By Abdulrazak Gurnah

Just five minutes from our old house in Malindi in Zanzibar (less than that if you went the back ways) was the cinema. It was then called the Sultana. The cinema was on a busy main road, just out of the dock gates, jostled by cafes and small shops, and vendors of nuts and fruit juices with their ornate little trolleys. Nearby was a kebab stand and a coffee seller with his brazier warming tall elegant brass coffee pots which he handled with deceptive ease. You only realised how deceptive when you tried to lift one, even when it was empty. There was also the seller of madafu, the young sweet coconuts which he trimmed and cut open for you to drink, wielding his big sharp knife with alarming speed. But all this activity did not, somehow, seem to crowd the cinema. The building was so singular, and the pavement in front of it so wide, that it seemed the quiet centre of this bustle.

It was looking at the Sampad collection on the SALIDAA website which made me think of the cinema. The images of the musicians and the dancers recalled the boisterous versions we used to see in the movies. Setting Tagore to music in the Chaturang images is an altogether different matter from the memory of the dancers they prompted, but that’s how memory works sometimes. The Sultana cinema was Indian-owned, as were the two other cinemas in the town, the Empire and the Majestic. The Sultana was built by the Parsi S. H. Talati who also owned the Empire Cinema, under a separate management. The Majestic Cinema was owned by the Ismaili Amir 'Ngozi'. There were many Indians in Zanzibar then: Hindu, Ismaili, Ithnaasheri, Bohra, Parsi. In my first-year class in secondary school, which was the year before the revolution in 1964, there were 15 Indian students out of 30. The grocer’s shop where our family had an account, just a short walk from our house and on the other side of the mosque, was Indian-owned. The carpenter on this side of the mosque and the barber down towards the main road were also Indian. In fact most of the barbers, tailors, haberdashers, doctors, motor dealers and, of course, lawyers were Indian.

I remember when the Sultana was new, or newly refurbished. In fact, I think I remember when it was being re-built, but that could be one of those illusions of memory when you are convinced you were present at some event which you have heard others speak about. I was 3 years-old when it re-opened. In any case, I remember the first time I went into it. One of the treats of Id was an evening at the cinema. It was not only a treat for us children but for the women of the house as well, for whom to be seen at the cinema at other times was about equivalent to having a secret liaison. Anyway, one Id I was old enough to be allowed to go to the cinema, accompanied by brother and relatives, and we went to the Sultana, of course. Those brushed velvet seats, the raked auditorium, the cream, almost see-through curtains, and then the huge screen they silently revealed when the moment came. This evening of miracle was only slightly spoiled by all the tall heads which obscured my view of the screen and the fact that I could not understand any English, and so could not understand what Audie Murphy and James Stewart were saying, for it was indeed they.

All the cinemas regularly showed an Indian movie during the week, but Sunday was the special show. Hundreds of Indians in town seemed to go to the cinema on that day, and those who were not at the cinema were promenading on the waterfront, and many did both. Whole families in their finery milled around the forecourt of the Sultana, talking and greeting, while we gaped at their impossible self-absorption. This was often an all-Indian show, and if you went to the box-office at the last minute and tried to buy a ticket, you found that all the seats were booked. You can imagine what Sundays were like when Mother India or Awara were showing. Actually you probably can’t. All three cinemas would show the movie on the same evening, staggering the scheduling to allow the reels to be transferred from one cinema to the other by a man on a bicycle. And all three theatres would be sold out.

During the week, on a Wednesday evening, the Sultana put on another Indian movie for the locals. This one had laughing jinns and mustachioed gods and songs and dances dances dances. How those women could dance, racing around the pillars and the bushes, mincing and winking, and shrieking out the lyrics at the same time, was impossible to understand. (They didn’t, of course, someone else did the shrieking.) We could not understand a word the women sang, but we went anyway, to hear the jinns laughing before soaring away into the firmament.

After the revolution in 1964, and the expulsion of the Omanis, the Sultana changed its name to Ciné Afrique. Business is business, and in any case, everything named after the Sultan and his family changed its name to something more appropriate to the circumstances. The Empire and the Majestic were left alone. The censors were also fiercer in this new era, and for a while Indian movies and Egyptian movies (which were also shown now and then) were rarer than they had been. More or less normal service resumed slowly, but the times had changed. Soon after the revolution, Indians began to leave in droves, and now only a few hundreds live in Zanzibar where once there were thousands. All three cinemas are shut. Now empty after another refurbishment, the Ciné Afrique is about to re-open as a supermarket.

To view the Sampad collection

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