1964 Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Felicia Agomuo

Born in 1952

Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Interviewed on September 21, 2019

By John Agoh

The first program that I remember seeing in the movie theater is called Village Headmaster. I think I was in my early teenage years and it must have been around 1964. The program was about colonialism and portrayed how Nigerians would serve as interpreters for the colonial officers. Some of them weren’t actually interpreting what the white men were saying. In fact, most of them just listened to the confusing sounds that came from the British and interpreted and translated it however they liked. The fact that they did not respond accurately was quite funny. I don’t really remember who was with me but it must have been my sister or some of my friends. I didn’t usually go with my parents, who would bring their parents to the cinema? We didn’t go to the movie theater frequently because the tickets were too expensive. We would go sometimes during the weekends or after school: when there was nothing to be done and we needed to pass the time. Some people used to think negatively about people that went to the movie theaters; if you went, you were seen as idle or jobless. However, a lot of people, a bit too many actually, would still go.

The specific cinema that I went to when I saw Village Headmaster was called Plaza Cinema. It was located on Enugu Street in Port Harcourt. To get there we had to purchase a ticket to take a bus and then we would trek for some time to the cinema hall. There were no ushers or anything of the sort, after buying tickets you would just enter the space. The amount of money you spent on the tickets determined where you sat. Rich people would sit in the front and poorer people would sit in the back. There was a concession stand and area where you could buy products like chewing gum and other foods; the cinema hall didn’t sell popcorn. Sometimes we would buy drinks like fanta and coke. We also bought foods that were sold outside of the cinema. They would sell foods like fish, plantains, yams, bread, and rice, which we could either bring inside or eat outside.

All the theaters that we went too were well-kept, the buildings both inside and out were nice. They used to play all types of movies in the theaters. I remember Cowboy and Bollywood movies being very popular. Also, during the festival seasons, they would play regional movies and programs devoted to the celebrations. Particularly, during the New Yam Festival, they would play New Masquerade, which is an Igbo film about the festival. Sadly, when the civil war hit, I and everyone stopped going to the movie theaters altogether. You had no time to, your time was spent running for your life and hiding in the bush.