East Africans were among the first people in the world to develop a love for going to the movies. Laura Fair's new book uncovers this remarkable story, beginning with the arrival of hand-cranked moving picture displays of the early 1900s, followed by the emergence of cinemas as fixtures of East African cities in the 1950s, the construction of a massive drive-in cinema by Tanzania's socialist government in the late 1960s, and ending with the proliferation of exurban multiplex cinemas in the shopping malls on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam in more recent years. She explores what Tanzanian audiences thought and felt about their favourite films, showing how Bollywood films resonated within regional understandings of love and comportment, and how in the 1970s, Bruce Lee and kung fu films inspired a public steeped in socialist ideologies of self-reliance and a political agenda of Third World solidarity and non-alignment. Fair argues that, while the vast majority of films screened in Tanzanian cinemas over the years were foreign imports from Hollywood and Bollywood, the films themselves are only one aspect of a rich and distinctly East African movie-going culture, rooted in regional cultures of urbanism, consumerism, leisure, affect and enterprise.

What stands out most about Laura Fair's new book are the exquisitely detailed descriptions of the work that went into making the cinemas into a meaningful public space. We encounter Indian entrepreneurs who use their resources and connections to scour the earth for the films that would most delight their East African audiences. We encounter ‘reelers’: young men who cycled frantically through the city streets transporting film reels from one cinema to another so that the same film could play at staggered times on the same evening in multiple locations. We learn about the ‘ruffian row’ – the front row of seats where young men would sit together, showing off for their friends by throwing orange peels and shouting clever things at the screen. We are taken into the gendered public spectacle of zanana (ladies-only) screenings. We are introduced to the hawkers who sell grilled meats and sweet tropical fruits in the streets outside the cinema. We imagine the excitement in the voices of Tanzanian men and women recalling the plotlines of their favourite films in conversations with Fair. Perhaps the book's biggest accomplishment is that, by the end of it, the reader really understands why the cinema was such a special place.

Fair frames the book as a comprehensive account of film in Tanzania, but I see this more as a Swahili urban history than a national history. In contrast with the cinema craze in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, cinema was never as popular in the rest of the country. Fair demonstrates how pre-existing Swahili urban traditions of public space, conspicuous consumption and cosmopolitanism proved fertile ground for the emergence of a vibrant film-going culture in the 20th century. The epilogue tracks how the scene of cinema culture has changed, from single screen theatres in the city centre, connected to the commerce of the city streets where patrons came on foot, to the multiplexes surrounded by parking lots in suburban shopping malls far from the city centre. In this way, the history of the rise, decline and then remaking of filmgoing in Tanzania might also be understood as a story about the decline of a kind of urban public sphere.

At 472 pages, this book is long. At times, some of the micro-historical reconstruction – the painstaking listing of the specific names and chronologies of all the different cinemas and cinema owners, for example – weighs down the story. Then again, I can imagine that for people with a personal stake in this history, it might be extremely important to see these names and places documented in these pages, and it might be this audience that Fair is addressing. I hope that this book circulates in Tanzania to reach those readers. As for American students, though it might be too long to assign in most introductory level undergraduate classes, it certainly deserves an audience with more advanced students of popular culture, urbanism and Tanzanian history.