The African Bioscope—Movie-House Culture in British Colonial Africa

On 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 makeshift 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

The 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.

The 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.

However, 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 daytime shows to what were presumably already popular evening screenings. Thus, the new bioscope was apparently a thriving, popular pastime.

In a recent monograph I have explored the history of colonial filmmaking 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 proactive 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.

My 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

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