I have been writing over the past few weeks about how foreign television stations cover events in Swaziland. I’ve also written about how some people living overseas see it as their mission to come and save Swazis.
One local television station in Michigan, United States, has managed unwittingly to combine these two themes. A TV station called NBC25 has been following the exploits of Derek Van Dam, who is the man who reads the weather forecast on the station’s breakfast time news show. In a series of reports that the station has called ‘Derek Goes to Africa’, NBC25 follows Derek and his church friends as they prepare to travel to Swaziland to visit El Shaddai orphanage and then reports on what happens to Derek when he gets there.
The reports give a fascinating insight into the way Swaziland is viewed in America.
These reports and others like them are important because very little about Swaziland gets covered in the foreign media. This is even more so when you look at countries outside the continent of Africa. Because of this people know very little about the kingdom. What little they do know they learn through the media.
Even the title of these reports ‘Derek Goes to Africa’ is faintly patronising. It reminds me of the stories we used to read as children in the UK 40 and more years ago, which featured people from England going to the Dark Continent to bring enlightenment to the savages.
In this first piece that was aired during the station’s evening news programme, Derek talks about why he is going to Swaziland with a group of residents of the mid-Michigan area (the area the NBC25 station covers). ‘We have been given an opportunity to help people who really can’t help themselves,’ he says.
Later Derek talks about the high rate of HIV AIDS in Swaziland and seems to blame Swazi parents for the number of children who have died. ‘They simply couldn’t take care of themselves or their families. It’s no wonder that 30,000 children die in Africa every day from malnutrition or starvation.’
The piece fails to put the HIV-AIDS-poverty crisis into any context. Instead, for Derek and his missionaries it is simply a case of presuming to know what is best. One missionary interviewed in the programme talks about the El Shaddai orphanage that the Americans, who are members of the New Covenant Free Methodist Church, intend to help. ‘We want to help supply the orphanage with a safe place to live and to learn and to go to school and to be fed and we’re working to get water into that community.’
This is stated as if there are no government policies in place in Swaziland to tackle these kinds of problems. Nor is it quite clear how Derek, whose job is reading the weather forecast on local television in the US, has the skills to solve health and education issues in Swaziland.
Also, erroneously the report and the others that follow state that Swaziland is one of the poorest countries in the world when it is not. It is not even one of the poorest in Africa.
You can see the report which lasts nearly four minutes here
One local television station in Michigan, United States, has managed unwittingly to combine these two themes. A TV station called NBC25 has been following the exploits of Derek Van Dam, who is the man who reads the weather forecast on the station’s breakfast time news show. In a series of reports that the station has called ‘Derek Goes to Africa’, NBC25 follows Derek and his church friends as they prepare to travel to Swaziland to visit El Shaddai orphanage and then reports on what happens to Derek when he gets there.
The reports give a fascinating insight into the way Swaziland is viewed in America.
These reports and others like them are important because very little about Swaziland gets covered in the foreign media. This is even more so when you look at countries outside the continent of Africa. Because of this people know very little about the kingdom. What little they do know they learn through the media.
Even the title of these reports ‘Derek Goes to Africa’ is faintly patronising. It reminds me of the stories we used to read as children in the UK 40 and more years ago, which featured people from England going to the Dark Continent to bring enlightenment to the savages.
In this first piece that was aired during the station’s evening news programme, Derek talks about why he is going to Swaziland with a group of residents of the mid-Michigan area (the area the NBC25 station covers). ‘We have been given an opportunity to help people who really can’t help themselves,’ he says.
Later Derek talks about the high rate of HIV AIDS in Swaziland and seems to blame Swazi parents for the number of children who have died. ‘They simply couldn’t take care of themselves or their families. It’s no wonder that 30,000 children die in Africa every day from malnutrition or starvation.’
The piece fails to put the HIV-AIDS-poverty crisis into any context. Instead, for Derek and his missionaries it is simply a case of presuming to know what is best. One missionary interviewed in the programme talks about the El Shaddai orphanage that the Americans, who are members of the New Covenant Free Methodist Church, intend to help. ‘We want to help supply the orphanage with a safe place to live and to learn and to go to school and to be fed and we’re working to get water into that community.’
This is stated as if there are no government policies in place in Swaziland to tackle these kinds of problems. Nor is it quite clear how Derek, whose job is reading the weather forecast on local television in the US, has the skills to solve health and education issues in Swaziland.
Also, erroneously the report and the others that follow state that Swaziland is one of the poorest countries in the world when it is not. It is not even one of the poorest in Africa.
You can see the report which lasts nearly four minutes here
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