AVALON CINEMA Dar es Salaam
from AFRICA'S WINDS OF CHANGE by Al Noor Kassam
At that time, Dar es Salaam had only two cinemas and, because the
tickets were expensive, the audiences were usually the well-to-do. My brother Hassanali was fascinated by films and he and some business partners formed an enterprise called Indo-African Theatres Ltd. They had cinemas in Nairobi and Zanzibar. The partners were Harbanslal, a Punjabi from Nairobi; a Parsee named Talati from Zanzibar, who imported films from India; and Thawer, an Ismaili from Zanzibar. They also gave me some shares in the company. They suggested to my father that he build a cinema which they would then lease from him. Our family owned a godown that was leased by an Arab businessman named Yahya Mohammed, which was ideal for conversion into a cinema. After the businessman vacated the premises, I supervised the conversion of the building into the Avalon cinema, which was opened in 1944 by the Mayor of Dar es Salaam, Tom Tyrell. In addition to Indian films, we also screened films from the UK and USA. We imported the latest films and screened them for a week.......
In April 1971, when I was back in Tanzania, the government
nationalized all private buildings from which the owners were earning rent in excess of a certain amount. My brothers and I expected our father to be furious about losing the properties he had acquired through hard work over more than half a century. However, he surprised us. ‘I am happy the buildings have been nationalized – I will no longer have to pay income tax since I won’t be earning rent,’ he said with a broad smile.
