ABSTRACT
The arrival of video film in post-socialist Tanzania opened up new entrepreneurial opportunities for many artists who over the last few decades have established a major film industry in Tanzania. Using Nollywood as a model,1 hundreds of young Tanzanians shifted from the media and fields like theatre or literature to the audiovisual medium of film to tell their own stories in Kiswahili, entertain, and make a living. Among them are directors, producers, mobile video vendors (machinga2), video shop, library, and cinema owners, and movie translators. This also holds true for the piracy business, a sector that has created thousands of jobs in the video filmmaking’s shadow industry.
