Nick,
There are some more intriguing connections yet.... putting an African
village in a zoo has some strange links to a programme I pointed out to
another colleague on the list, which is the African version of Big Brother.
In this, young Africans of various ethnic groups are put into a house under
circumstances similar to those of Big Brother in the UK.
But imagine how surreal that must be, in a continent riddled with HIV/AIDS
and hunger - healthy young people in luxurious surroundings being urged to
eat, drink and behave how they like and to have sex with each other in as
quick a time as possible, in direct contradiction to the death-laden
messages from the AIDS education groups. That says something fairly
fundamental about power relationships within and outside Africa, no? That
the commercial imperative of selling a TV programme like this is far more
important than any considerations of the disastrous health consequences it
might have through emulation... but more importantly still, perhaps, that
many of the staff from charities who are active in HIV/AIDS education are
from the countries in which these TV programmes originate and where that
kind of behaviour is not just acceptable, but laudable, saleable.
In last summer's finals exams at Durham, I was a module co-ordinator with
David Campbell for a level 3 module on geographies of identity politics, and
one of the questions we set concerned the iconography of Africa constructed
by the media. In terms of the African village in the Zoo (a media event,
after all), African Big Brother and the iconography of Africa, isn't there a
sense that television is the architect of a new imperial anthropology of
Africa?
'Reality' TV itself is a complete misnomer, after all, taking as it does
people who generally aren't representative (whatever that means) of the vast
mass of citizenry but who have strange behavioural quirks that might make
them 'watchable', then putting them in a strange and extremely stressful
environment for months, in a situation guaranteed to produce extremes of
behaviour. When TV constructs its' African anthropology, doesn't it do more
or less the same, with its' relentless search for 'ethnic' qualities, for
starvation, suffering, corruption and poverty? TV after all isn't concerned
with what passes for an average middle-class African family getting by in
Djibouti, Oran, Cairo or Lagos, it wants them weeping in a refugee camp
while they bury their dead....
Some thoughts,
Jon Cloke
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