rhodesia, who expressed the opinion that “there is nothing wrong in a well-conducted bioscope” and assumed that the venue’s popularity was too great for it to be closed altogether [43]. Clearly the Bulawayo bioscope was seen as a venue where mixed couples were expected to be able to enjoy the cinema unmolested. Far from suspending bioscopes, the Bulawayo Social Welfare Office built a new hall in 1937 which became the city’s most popular movie house.

23If the establishment of bioscopes went largely unnoticed in Southern Rhodesia, it led to problems in other colonies. Muslim authorities in Sokoto had misgivings about the building of Hausaland’s first bioscope in the 1930s, and staged protests against subsequent attempts to build a bioscope in the old city of Kano [44]. In the Tanganyikan city of Rufiji, elders tried to get a brand new bioscope closed down in 1931 [45]. In both cases local authorities were unable to stop the bioscopes from operating. But their opposition indicates that many African communities greeted these new entertainment venues with ambivalence.

The Influence of the War

24By the advent of the Second World War there were still only a handful of theaters in Africa dedicated to showing movies to anything other than affluent White customers. The war provided a fillip to the creation of bioscopes in many areas of British Africa. It did so for two reasons. First, the recruitment, transportation, and provisioning of African soldiers for the war effort put demands on the entertainment facilities in several colonial cities. In Kenya, the arrival of West African troops en route to the east forced the colonial government to reassess its attitudes towards African bioscopes. The event that precipitated this reconsideration was a complaint voiced in the House of Commons regarding the fact that West African troops stationed in Kenya were facing racial segregation at movie houses. The root of the problem lay in the fact that the coastal city of Mombasa had no functioning African bioscope, a previous one having been closed during a cholera epidemic and never re-opened. Thus while there were several theaters catering to White customers, West African troops, though used to attending bioscopes back home, found themselves refused admittance in Mombassa [46].

25The discrimination faced by the West African soldiers (most likely from Lagos or Accra) drew attention to the issue of racial segregation at the bioscopes, a problem that would become increasingly aggravating to urban Africans, and embarrassing to British authorities, as the popularity of movie houses expanded. In the pre-war period, the most stringent racial segregation policies tended to be associated with those territories with the largest populations of European settlers. The settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, and the European dominated Union of South Africa had separate theaters for “Whites” and “Natives”, while Kenya had no movie houses for Africans at all. However, the situation in regions without significant settler communities was varied. Within colonial Nigeria, bioscopes in the predominantly Islamic Hausa states in the north were racially segregated, while those on the southern coastal regions were not. In 1941 the Colonial Office administrator responsible for Social Welfare in Africa, J.L. Keith, observed that Europeans excluded Africans from seeing movies in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and Southern Rhodesia, because “Europeans object to their presence in places of amusement which the European community regard as their own [47]”. However, colonial attitudes about segregation came under fire during the war. In the wake of the complaints from the West African troops, Kenyan officials immediately began considering plans for including cinema facilities in future urban planning [48]. Within a decade of the war’s end only South Africa and Southern Rhodesia still retained segregated theaters, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Northern Rhodesia having abandoned segregated bioscopes by the end of the 1940s [49].

26The war also sparked a rush of migration into urban areas throughout the continent. In Southern Rhodesia the adult male population of Bulawayo tripled between the 1937 and 1948, a trend that was mirrored in many colonial cities. In Zanzibar, a government report issued in 1942 cited the cinema as an important factor attracting juveniles to leave rural areas for the city [50]. Wartime urbanization led to a post-war boom in cinema construction. The ill-fated al-Duniya was built in 1949. In Gold Coast, Lebanese businessmen built several theaters in Kumasi and Accra during the 1940s [51]. Tanganyika, which had only a handful of cinemas before the war, had seventeen within a decade of the war’s end [52]. Not long after the war ended, authorities in Kenya began making plans to expand the capacity of cinema venues in that colony.

27Discussions over the expansion of cinemas in Kenya elicited some concern regarding the social impact of the shows. In order to address the demand for cinemas, a “committee on African Advance” suggested turning a Mombasa stadium into an open-air bioscope. This however prompted the following response from a Kenyan official : “Mombassa Africans do not need entertaining en masse after dark. Most of them like to be at home by then. Should they be encouraged to go out ? Once out, will they not want to ‘go on’ somewhere after the show ? Where will they go, if not to bars [53] ?” In the city of Nairobi bioscope remained a novelty, and by 1950 there was only one such facility for African use [54].

28Tanzania likewise saw a dramatic expansion of cinemas in the post-war decade. If building bioscopes before the war had been controversial, in the post-war period this was clearly no longer the case. By the mid-fifties, bioscopes in Tanganyika were reputed to be doing great business [55]. In the post-war decade cinema became such an important part of cultural life in urban areas that the Tanganyika African Government Servant’s Association, one of the most powerful worker’s groups in the colony, lodged protests with the government over the skyrocketing price of bioscope tickets [56].

29The British colonies where the post-war expansion of the bioscope was most pronounced was in Northern and Southern Rhodesia. This region experienced rapid economic growth and immigration during and after the war, and the bioscopes appeared in tandem with the swelling urban populations that accompanied this growth. In Southern Rhodesia, provincial towns such as Gatooma began erecting cinemas to match the example of the larger cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo [57]. Indian merchants played a central role in the establishment of multi-racial bioscopes in the Rhodesias following the war [58].

Domesticating the Bioscope

30Like the al-Duniya fire, extraordinary circumstances thrust the otherwise obscure Rhodesian bioscope culture into the public transcript. In this case, it was a campaign launched by educated Africans in the colony to regain a space for themselves in a bioscope culture which was divided between raucous, lower class houses, and segregated “Whites only” picture palaces. The desire to reclaim the bioscope by this tiny elite class thrust the issue into the pages of the two African newspapers in the colony, the Bantu Mirror and the African Daily News. Articles, letters, and editorials brought the world of the bioscope to public attention.

31The environment portrayed by the press was a raucous world of drinking and rowdy behavior. As it had been in 1929, the city of Bulawayo was again at the center of a debate over bioscopes in the post-war era. The city had one main bioscope called Stanley Hall, which had been erected as a welfare center in 1937. However, by the 1950s it had become the preserve of young men whose comportment at the theater was roundly criticized in the African press. As one correspondent to the Bantu Mirror explained, “This section defied all decorum and shouted without restraint, with some of its members taking the role of unauthorized commentators on a picture they hardly followed [59]”.

32Similar problems were associated with the bioscope in Southern Rhodesia’s other major city, Salisbury. There, in the African township of Harare, bioscope shows had also become infamous for the raucous behavior of their audiences. In 1957, a correspondent for the African News offered the following description of a performance : “Some of the people who came to the hall are so drunk that they are unconscious of their unruly behavior until an official reminds them that the toilet rooms are twenty feet from the hall [60]”. Another reporter noted that a recent showing had resulted in “a big row because of the poor film shown [61]”. Another confirmed that a recent screening at the Hall had nearly ended in a riot [62]. This kind of violence was apparently not unusual at Harare cinema shows. The African Daily News’ story on a 1957 showing of “Abbot and Costello Meet Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” assured readers that “to maintain order in the hall, African constables from Harare will be in attendance [63]”.

33To address this problem, African elites established a new cinema hall in Bulawayo, which showed “quality” films instead of the Westerns that were the staple of the other bioscopes. It also led to a campaign to end the racial segregation that kept middle-class Africans from attending the “Whites only” cinemas in the colony [64]. By 1959 their efforts had resulted in an end to legal segregation in both Rhodesias, though de facto segregation remained in effect in the large cities of Southern Rhodesia [65].

Conclusion

34Within a few years of this discussion Britain’s African colonies would be independent nations. With the coming of independence, bioscope culture declined. Economic crises and military coups in the 1960s and 1970s effectively ended the distribution of Western films throughout much of Anglophone Africa. Though these were to some extent supplanted by films from Asia, most urban Africans lost the cinema habit during these initial decades of independence.

35Today the bioscope has faded in importance in African cities, as cinema houses are no longer widely frequented. In Kenya, urban crime, combined with the proliferation of pirated media, has effectively ended movie-going as a popular cultural activity [66]. In Nigeria, video has replaced cinema as the most popular spectator attraction. Lagos, once the cinema capital of West Africa, went a decade without an active cinema house before an entrepreneur recently opened one. In South Africa, enormous multi-plex theaters have displaced local bioscopes almost completely. As a recent article from Reuters put it, “In South Africa […] the sprawling black townships on the edge of the big cities have virtually no cinemas [67]”.

36The bioscope is no longer a distinctive urban space in African cities. Many have been converted to other uses, such as churches and hospitals. Others have been demolished. Alternative methods of distributing film, from video clubs in Nigeria to “cinema shacks” in South Africa, are preferred by African spectators, for reasons of expense, convenience, and safety. But in their day, bioscopes were a diverse vibrant, and often controversial public space in most colonial cities.

37This article has attempted to provide an overview of the bioscope’s history in British Africa. Its goal is to begin a dialogue with scholars of cinema and urbanization in all parts of the colonial world. Specialists within the regions discussed will hopefully be able to complicate and clarify the arguments made about British colonies. Scholars working in Francophone and Lusophone Africa can use its argument as a departure point for exploring movie-house culture in these regions. And scholars working in the Pacific, Asia, the Caribbean [68], and other former colonial territories can draw parallels with the history of these urban spaces in other regions. Movie houses were a fixture of virtually all major colonial cities. More original research, and comparative analysis, is needed to bring to light their rich and important story.