Journal of Social History

Prichard, Andreana, C

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz119pmid: N/A

Laura Fair’s Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania is a detailed look at changing race relations, resistance politics, urban spaces, female empowerment, and African agency through the lens of the cinema industry in twentieth-century Tanzania. One of Fair’s central arguments in Reel Pleasures is that cinema and its industries were spaces of encounter where East Africans defied the spatial and racial geographies meant to define their lives. They did so with creativity, ingenuity, and agility that resulted in a sense of “in-commonness” experienced across racial, class, and political divides. In making this argument, Fair builds on a long tradition of urban social, cultural, and leisure histories of Africa. By emphasizing the myriad ways in which Zanzibaris and Tanzanians (including those descended from immigrants) worked to build inclusive and accessible institutions and to foster communities mobilized around commonalities, Fair pushes back against East African Studies literature that tends, as she rightly points out, to be dominated “by images of othering minority populations” that grant “normativity to the racism of nationalist rhetoric” (22). The book is thus a story of resistance—against colonialism, socialism, patriarchal institutions, and images of East Africa drawn by scholars and historians. In the tradition of the best social histories, Reel Pleasures is full of detail about East Africans’ experiences with cinema, from street-level to censorship boards. This richness is due in part to the diversity of sources Fair consulted and to the intimate relationships she built with her interlocutors. In addition to over 100 interviews, Fair sourced data from beyond the traditional archive to paint a picture of “what going to the movie meant [to Tanzanians] and how people made use of films in their own lives” (32). She used Kiswahili terms, memories of movie-going (places are “containers of memory”), random sampling and surveys, and personal photo collections. She located uncollected holdings and business records of departments, ministries, offices, and parastatals. At the building that formerly housed the Tanzania Film Company, she found reams of records staff presumed had been lost; she hosted an essay competition that produced colorful evidence. Reel Pleasures includes an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction clearly sets out her arguments, embeds the work in the broader scholarship, and gives readers a sense of how she conducted the research. In Chapter One, Fair looks at business relations between budding cinema entrepreneurs in the early 1900s. Here she sets the stage for an argument that unfolds across several chapters about the importance of reputation and cooperation for businessmen operating in and around the cinema. Elements of the “patron-client relationships that infused nineteenth-century business and leisure networks” shaped the nature of the cinema business such that the goal was “never to eliminate one’s rival but to outclass him” (42). For East African cinematic capitalists, reinvesting in their communities with acts of philanthropy was another element inherited from older patterns of thought (70). Chapter Two illustrates the power of cinema to enhance valuable social and cultural capital for a range of people. Stories of managers, ticket sellers, projectionists, concession stand operators, reelers, and human billboards illustrate the social networks, human interactions, and distinct personalities that made cinema central to communities. Fair shows black marketers to be skilled practitioners engaged in what many considered to be a prestigious way to earn a living; unlike in the American mafia, there was little competition (108). Affective ties grew up in this space, creating family and friendship ties across race and class. Chapter Three (which will be familiar to readers of Cole and Thomas’s Love in Africa) focuses on the way in which Hindi films—particularly the film Awara—created space for East Africans to explore the growth of romance and the rise of nationalism (139). This discussion also illustrates Fair’s emerging argument about the ways in which film served as a tool for individuals to overthrow control—in this case, of political economies based on colonialism and patriarchal control of marriage (140). Chapter Four explores how international films were received and understood in different local contexts from the 1950s-1980s. Indian films of the Hindi-Bombay variety were most popular and American films less so, but moviegoers preferred to see a consistent set of elements. By the 1970s and 1980s, new genres turned moviegoing into an activity for youths interested in particular niche markets, such as blaxploitation and kung fu films. Chapter Five discusses the differences in the way cinema was adopted in cities throughout Tanzania. Access to cash and relative wealth made moviegoing easier for people living in coastal cities than in regional towns. While colonial officials and locally specific norms of mobility affected people’s (particularly women’s) ability to take in a show, only Arusha segregated moviegoing by race. Chapter Six illustrates Fair’s broader argument that postcolonial socialism and visions of modernity and independence were not monolithic, but that rhetoric and reality intertwined in complex and contradictory ways. Drive-in theatres were an ironic epitomization of Nyerere’s vision of socialism, where races, ethnicities, and classes could come together in public and enjoy (if temporarily) consumption and abundance (244). In Chapter Seven, youthful moviegoers of the 1960s-1980s remade the global to fit local expectations and desires. Bruce Lee films inspired women to imagine “crushing male privilege with only their bare hands and feet” (255) and immigrants to the cities came to equate moviegoing with older puberty initiation ceremonies (269). In Chapter Eight, Fair argues that the nationalization of the film industry and a thirst for short-term profits coincided with the failure of the indigenous feature film-making industry and a decline in the viewing experience of a broad range of films. In the epilogue, Fair describes contemporary transformations to moviegoing culture—buildings that once held cinemas now hold “Pentecostal churches, rent-to-own furniture stores, and warehouses for electronics” (312), affordable TVs and DVDs allow for on-demand viewing at home, and families or chauffeured youths visit multiplex cinemas at shopping malls. Fair aims to dispel the stereotype that Africa is “consigned to the ‘global shadows’,” as if it were “tangential, rather than central, to the unfolding of truly global experiences” (24). She argues that in Reel Pleasures we see that “Tanzanians’ experiences were actually commensurate with global trends in technological appropriation, the rise of commercial public leisure, and engagement with transnational media flows” (24). This is an important argument, but it is not made as strongly in the body of the book as in the introduction. It might have been interesting to learn more about how Tanzanian tastes, desires, and regulations shaped the film industry outside of the country. Indeed, by Fair’s own admission the scope of her study hemmed her ability to illustrate this argument in the way she had initially planned (39). This is a small point about an otherwise superb social history of Tanzania, which offers valuable insights into twentieth-century East African urban life. It is an enjoyable and accessible read that will be of equal utility for undergraduate classes in African history and film studies, for graduate students interested in social history methodology, and for scholars. From experience, I know that undergraduates enjoy screening Awara and eating Zanzibari snacks while reading Chapter Three, and that the entire volume works well as a text for any study abroad trip to Tanzania, especially when paired with a trip to Jaws Corner. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)