BIG BROTHER SHOW CONS AFRICANS

Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2), the ‘reality’ television show that went on and on and on for three months is finally over.

The Swazi media, particularly the newspapers and mostly the Times of Swaziland, got carried away by the show in which 12 young men and women were put together in a house, made to undertake tasks, had cameras watching them 24 hours a day, and then had viewers decide which ones of them they wanted to evict from the house. This went on and on for 98 days until there was only one ‘housemate’ standing. The winner got to go away with 100,000 US dollars (about 700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

Swazi journalists such as Nathi Gule, who writes a television review in the Times every Friday, thought BBA2 was the best thing since television was invented.

Although the media in Swaziland fell for BBA2, journalists elsewhere in Africa were more aware of that BBA2 was a confidence trick on ordinary Africans.

Daniel Soetan, writing last Saturday (17 November 2007) in the Nigerian newspaper Leadership, compared BBA2 with a previous ‘reality’ TV show called Gulder Ultimate Search. Soetan writes.

‘[Gulder Ultimate Search] was a TV Reality Show that x-rayed the true day-to-day life of average African people.

‘Gulder Ultimate Search was devoid of luxury, flamboyancy etc. No rooms fully air-conditioned, no gas cookers, and other quirths that an average African cannot afford.

‘How will you get an air-conditioner when your ordinary ceiling, standing or even table fan, as the case may be, would require generator to roll the blades?

‘What gas cooker? Can an average Nigerian afford it? My neighbours, even with the kerosene cooking stoves, still have to use charcoal burner to cook oftentimes. The poor family can’t cope with the hike in the price of kerosene.

‘In an hotel one day, during the early days of the just concluded Big Brother Africa, I watched the housemates testing the beautiful new clothes that had just been delivered to them by the organisers. Ask the participants of the Gulder Ultimate Search.

‘The BBA reality show, to an extent, suppresses the truth about the real African. How can you lock up some youths and have them live in a fake world? They briefly enjoy luxury, comfort, a high life style and rich nutritious food that some of them do not enjoy in their real world, only to evict them back into their real world of poverty and hustling.

‘They'll come out more angry, frustrated and aggressive than they went in with so much impatience and greed because they simply desire that it continues to be like it was in the Big Brother House.’

I agree with most of what Daniel Soetan writes but I think he misses an important point. BBA2 wasn’t meant to be about ‘average’ Africans. BBA2 went out on the satellite channel DSTV, a channel that most Swazis don’t watch because they can’t afford to. In Swaziland about 70 per cent of the population exist on less than one US dollar a day.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates ranged in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them were aged 23 to 28. They didn’t have run-of-the-mill jobs in the real world. Two described themselves as ‘authors’, one was a model and actress, another was a fashion designer and yet another was a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

Only countries with people who have money to attract advertisers were allowed to take part. Swazis were not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV. Swazis are just too poor.

I’ll leave the final word for today on BBA2 to Ambrose Nuwagira, writing in the New Vision newspaper, Uganda.

‘What has this show portrayed? That life is all about manipulation, hypocrisy, and exploitation, whereby the most clinical in these will always win. This is a blatant lie.

‘To the African child, the biggest question in the last 98 days has been what can an African do for $100,000? The answers were just manifesting on the TV screens; hatred, envy, greed and infidelity.

‘There is absolutely nothing African about big brother.

‘Big brother is a sign of moral degeneration, greed, and gluttony. Africans have a sense of decency, shame, honour, dignity and moral sensibility. These are two contrasting situations. Now that they have broken the codes of decency, have made adultery look attractive and, of recent, portrayed fidelity as insignificant, what will be the next item on stage in an era where HIV/AIDS rates are increasing and vices like homosexuality trying to hold ground? Big Brother Africa portrays high corporate social irresponsibility and has offered our society a disservice.’

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WATCHING BIG BROTHER

READING BIG BROTHER

AFRICA’S NEWS BY AFRICANS

More realistic and relevant images of Africa may be seen on television screens across the world with the launch of new TV channels.

The changes come after established global television companies have been criticised for mostly broadcasting news and documentaries that stereotype Africa as a disaster-torn continent full of starving and needy people.

The website journalism.co.za reports that new satellite channels are planned to give an African perspective on African news

South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) began test transmissions of SABC International in June 2007.

‘SABC News International will provide on-the-hour news bulletins and news updates,’ says Alwyn Kloppers, Manager of Resources at SABC News, who is also a member of the task team planning the service.Fashioned on similar lines as the big international services like CNN, BBC World and Al Jazeera, SABC News International will seek to compete commercially.

The channel will replace the existing SABC Africa service carried on DSTV, whose broadcasting contract expires in March 2008. The new channel will be available on Sentech’s relatively unknown VIVID satellite platform. It will be free to air, but users will need to buy a special decoder. It will cover Sub-Saharan Africa from Nigeria to South Africa.

Initially, broadcasting will be mainly in English, with French as the second main language. Other languages like Portuguese could be added in due course.

The SABC initiative comes amid several other continent-wide TV projects, many driven by a sense that Western networks consistently misrepresent Africa. An independent company, Africans Together Vision (ATV), led by Samir Amin, the son of the late Mohamed Amin, a Kenyan cameraman best known for his coverage of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, is planning a pan-African channel with the name A24 TV.

In 2006, ATV announced that it aims to give a voice to the continent and that it targets free-to-air television and radio stations complemented by mobile and internet services.

The Guardian newspaper, UK, reports that for years a news channel has been beyond the reach of any media organisation in Africa. Now, however, satellite and coverage costs, through new technology and the internet, make A24 possible.

The channel will offer breaking news, analysis and a platform for sharing ideas between Africans from across the continent and beyond. It will use a range of distribution methods including streaming on the internet and mobile phones. Africa is enjoying an explosion of mobile usage and the channel bosses plan to encourage its audience to send user-generated content to its Nairobi headquarters.

Eventually, A24 wants to run 46 news bureaux across the continent. A24 will cover both the uplifting as well as the depressing news from Africa.

The channel will be editorially independent and plans to train its own journalists through the A24 Foundation with the help of Norway's Gimlekollen School of Journalism. The foundation will coordinate this training in cooperation with universities and institutes in South Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya as well as major TV news agencies.

A24 is in discussion with a wide range of international broadcasters and partners about content-sharing, distribution and support, and the channel’s two founders, Amin and managing director Daniel Rivkin, plan to roll the channel out both online and on television during next year.
‘24 will make a difference because it will create a new kind of voice,’ says Amin. ‘It will be truly African, beyond local politics and beyond prejudices.’

Meanwhile, CNBC Africa has recently begun broadcasting as sub-Saharan Africa's first 24/7 international business news channel. Recently, to give more coverage on Africa, Al Jazeera added another portfolio called Al Jazeera Africa to its Al-Jazeera International (AJI), the new 24-hour English-language news and current affairs channel and sister of Al-Jazeera Arabic News Channel.

READING BIG BROTHER

Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2), the television ‘reality’ show that put 12 young people in a house together and asked the viewers to vote which of them should be thrown out, is getting a lot of coverage in newspapers across Africa. That’s understandable, because a great deal of money has been spent putting the show together and if the publicists can get enough people hooked on it there’s a lot of money to be made for the sponsors.

A good deal of the coverage is in countries that have a representative in the house. Only 12 people were chosen and each of them is from a different country. Only countries with people who have money to attract advertisers were allowed to take part.

Swazis were not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV, the satellite television company that is broadcasting BBA2. It seems that Swazis are just too poor.

That hasn’t stopped the Swazi newspapers from running articles about BBA2. I don’t quite see why the newspapers bother since hardly anyone in Swaziland is watching the programme.

Of Swaziland’s two daily newspapers, the Swazi Observer has been publishing most articles detailing what’s going on in the BBA2 house and I can see the irony of a newspaper with hardly any readers writing about a television programme with hardly any viewers

Although the Observer has been publishing BBA2 articles for some time now, its daily rival the Times of Swaziland is catching up.

But the problem is both newspapers are too lazy to write their own articles, even though yesterday both of them devoted a page to the latest ‘news’ from the BBA2 household.

What at first look like columns written by a journalist are actually just a bunch of words copied from the Big Brother Internet site.

I say a ‘bunch of words’ because the inept ‘journalist’ who put the page together for the Observer on Monday (17 September 2007) clearly didn’t even bother to read them. Or maybe, he or she did read them but was a bit too slow to understand what the words actually meant. For in Monday’s article the ‘journalist’ left in lines that are clearly ‘hot links’ for people who are reading the stuff on their computers to click onto and leave their own messages.

When you see the words ‘Make your prediction in the forum’ in print on the page of the Observer, it just makes no sense at all. When you see the same words on the Internet you know to click on them and be taken to a page where you write your own comments about the show.

This is just another example of how difficult it is to trust Swazi journalism. What looks like a piece of independent journalism turns out to be copied from a commercial website.

Yesterday, the game was up. Anyone who bought both the Observer and the Times would see that their BBA2 articles were exactly the same. Word for word.

Both articles were about the non-story that there would be no evictions from the house this week. But (and how exciting is this?) the housemates don’t know.

It’s all public relations nonsense of course to try to drum up some drama about the BBA2 show, when none really exists.

I’d rather the newspapers gave us some real journalism about BBA2.

Here’s something they could find out for us. How many Swazis have been sending SMS text messages to the show (at E3.50 a time) and how much profit has the cell phone company MTS made as a result of this?

And what chance does a caller from Swaziland really have in deciding which housemate gets evicted?

WATCHING BIG BROTHER

On Sunday I saw some people having a meal (scrambled eggs, I think) and then one man poured himself a glass of water and drank it. Later, someone else took a broom and swept the floor of the kitchen while some others sat in the garden.

No, this wasn’t a typical Sunday at the Rooney homestead; this was a day in the life of Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2).

BBA2 is the new ‘reality television’ show broadcast by satellite company, DSTV.

For those of you who have real lives of your own and haven’t been paying attention, BBA2 put 12 ‘housemates’ together in a house, locked them away from the world, and has had cameras following them for 24 hours a day.

Sunday was day 42 of their exploits. The series is scheduled to run for a total of 98 days.

From time to time, viewers are asked to nominate one of the housemates for eviction from the house. This goes on until viewers have voted everybody except one person off and that person is then declared the winner. The winner gets to go away with 100,000 US dollars (700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

This is only the second time that Big Brother Africa has been broadcast, but the programme format is not new. It started in the Netherlands in the1990s and local versions of the programme have been broadcast around the world since. It is now one of the most successful programme formats in the history of television.

Back in the 1990s, the programme makers made all kinds of claims for Big Brother. They said it was a social experiment to see how people would react to living so closely to one another without a break and for such a long period. Sociologists and psychologists rushed to praise the programme for its intellectual insights.

Nobody seriously says that kind of thing now. It didn’t take too long before the truth came out. The reality of this ‘reality television’ programme was money. That’s why it’s taken so long for Big Brother to get as far as Africa: there’s not much money to be made on this continent.

Here’s how it works. The BBA2 programme makers wanted 12 contestants from across Africa. Instead of auditioning people across the continent and taking the best people they could find they decided to look only in Africa’s richer nations. They didn’t bother to come to Swaziland.

BBA2 found its 12 contestants – with no more than one person from any single country so they could spread the interest in the programme around the continent. Countries represented include South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Botswana.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates range in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them are aged 23 to 28. They don’t have run of the mill jobs in the real world. Two describe themselves as ‘authors’, one is a model and actress, another is a fashion designer and yet another is a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

The cell phone company MTN sponsors the programme and must be rubbing its hands all the way to the bank because the other way they make money is by getting the television audience to send SMS text messages.

If you want to vote to evict a housemate you send an SMS message. If you SMS from Swaziland it’ll cost you 50 US cents (about E3.50). The other moneymaking scheme is to get viewers to SMS messages that get published on screen. Again, an SMS from Swaziland will cost you 50 US cents.

To get the messages flowing and to incite interest, BBA2 has manufactured conflict within the house. By clicking OK on screen you are taking to a ‘news’ centre where you can catch up on what’s been going on in the house for the past 40-odd days. Here you learn that the housemates have fallen out with each other and there are now two opposing camps who are fighting with one another.

Also, a couple (one male and one female) are said to be getting a bit hot and have been kissing and nuzzling one another.

On the afternoon I watched, these two pieces of ‘news’ excited most of the text messages. There was a constant stream of messages (at E3.50 a time) and as far as I noticed none of them were repeated.

So the companies behind BBA2 are making a lot of money out of this programme, but as viewers what are we getting? On Sunday, I switched off after an hour or so and went to read a book. When I switched back on an hour or so later, there was a man and a woman in the kitchen boiling a pan of water. Maybe it was time for tea.

When I lived in Papua New Guinea I watched a TV programme called Haus and Home where they showed viewers how to decorate a wall in your house by painting it. We then spent some time watching the paint dry.

Why did I suddenly remember that? ….

DSTV: NOTHING LOCAL ABOUT IT

The news that satellite broadcaster DSTV has created a new ‘cheap’ priced package of channels has caused excitement in some quarters in Swaziland.

The so-called Family Bouquet allows people to access 20 television channels as well as radio and music stations. The news prompted Nathi Gule, the Times of Swaziland’s television writer to prophesise that Swaziland’s two indigenous television channels, Swazi Television and Channel S, would lose the majority of their viewers to DSTV as a result of this.

Critics have complained that Swaziland’s two channels bore viewers with constant repeats of programmes or uninteresting and irrelevant material.

I assume DSTV has introduced its low cost Family Bouquet because it realises that many potential customers across Africa, and not just in Swaziland, simply cannot afford the larger packages on offer. DSTV in its on screen self-promotions presently boasts that viewers can receive more than 70 channels (which I think you’d agree makes the new 20 channel package look like very small beer).

Although, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s viewing enjoyment, I am not convinced that the DSTV package is really in the best interests of the people of Swaziland.

The problem is none of the material on the satellite channels and hardly any on the two Swazi television stations is local. Instead, viewers are given a diet that consists mainly of sport, cheap American and British dramas, soap operas, mostly American movies, and lots and lots of ‘reality’ programmes and game shows.

Even Swazi TV and Channel S broadcast next to no programmes made in the kingdom. If you take away the daily news broadcasts and studio-based interview shows there is little left of a Swazi origin. American talk show hosts such as Oprah Winfrey get almost as much airtime as all the Swazi programming put together.

It is important for television stations to provide programmes that are created locally because these programmes deal with the community’s local needs, knowledge and experience that are relevant to the community. The whole process of creating and broadcasting local content provides opportunities for members of the community to interact with each other, expressing their own ideas, knowledge and culture in their own language

The Swazis who watch television are virtually inundated with information that is culturally irrelevant to them. Also, the programmes that are not made locally often reflect language, values and lifestyles, which are vastly different from those of the Swaziland community. Extreme examples of this are the soft porn movies that the DSTV channel Action X broadcasts late at night. (It is illegal to publish and distribute pornographic magazines in Swaziland).

Television should be about more than simply beaming foreign material into Swazi homes. Mass media that are available in Swaziland should have a role in helping the country to develop and contributing to social change. Instead, the foreign made programmes portray Westernized consumer culture as attractive to people in Swaziland, even though about 70 per cent of the population live below the poverty line.

What is really happening with DSTV, and to a lesser extent with the two Swazi TV channels, is that advertisers are deciding what gets shown. They want audiences with money to spend on the goods and services the advertisers wish to sell.

Where advertising becomes increasingly important as a source of revenue for media, entertainment packages of soap operas, music, and sports are central to attracting audiences. This is precisely the type of programming DSTV provides.

As a result Swaziland’s cultural values will be seriously damaged if Swazi children continue to be exposed to TV programmes with massive foreign content which do not promote Swaziland’s own cultural values. Today’s Swazi children are in danger of becoming ‘Anglo American’ in their mentality without ever setting foot in those countries, instead of identifying themselves with Swazi values and traditions.