Tanzania is the host of over forty million people. Approximately over 5 million people are expected to be movie fans regardless of their age, occupation, education level, race, regions that they are found and so forth. These audiences are fond of watching movies in the confinements of their homes, some go to cinema houses while there are many of those who go for local cinema huts famously known as “Vimkandala”. What attracts these audiences to these cinema huts is, among other factors, the fact that some, if not all, of the movies that are screened are movies that have been translated to Kiswahili language. Most of these movies are translated from their original languages but mostly the Indians and the English language movies. The group of people that are accustomed to this tendency is a group I hereby connote them as “average audience”. By average I mean audiences who have no competence in the language that is being used in a movie but they demand to watch the movie with different sorts of pleasure that they obtain from it.
The question of what language is being used in a movie for an audience to understand I believe is also a question of who is the target audience. In this information age or in this human project of living as if we are in one village, we are given access to whatever that appears to please us and appeals to our gratitude and pleasures with little hitches of difficulties. Some are aware of this and what they do is to choose what bears with their social-economic realities. However, within the same trend there are some of us that have failed to make such sorts of choices but rather they seem to look for anything that gives them pleasure regardless of the difficulties. The difficulty of language in foreign or rather imported movies to average Tanzanians is the typical case here.
Movie stories are said to unfold in two major aspects. One is that movies are 70% mimetic/showing us what the movie is all about while the remaining 30% is reserved to the diegetic/telling aspect of them. But however little the aspect of telling is, it plays vital role for audience to conjure what the movie is all about. This aspect of telling is the one that we listen to and cognize, hence language becomes the most important tool in this process of exchanging information from the authors of the movie to the audience. Henceforth, I parade herewith the incidences that we demand subtitles to movies that speaks a foreign language to us, therefore the subtitles should be in a language that we are at least competent with. However there are incidences that even the subtitles are termed to be unhelpful. Such incidences are for instance when you don’t understand even the language of the subtitles.
This is where we find the antecedence of “Vimkandala” or cinema houses in most of the highly populated areas in Dar es Salaam such as buguruni, Mbagala, Gongo la Mboto, Manzese, and so forth. The social composition of the population that is found in these areas is of such people who have certain sentiments of language incompetence of such language as English, let alone Indian. As this average audience encounter difficulties on understanding the movies that are told in different language such as English movies and those in Indian they turn to this Vimkandala where by the movies that are screened are basically the translated ones from such languages to Kiswahili. If you happen to attend the screening sessions in “Vimkandala” you will find that it is not only the matter of translating, and this is exactly my concern, but also a matter of employing a new narrator to the story of the movie. A narrator here is employed as an omniscient narrator who is looking and explaining the events that are unfolding in the movie from outside. Need I mention also he seem, if you listen very carefully, to be the one who knows everything about what is happening in the movie.
My reservation here is that we are overlooking the unconstructive impact of such translations to many factors of development such as human intelligence. Movies not only that they appeal and involve the minds of the audience to conjure it contextually as well as content wise, but also they are good as brain teasers. They demand the use of brain for an audience to juggle with the plot of the movie story. This is one reason why film theorists have tried to categorize movies among the pedagogic institutions. However among the activities that denies movie such power is the act of translating them by imposing a third narrator who tells the story in a translation and from his point of view. This may cause serious problems to the audience who at this sort of phenomenology are denied the use of their intelligence to grasp what the film tries to propound but rather they are being oriented to it via this new third narrator. If audience is subjected to such phenomena repeatedly, I conceive that his/her thinking capacity is at stake and however helpful this has been to him/her; it shall reveal its cons in the following endeavors such as excelling in education palavers that calls for his ability to think.
Finally, looking back to the old good days where we had storytelling sessions during evenings that were told to us by grandpas and grandmas, this should be a replica of such atmosphere, the only difference is that now we are seeing what is being told. The fact that we were not seeing what our grandpas and grandmas were telling us and it was upon each individual to visualize what he/she hears is one factor that I consider that tradition as part and parcel of nurturing human thinking faculties from childhood. In the contemporary Tanzania if you step into this “Vimkandala” you will find children of five to ten years concentrating on the screen to see just what they hear at the same time. E.g “anampiga teke pale”as in action movies. I suppose this is one of the negative facets of Vimkandala to average movie audience in Tanzania that the government and stakeholders should not continue to overlook them.
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