Durban - The old picture this week takes in a famed Durban landmark, The Avalon Cinema, at the intersection of Victoria and Albert streets, today Bertha Mkhize and Ingcunce.
The building was designed by architects Gliksman and Dirksen and erected in 1939.
It was the dream of Aboobaker “AB” Moosa who, as a young man in the 1920s, fell in love with cinema and longed to have a theatre of his own where he could watch the movies he wanted for free. At the age of 37, he and Abdulla Kajee opened the Avalon Theatre.
The theatre was a huge success, catering largely for the South African Indian community. Moosa was one of the first to bring early Bollywood movies to South Africa. The business boomed, and he began opening theatres elsewhere in South Africa – in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kimberley, East London, Port Elizabeth and Paarl.
The Group Areas Act and Reservation of Separate Amenities Act nearly destroyed Moosa’s empire. In 1964, at the age of 21, his son Moosa witnessed his father’s humiliation at their family’s eviction from their home in Morningside. AB Moosa did not survive either the eviction or what Moosa refers to as the “legislated theft” of his assets.
Moosa Moosa took on sole ownership of Avalon and ran only one cinema in Durban. “We might not even have retained that, but the Grey Street complex was in a so-called ‘Indian’ area,” he said.
Today the Avalon group run by Moosa’s grandson, also AB Moosa, is the third largest cinema group in the country with headquarters in Durban’s Suncoast.
Today the complex is converted into shops and flats as Shelley Kjonstad’s picture shows.
The Independent on Saturday