international comm

Big Brother, Africa is watching

Sean Jacobs UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, USA

On Sunday, 7 September 2003, Cherise Makubale from Zambia was declared the winner of the reality television show, Big Brother Africa. The final episode of the series, which had been running daily for more than three months on satellite and land-based TV channels across Africa, was broadcast from Johannesburg to an estimated television audience of 30 million people in 46 countries on the continent. Viewers watched live as Makubale, a pro- curement officer from the northern Zambian town of Kitwe, beat five other contestants to claim a grand prize of US $100,000. The next day Makubale was invited by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s former President, to his offi- cial residence. In front of reporters, Mandela labeled her ‘an example to African youth’. Makubale’s achievement, he told journalists, ‘encourages other young people to follow an example like this … I commend … people [like her] who make a contribution to Africa’ (Mail & Guardian Online, 9 September 2003; Saturday Nation, 13 September 2003). Shortly thereafter Makubale flew to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, where she was greeted by the country’s leader, Levy Mwanawasa. Members of Mwanawasa’s Cabinet and 40,000 cheering people, who had lined the streets from the national airport, joined the President in welcoming Makubale home. With unusual enthusiasm, the Zambian Government feted Makubale and held her up as a model citizen. Receiving her at the presidential residence, Mwanawasa promptly announced that she would become an ‘ambassador of goodwill’, representing Zambia with diplomatic privileges.

As Mwanawasa met with Makubale, sharp observers of the Zambian – and African – political scene could not fail to notice that ‘before TV took over from reality’, Mwanawasa was facing political opposition on a number of

Media, Culture & Society © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore), Vol. 29(6): 851–868 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443707081691]

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fronts. The result of Big Brother Africa seemed an opportune distraction from a number of issues of political management Mwanawasa faced. As Africa Confidential reported at the time:

[Mwanawasa] is up against opponents within his own Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) who remain loyal to his predecessor Frederick Chiluba. He also faces strikes, discontent and general dissatisfaction, not to mention disfavor among the donor countries and organizations whose money has kept his govern- ment going. (Africa Confidential, 26 September 2003)

None of this is terribly surprising. Throughout the 1990s, the Zambian political class recognized the usefulness of the flood of televangelists broad- casting on Zambian television and radio in diverting attention away from the government’s inability to manage a range of political and economic crises (corruption and unemployment, among others). Notable in the televangelists’ message was a politics of individual responsibility and spiritual submission. A similar focus – on the individual, on notions of submission (in this instance to the nation and to ready-made ideals of nationalism) – undergirds the Makubale episode. In a more blatant way, certainly, but in precisely the same vein, the Zambian establishment was recruiting television-generated celebrity to ensure its ongoing hegemony.1

Still, there is more – much more – to the Big Brother Africa phenomenon. The series has had profound impacts and consequences on the African conti- nent and its people, particularly, though not exclusively, in those countries where it was broadcast. These effects, this article will show, were unpre- dictable and sometimes contradictory. They shed light on a range of complex issues all too often cast aside or altogether ignored in discussions of cultural phenomena south of the Sahara: economic relations between countries, issues of race and class, and perceptions of self and other, among others. At the same time, they significantly complicate mainstream, primarily US- and Western Europe- centered, analyses of the reality TV phenomenon. Most importantly, they bring into focus debates within Africa concerning processes of globalization.

The program as media phenomenon

The Big Brother Africa series was the third of its kind produced by M-Net, a South African television company trading in the rest of the continent as MultiChoice Africa. The first two series featured South African contestants only and were very popular with advertisers and viewers in the ‘Rainbow Nation’. In January 2003, M-Net announced that it would host a ‘continen- tal’ series. Following auditions, 12 contestants – representing Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and South Africa – were chosen. They entered a spe- cially equipped house in suburban Johannesburg on 26 May 2003. (Much

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was made of the continental nature of the show. While this was unique specifically for Africa, it has been done elsewhere, with regional [multi- country or continental] Big Brother programs produced for the Middle East and Scandinavia among others. At the end of 2005 a regional version is planned for Central America.]

Eleven of the contestants came from countries where English was the lingua franca among elites, while one contestant was from a Portuguese-speaking country (Angola). The overwhelming Southern African presence reflected the region’s status as M-Net’s number one decoder and satellite television services market. Market considerations dictated the inclusion of Ghana and Nigeria too, and the choice of Angola – M-Net’s fastest-growing client base outside South Africa – as well (Mail & Guardian, 6 September 2004).

The producers christened the house ‘Home of Africa’. In what was either a stupendous gaffe or a deliberate appeal to elite taste communities, it was fur- nished in ‘a lot of colonial-era designer artifacts’, many manufactured in China and exhibiting ‘Italian, Moroccan and Zanzibari influences’ (Big Brother South Africa, n.d. b). The goal, according to the series’ official web- site, was to create in the house a space ‘reflect[ing] the whole spirit of Africa without drawing any bias towards a particular country’ (http://wwww.big- brothersa.co.za).

The home was also equipped with 27 cameras and 56 microphones (con- cealed behind mirrors or mounted in walls) running continuously to catch every moment of the housemates’ activities. The footage was broadcast non- stop on a satellite television channel created specifically for this purpose by MultiChoice Africa. It was also streamed on the internet. A daily 30-minute highlight program and a Sunday night 60-minute ‘eviction’ program were broadcast on M-Net’s sattelite channels in 47 countries. These also appeared on free-to-air services through an agreement with terrestrial broadcasters in a number of African nations.

For the show’s full run – 106 days, beginning in late May 2003 – the house- mates were isolated from the rest of the world. They could not leave their ‘home’ and access to television, radio, telephone or other communications media was banned. Each was required to carry out special ‘tasks’ set by the producers. How these were performed was meant to reveal how ‘creative and original’ individual housemates were and served to determine their popular- ity both among their fellow contestants and with the public. Each week, view- ers voted their least favorite candidate out of the house and off the program. The final contestant remaining walked away with US $100,000. As in similar shows elsewhere (Big Brother in its US and British iterations, Loft Story in France), contestants here spent most of their time doing rather ordinary things – eating, arguing, playing in a strategically positioned hot tub and hamming it up for the camera (International Herald Tribune, 10 September 2003; Newsweek, 18 August 2003; The Times (London), 16 July 2003; Time, 23 June 2003; Washington Post, 14 July 2003).

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The show shared characteristics of the reality program genre that have been well documented and critiqued in the academic literature and popular media alike (Corner, 2002; Couldry and Palmer, 2002; Murray and Ouellette, 2004). By way of carefully chosen camera angles and editing, the producers deter- mined what viewers saw, belying the series’ much-touted claims to unscripted ‘reality’. Activities on the set were driven by daily and weekly ‘storylines’, with contestants coming to represent stock characters and stereotypes. Audience reception was actively shaped by these views and plots imposed from above. The producers’ continual emphasis on certain, very particular types of ‘cre- ativity’ and ‘originality’, and on what they termed ‘a willingness to play the game’, determined who stayed in the house and who got evicted, belying still another of the show’s claims – that the winner would be chosen by the audi- ence and audience alone.

Still, for all its faults – or perhaps because of them – Big Brother Africa can be said to have attained the status of a ‘media phenomenon’. That is to say, it emerged as ‘an idiosyncratic text that commands a sudden, high degree of attention during its initial run, prompting discussion about television and society throughout the media and society’ (Kompare, 2004: 100). The sheer number of people who witnessed the series had a lot to do with this.

As pointed out earlier, one of the key achievements of Big Brother Africa was the breadth of its reach. The series managed to attract huge audiences, averaging 30 million nightly throughout its run: a feat for the African conti- nent (see Bahi, 2004; Brown and Licker, 2003; Chivhangu, 2000; Jensen, 2000). This was all the more remarkable as in 2003 M-Net had only 1.3 mil- lion subscribers, 80 percent of whom lived in South Africa (MultiChoice Africa, n.d.). Thanks to national broadcasters throughout Southern Africa and beyond who chose to carry the daily episodes, the show’s viewership grew exponentially, beating all previous records.

Previously, only sports events – World Cup matches showcasing African teams, in particular – had prompted such interest in continent-wide television broadcasts. The opening matches of the 1990 and 2002 World Cups, in which Cameroon and Senegal beat defending champions Argentina and France respectively, drew massive numbers of viewers. Nigeria’s gold medal football win in the 1996 Olympic Games also managed to create a continental television and radio audience for a media event (see Ambler and Akyeampong, 2002). But none of these prompted the level of interest or had the impact on television cul- ture that Big Brother Africa did. For the three months that the series was on the air, unprecedented numbers of people in cities and towns across the continent dropped everything to watch the show. Crowds formed in bars, shopping malls and any other public place where the program could be viewed.

This mouvement de masse was read in particular ways by the mainstream media in Africa and beyond. Some, notably the US news magazine Time, hailed the program as an avatar of continental unity, contrasting the relative goodwill among its contestants with the fragmentation that many in the ‘North’ see as

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Africa’s downfall. ‘Three decades after the concept of Pan-Africanism fizzled out’, Time’s European edition reported, ‘satellite television is working where liber- ation philosophy did not: connecting and modernizing the world’s poorest continent’ (Time, 23 June 2003). The influential South African newspaper the Sunday Times editorialized about the program’s impact as follows:

Big Brother Africa has succeeded where the Organization of African Unity failed, by unifying the ordinary people of Africa. (24 August 2003)

Still other non-African newspapers presented Big Brother Africa as an anti- dote to xenophobia, for the housemates as well as the continent’s people in general: ‘For Africans, the show has been revolutionary, allowing them to get to know their neighbors for the first time,’ suggested one report (Cincinnati Post, 14 July 2003). The Johannesburg correspondent of the US newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, praised the series, echoing common senti- ments: ‘[Big Brother Africa is] … an unlikely catalyst for cultural under- standing on a continent often divided by ethnic conflict, nationalism, and xenophobia’ (Christian Science Monitor, 8 July 2003; Daily Independent, 21 July 2003; Inter Press Service, 12 September 2003).

The series’ initiators actively encouraged such views. Carl Fischer, pro- ducer of TV shows for M-Net’s home market and a key player in one of the earlier, all-South African iterations of Big Brother Africa, made much of the program’s alleged loftier aims: ‘For the first time [African viewers] are get- ting just African images, African people, African heroes, African music’ (Time, 23 June 2003). For Marie Rosholt, the series’ executive producer, Big Brother Africa was properly groundbreaking: ‘It’s serving to break down mis- conceptions. There’s a perception in the rest of Africa that Nigerians are less than honest, that South Africans are arrogant. I think our show challenges those views’ (Time, 23 June 2003).

As I will argue later, these and related remarks by the producers reflected specifically South African (and in particular white South African) attitudes and ideas about other Africans and about race more generally – ideas and atti- tudes that found little echo elsewhere on the continent. First, however, a look at various ways in which viewers across Africa responded to the series.

Big Brother Africa, globalization and ‘democratization’

Across the continent, Big Brother Africa elicited a range of responses, from delight to no-holds-barred opprobrium. Many of these responses were pre- dictable. Some were striking, not so much for their content as for the unex- pected alliances they fostered. Among the latter, one in particular draws attention: a rallying against the show by groups unhappy with the effects of post-industrial globalization on Africa and her peoples. These opponents of

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Big Brother Africa were a motley crew; far from univocal, they made for strange bedfellows. They included governments, national broadcasters, liter- ary figures, democracy activists, academics and conservative Christian groups. More often at loggerheads than in agreement on any matter of import, across boundaries of class, faith and nation they stood united in their opposi- tion to Big Brother Africa.

This opposition often reflected genuine unease with changes afoot in the social order. Commonly, however, it was ill-conceived or opportunistic. ‘Invented traditions’ were invoked to damn the show as somehow ‘un-African’. Essentialized conceptions of African kinship and patriarchal values fast on the wane found common cause with the moralism of missionary Christianity; the series’ voyeurism was condemned and, in the process, notions of ‘privacy’ – commonly (if erroneously) associated with Western individualism – were conflated with ideals of African ‘cultural heritage’.

Some of the continent’s leading voices joined the chorus of objection to Big Brother Africa. Wole Soyinka, according to a Nigerian newspaper, called the show ‘banal, lacking anything to offer to the continent’ (Daily Independent, 21 July 2003). Nigeria, he noted in a widely reported speech, would do just as well to put on its own reality television show: ‘All we need is just get some prostitutes on the streets and lunatics. They will go naked for nothing’ (International Herald Tribune, 10 September 2003). Personally, he added, he would prefer to watch the crude productions of the Nigerian video industry than Big Brother Africa – no small indictment, this, given the contempt in which Western-minded Nigerian political and literary elites hold ‘Nollywood’ and its products. Kenyan political scientist Stephen Ndegwa, a Senior Public Sector Governance Specialist with the World Bank and a mainstream demo- cratic theorist, shared Soyinka’s disdain for the program. Dedicated though he claims to be to ideals of democracy, he advocated for a government censor- ship board in Kenya to deal specifically with programs such as Big Brother Africa. ‘Why have we forgotten that we are Africans and [that] we have our own customs and traditions?’, he asked in an opinion article published by the Daily Nation (Nairobi):

Why are we so fast in accepting trash provided it comes from the West? Why are we not as aggressive in promoting our own lifestyles and values to the outside world? I support the leaders of Malawi and Namibia, and the religious community in Uganda for censoring the Big Brother Africa reality TV show. What do our chil- dren learn from this show apart from watching housemates bathing in the nude and throwing up after hours of indulgence? (Daily Nation, 12 September 2003)

In Zambia too there was talk of censoring the show. Conservative Christian groups, which had achieved quite a foothold in government in the early 1990s, when President Frederick Chiluba declared the country a ‘Christian Nation’, pressured government to take the program off the national airwaves on grounds that it was ‘immoral’ and ‘un-African’ (Inter Press Service,

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23 July 2003). Significantly, different church denominations, usually at log- gerheads over methods of proselytizing and means of influencing government and society, united around their opposition to the reality series. The churches had earlier succeeded in getting the Zambian national broadcaster to stop broadcasts of the South African satellite TV music channel, Channel O. The channel is an ‘African version’ of MTV.

In Zambia as elsewhere, however, these proved to be minority views. Despite much-reported opposition to the show by influential actors, the series enjoyed widespread public support. In part, this support constituted a form of protest, a rejection – or in any event a questioning – of elite views and motives. Inter Press Service reported:

Joseph Bwalya, an arts student, wonders what the motive of the [Zambian] church is … [W]hen Big Brother was shown the first time with only South African con- testants … he says … there were sexual overtones culminating in a scene [involv- ing] a cucumber … The church [however] did not react. [If they do now, it’s] just [that they] want to draw attention to themselves because they know the whole con- tinent is involved.

Another viewer (and supporter of Big Brother Africa) in Lusaka, lawyer Godfrey Manda told a journalist:

Africans have become cosmopolitan. The behavior of the housemates – a combi- nation of prudish and sexy habits – is representative of the lives and views in the new globalized Africa. They have little or no affinity for traditional values and norms and institutions … Immorality, drinking, smoking in the Big Brother house cannot be labeled African or European. So you cannot call it un-African. The Western clothes we wear are un-African. Even the religion that is preached [in this country] is un-African. So where do these pastors draw the line? (Inter Press Service, 24 July 2003)

Observers of the media scene interpreted the airing of such sentiments among members of the public as a sign of widespread, if latent, dissent. In the behavior of the housemates, too, they saw a rejection of established forms of order; this was the case, notably, when the home-bound contestants questioned Big Brother’s authority, ‘greatly amusing many viewers who have known authoritarianism all too well’ (International Herald Tribune, 10 September 2003). Most striking, however, for reporters and political pundits alike, was the staunch refusal with which viewers met attempts by their governments and law- makers to ban Big Brother Africa from national free-to-air broadcasts.

This was the case, for example, in Malawi. Edited highlights of Big Brother Africa were broadcast on national TV (TVM). Members of the Malawian Parliament threatened to ban the program, but it had a dedicated following determined to keep it on the air, not least because a young Malawian was a contestant on the series. In August 2003, parliamentarians briefly succeeded in their quest to do away with the show, voting to ban future broadcasts on the

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basis that some of the sexual scenes in the program were ‘immoral’. However, on the back of broad public unhappiness with the vote, and following a court action by a private citizen against the decision, the High Court reversed the ban. The lawyer for the plaintiff had argued before the Court that banning the show was outside Parliament’s purview. He accused MPs of ‘fleecing peo- ple’s constitutional rights to free information and participation in cultural issues of their choice’ (Mail & Guardian, 19 August 2003; see also BBC News, 15 August 2003). In the aftermath of the court decision, the country’s information minister, also a ruling party MP (who had earlier been one of the main sponsors of the ban), praised the Court’s decision, saying his fellow MPs had ‘overreacted and were emotional. They should have consulted the people first’ (All Africa News Agency, 1 September 2003). Even more telling was a comment on the matter by Benson Tembo, Director General of TVM. He called the court victory and the reversal of the parliamentary ban a ‘test for democracy’, adding ‘we will only respond to the wishes of people’. BBC News quoted Tembo: ‘The court has affirmed that only professionals at Television Malawi have the right to judge what should go on or off air’ (15 August 2003).

A month earlier the former President of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, had failed in his attempts to convince the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) to take the program off the air and ‘concentrate more on educational films and documentaries about Namibia’ (Nampa News Agency, 28 July 2003). While in power, Nujoma had had a combative relationship with the country’s media. As President and Minister of Broadcasting – he held the two positions con- currently – he had on several occasions succeeded in influencing NBC pro- gramming decisions. In this instance, negative public opinion and the refusal of senior managers at NBC to heed his request meant that in the Namibian case the ban was stillborn. In Nigeria, attempts at a ban failed as well. In July 2003, Dr Silas Yisa, Director General of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, declared it illegal for Nigerian terrestrial TV stations to broad- cast Big Brother Africa. The bulk of the stations, however, ignored his direc- tive (Daily Independent (Nigeria), 21 July 2003).

Many observers of the African media scene chose to see in such reactions a broad-based will to democracy. This view played nicely into the producers’ own spin on the program. Occulting entirely the fact that (as we have seen) they had a great deal of influence over who was voted off the program in the weekly eviction shows, and thus over who ultimately won the game, with much fanfare the makers of the show announced that Big Brother Africa would be an exercise in Pan-African democracy. ‘Africa’, they declared, would be ‘battling it out on the voting front’ (Big Brother South Africa, n.d. a). Viewers could vote via SMS, telephone or email. Well aware that all countries did not offer equal access to such means of communication and, it seems, anticipating criticism as a result, the producers had devised a corrective, a complicated vot- ing system which, they claimed, would ensure that no contestant or his or her

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national supporters had an unfair advantage (Washington Post, 14 July 2003). Among regular viewers of the series, this message was received with enthu- siasm. In certain milieus, in turn, such positive responses, considered in tan- dem with popular resistance to attempts by legislators to ban the show, were taken as a very good sign indeed. They were publicly interpreted as the basis for mobilizations that could open the way toward larger and sustained politi- cal organization against unresponsive governments.

Discordant and on occasion wholly contradictory though they were, the reactions to Big Brother Africa surveyed in the foregoing pages shared one common feature. In virtually all cases, globalization – as concept and prac- tice, success story or bugbear, force to be embraced, rejected out of hand or rethought at length – was at the heart of the matter. Whether one was a staunch Christian, a dedicated altermondialiste, a partisan of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘African Renaissance’ initiative or a believer in the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), one had something to say about the show and how it fitted in with broader issues of politics, the economy and social factors on the global stage. In this context, for a number of governments as well as members of the continent’s cultural and political elite, Big Brother Africa became a potent symbol. It came to be seen as the incarnation of com- plex globalization processes and as the focus for a range of responses, from within Africa, to these processes.

Big Brother Africa, race and class power

The show, then – whatever one thinks of its merits or lack thereof – prompted discussions that highlighted relationships between Africa and the rest of the world. At the same time, however, it pointed out growing pockets of insular- ity, a distinct turning inward. This, of course, is not particularly surprising: it appears to be an example of the paradox often associated with globalization of media and cultural content, namely that such globalization commonly elic- its an insistence on local cultures and identities (see Tomlinson, 1999). The form this took in South Africa specifically, however, is striking and thus worth underscoring.

A number of observers have pointed out that in South Africa Big Brother Africa was less popular than its two predecessors – the two earlier, specifi- cally South African incarnations of the program (Mail & Guardian, 9 March and 20 June 2003). South African media outlets spent considerable time and resources covering the first two shows, even assigning journalists to cover the series as their exclusive ‘beat’. This was not true for the continent-wide pro- gram. Only the Sunday Times, which publishes a regional, Southern African edition, provided weekly rundowns of the show – and with good reason: sev- eral of the countries in which it is distributed outside South Africa had a con- testant in the running.

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Reasons for this diminished media interest likely included the very high levels of xenophobia that characterize contemporary South Africa. It is no secret, and considerable research has shown, that South Africans across the board harbor a number of racist cliches about other Africans, be they ordinary immigrants or refugees; Nigerians, it is widely believed, are drug dealers and confidence men, Mozambicans are car thieves and so on. Big Brother Africa may well have been rejected by viewers in the ‘Rainbow Nation’, and as a result given short shrift in the country’s print media, because it was seen as a program about ‘those Africans’ (see McDonald and Jacobs, 2005).

Such attitudes strongly contrasted with those encountered on the rest of the continent. Abroad, TV audiences and media alike appeared to relish the friendly inter-country competition evidenced in the show. Largely, people seemed to share the view expressed by Sammi Bampoe, a Ghanaian contest- ant on the series: participating in the competition, he told his country’s media after being evicted from the house, had had no negative impact on his opin- ion of other African countries or their nationals. In any event, he had found, the housemates had a lot in common. The only difference, according to Bampoe, ‘was in terms of food and music. Apart from that we were all the same’ (Accra Daily Mail, 11 August 2003).

Still, it would be inaccurate to say that Big Brother Africa was a marginal phenomenon in South Africa. Evidence from a variety of sources suggests that this was far from the case. Nor would it be accurate to suggest that it did not have a strong impact on South African society. Quite the contrary, in fact. As days turned into months in the ‘Home of Africa’, the show fueled and, in the process, illuminated key debates about national identity. In time, it emerged as a privileged site for the playing out of a politics of race and power.

A defining characteristic of South African reality programs is that the bulk of the contestants on these shows are white. On the first two Big Brother series, six of the 12 contestants were white and in each case the winner was a white male. The inaugural winner of the Pop Idols program, another much- watched TV show, was also a white male. M-Net came in for heavy criticism as a result, from members of the South African media and cultural critics alike. (The producers of both shows insisted this was unfair. Only half of the contestants were white: this, they insisted, represented significant progress, a rather extraordinary statement given that whites make up only 10 percent of the South African population.) The rationale behind the skewed demograph- ics of the first two shows was, of course, that whites constitute the economic elite in South Africa and, for this reason, are more attractive to advertisers. But this could hardly be said openly.

The show in its third, continent-wide iteration was, on M-Net’s part, both an attempt to keep interest in the Big Brother franchise alive – and profitable – and a transparent attempt to respond to well-earned criticisms of the show’s very white look. To fix what was fast becoming an ‘image problem’, M-Net made two decisions: it chose a colored woman, Abby Plaatjes, to represent

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South Africa and included only one white contestant in the show’s cast, Stefan Ludik, a Namibian. M-Net had created South Africa’s first majority-black real- ity TV show and, in the process, done marvels for its tarnished reputation.

If it thought all would go well, however, M-Net was mistaken. Ludik’s inclusion did not go unnoticed. It prompted a public debate in his country – reflected in broadcast and print media as well as on the internet – over whether he was the most appropriate representative for Namibia. This was mostly because whites represent a tiny minority in that country (only six per- cent of the population). Responses by persons interviewed on the subject on the streets of Windhoek and other towns tended to fall into two categories. Predictably, most white Namibians saw no problem with his selection. ‘It’s good because it shows that Africa is multicultural and especially in Namibia’ was the common response. There was some concern that his being the only white contestant might prove burdensome for him (‘Stefan is there for Namibia but it’s not fair on him because he is the only white person’, The Namibian, 30 May 2003). Most blacks disagreed with M-Net’s decision, a point underscored by sample remarks printed in The Namibian:

It is an embarrassment. Not even South Africa is represented by a white person.

Some whites may be born here but they are not black. His grandfather probably came from Europe. (27 May 2003)

Ludik’s part in the program had an impact not only in Namibia, but in South Africa as well. It actively shaped how the program was viewed there. During initial rounds of the series, the Namibian appeared to be the most pop- ular housemate among viewers. So the tally of votes suggested. The Big Brother Africa producers and sections of the South African (as well as the Namibian) media attributed this to the fact that, while most of the contestants had country-based followings, Ludik’s popularity seemed to straddle the con- tinent. His ‘movie star looks’ were said to have much to do with this state of affairs. A number of media commentators did not share this view, however. They did not find Ludik particularly charismatic. A more plausible reason for his apparent popularity, they held, was the color of his skin: South African (and Namibian) whites were ‘voting’ en masse for Ludik (Financial Gazette, 3 July 2003; Mail & Guardian, 16 June 2003; The Namibian, 18 July 2003).

In contrast to Ludik, Abby Plaatjes was the subject of generally negative coverage in the South African media. She came across as not very likeable and was described as ‘embarrassing’ to South Africa’s ‘national pride’ (Sunday Times, 1 June and 13 July 2003). Those who most disliked her justi- fied their animosity by pointing to what they termed her ‘sexual exhibitionism’. Plaatjes was one half of a couple that had sex on the show live (the other was the Ugandan contestant), an event that caused a great deal of noise. Ironically, Plaatjes’ behavior on the program was in line with that of the winners of the

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previous two versions of the series (both white males, as we have seen) and she probably did more for the ratings of the program – which thrived on titil- lation and sexuality – than most of the other contestants.

That Plaatjes was disliked, of course, was no more due to her ‘exhibition- ism’ than Ludik’s success was to his ‘movie star looks’. In her case as in his, the arbiter of taste was a heady mix of race and class politics. A comparison of the two contestants’ post-show careers underscores this. Plaatjes has enjoyed some minor celebrity in the smaller entertainment markets of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, but not at home where Ludik was essentially treated by South African whites as if he had won the contest (Sunday Times, 23 October 2003; Variety, 1 March 2004). He is a now a well- known television personality, having been offered a role in Egoli, a leading soap opera produced by M-Net that is very popular among white South Africans and advertisers. In addition, he has been given the job of presenter of a variety show on Kyknet, a satellite television channel aimed primarily at a white Afrikaans audience, and he does the rounds of public ‘celebrity’ appear- ances (a fairly good living in South Africa) (The Namibian, 23 February 2003). Ludik became the default candidate for white South Africa and his treatment, like Plaatje’s, whom the white public essentially disowned, clearly reflected the internal race politics of the country.

Big Brother Africa and South African neo-colonialism

Elsewhere in Africa, discussion of the show focused to a far lesser extent on issues of race. The program, we have seen, attracted a good deal of criticism. But there were positive responses as well, not least by members of the polit- ical and cultural elite. Where the latter proved true, Big Brother Africa con- testants were commonly associated with responsible and enterprising citizenship. In socially conservative Botswana, the country’s president, Festus Mogae, officially endorsed the Batswana contestant. And, as pointed out ear- lier, when the winner, Cherise Makubale of Zambia, returned to Lusaka, she was feted by the country’s President (and ironically its religious leaders) and named an ambassador. President Mwanawasa publicly praised her for exhibit- ing positive national traits that simultaneously reflected a particular set of gender relations – economic, cultural (‘national’) and familial:

Your conduct was exemplary [and] you were extremely hardworking [inside the Big Brother Africa house]. A Zambian woman must sweep and cook and you did exactly that. I am not surprised that you have received so many marriage propos- als. (Saturday Nation, 13 September 2003)

The chief government spokesperson for the Zambian Government told Makubale she had ‘exhibited high moral standards in the house’ (Times of Zambia, 12 September 2003).

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While leaders like Mwanawasa were busy praising the national values of their countries’ respective candidates, the producers of the show were hard at work celebrating the diversity and uniqueness of the housemates and, in the process, claiming the loftiest intentions for the show. Carl Fischer, one of the series’ initiators, insisted that Big Brother Africa represented a significant rebuke to generally dour views of the continent:

We are providing the opportunity to observe interaction between people most Africans normally don’t get to see. In a small way, it provides a different image about Africans. We are educated, can engage one another and don’t always have wars. (Times of Zambia, 12 September 2003)

This too, of course, was spin. Big Brother Africa had no intention whatsoever of showing a diverse and complex Africa.

A close look at the social backgrounds and economic status of the contest- ants gives a clear sense of the program’s real intentions. Most if not all of the housemates had finished college, were fluent in English, lived in the major African cities (and not their slums), had some exposure to the entertainment industry or had worked in it (in television and modeling among others), and had either traveled or lived outside the continent at some time or other. As one journalist noted:

Kole Omotoso, the show’s Nigerian ‘cultural adviser,’ said that each housemate was vetted to ensure maximum viewer interest. But they are drawn from their respective country’s cultural elite and are in no way representative of Africa’s impoverished and downtrodden millions. (The Times (London), 16 July 2003)

The larger agenda of the show comes through inadvertently in a comment by a Ugandan journalist (and an emphatic supporter of the show), who told a US radio news program:

There’s been criticism that the bulk of the contestants didn’t really grow up [here] – like Gaetano [the Ugandan contestant] – he didn’t do most of his schooling here. Some of … the contestants have been criticized for not having been through or probably lived through Africa enough. But you must look at some of the require- ments that the show organizers wanted. They wanted people who were fluent in English. They really wanted people who had had some form of exposure – not peo- ple who were really raw. (WNYC Radio, 8 August 2003, my emphasis)

To be young in Africa really means ‘being disadvantaged, vulnerable and marginal in the political and economic sense’ (Burgess, 2005: ix). Big Brother Africa, despite its claims to ‘truth’, hid that reality completely.

In this, M-Net had a specific agenda. According to Neil McCarthy, who was series editor on the first South African Big Brother program, in dramas and reality TV shows South African broadcasters actively promote what they refer to as the ‘aspirational’:

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[It] translates to mean that the lives we see on TV should be ones that give ordi- nary people something to aspire to, not ones that mirror their fears. It seems to be based on a view that popular culture in South Africa has an ethical obligation to be encouraging. That social ills such as crime, poverty and corruption and illiteracy should be handled with extreme caution. [As a result] … we get drama that reflects a slightly idealized, middle-class world, where the problems are small ones and the delights are many. (The Media, 1 March 2003)

In fact, ethics have very little to do with any of this. The bottom line is money. Thus the bias in favor of educated, city-dwelling folk in the ‘Home of Africa’.

Even more starkly than the racial politics of the show, the class politics of Big Brother Africa were based on commercial imperatives. The program coin- cided with a massive South African business expansion into the rest of the continent. It made its way onto the air just as a number of large South African trading and services companies were beginning to invest seriously to the North. This is no serendipity. MultiChoice Africa aggressively pushed a con- tinental Big Brother Africa in an attempt to encourage middle-class people outside South Africa to buy their own television sets and eventually to sub- scribe to satellite television services. As an M-Net producer told journalists, ‘The decision to expand Big Brother across Africa was taken for purely busi- ness reasons. M-Net is growing faster in other African countries than in South Africa’ (Times of Zambia, 5 July 2003).

The show fitted in quite neatly with the exploration of new markets in Africa by media and telecommunications companies like MultiChoice Africa (Manu, 2005: 1; see also Dawson and Hayes Edwards, 2004). A num- ber of such corporations heavily underwrote the program. They included M-Net/MultiChoice Africa itself and various cell phone companies, notably Viacom and MTN. All three companies aggressively market their products on the continent, primarily (though not exclusively) to middle-class audi- ences. In so doing, MultiChoice has privileged one tactic in particular: ‘reflecting Africa back to itself’. The rationale behind this approach is straightforward. The maturation of the local pay-TV market in South Africa means M-Net has to expand beyond the country’s borders (Mail & Guardian, 6 September 2004). As a result it has developed specialized ‘bou- quets’ of channels specifically targeted at niche markets within the continent. These include series of channels aimed at Francophone and Anglophone Africans respectively, the Portuguese-speaking countries, and a large Asian audience in East Africa (http://www.dstvafrica.com). Big Brother Africa helped to increase this market considerably. One report pointed to the show’s effect in this regard:

From a business perspective, Big Brother [Africa] has been a runaway success for M-Net and MultiChoice … Satellite dishes and cable subscriptions are up since the show began in late May, and cell phone usage is booming as well with text mes- sages voting out contestants every week. (International Herald Tribune, 10 September 2003)

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M-Net is keenly aware of the potential that the wider African market represents and, in response, has launched a variety of programs aimed at audi- ences across the continent. Among these is an African version of the US music television channel MTV, called MTV Base and sited in Johannesburg (MultiChoice Africa, 2005), as well as continental versions of the reality tal- ent contest Project Fame (where contestants compete for a recording con- tract). (Not surprisingly, the composition of the contestants was corrected to ensure South African [consumer] interest: 16 contestants of whom 10 were from South Africa. This did not prevent a Zambian from winning the final.) MultiChoice Africa has also debuted Face of Africa, a program in which com- petitors vie for the prize of a modeling contract in North America or Western Europe (Accra Daily Mail, 13 April 2004).

Still, all is not smooth sailing. Despite the popularity of these shows and the fact that, from a technical standpoint, they tend to be of better quality than other programs produced elsewhere on the continent, South African TV has encountered some difficulties in its expansion to the rest of Africa. In their forays into the continent, South African businesses face considerable opposi- tion (Daniel et al., 2004; UNCTAD, 2000). In a number of countries, they are considered ‘new imperialists’. In March 2004, a member of the South African Cabinet, Jeff Radebe, admitted as much when he told journalists:

There are strong perceptions that many South African companies working else- where in Africa come across as arrogant, disrespectful, aloof and careless in their attitude towards local business communities, work seekers and even governments. (quoted in Bond, 2004: 38)

There are, of course, many reasons for this. Among them are accusations of disregard for local production and workforces, and allegations of corrup- tion. South African retailers that have opened malls in countries to the north are criticized for contributing to de-industrialization there, and to undercut- ting the value of local products by sourcing cheaper goods from South Africa. More controversial still, South African mining interests have become embroiled in allegations of looting mineral assets abroad, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Human Rights Watch, 2005).

All of this has tended to slow South African TV’s progress in the rest of Africa. M-Net’s continental version of Big Brother was intended as an anti- dote to this state of affairs. The goal, in part, was to make South Africa palat- able to the rest of Africa. The results, however, in this regard were mixed. As this article has shown, the program made a great deal of noise: it most cer- tainly put M-Net, and South Africa and its products more broadly, on the African map. At the same time, by touting the ‘advancement’ of South African society and the ‘enviable’, ‘superior’ nature of its infrastructure, it underscored precisely the types of divides that cause South African busi- nesses to be seen as interlopers in the rest of the continent. Not surprisingly, when the show came to an end, at least three of the housemates declared they

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would stay in South Africa ‘forever’. Reports quoted contestants saying ‘the best opportunities are here’; South Africa, the competitors agreed, ‘is rich in opportunities’ (Sunday Times, 9 November 2003). In some quarters abroad, which M-Net sought to court, such statements may not have gone over well.

Conclusion

Despite the increasing, worldwide attention to reality television and its wider impact, there is still very little scholarly research on the subject. What research and commentary exists largely deals with the North American and Western European context and focuses very much on ‘the implications of questionable production techniques, ethics, and the effects of globalization for television culture and production’ (Vinson, 2004: 80). Africa is missing in all of these analyses, and there is often a tendency to transfer insights and conclusions from the rest of the world uncritically to its shores. While some of the characteristics and impacts of reality television encountered elsewhere are present also in Africa, it seems clear that generalizations are of little use in analyzing the phenomenon such as it presents itself on the continent. Such an analysis, this article has sought to demonstrate, requires that the conti- nent’s marginal technological status and the specificity of its political econ- omy be taken into consideration. As I hope to have shown with this brief study of Big Brother Africa, it demands close attention to issues of economic disparity, to politics of race and class as these manifest themselves in various, interlocking spheres, and to discourses of nationalism. It calls for serious reflection on the interaction of culture, politics and shifting economic land- scapes in Africa – reflection that, without conceding exceptionalism, engages with the continent on its own, specific terms.

Notes

The author would like to thank Jessica Blatt for her support in preparing this article. 1. Kenneth Kaunda, the former Zambian President also joined the frenzy surround-

ing Makubale. At a private meeting (the media in tow), Kaunda advised her ‘not to let her spirit be dampened by some people who criticized the reality show’. He then com- pared her critics to those of the nationalist and independence movements: ‘Some of us who have witnessed the independence and growth of Zambia can tell you that we have been through temptations but stood firm’ (Times of Zambia, 12 September 2003).

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Sean Jacobs is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of London. His PhD disserta- tion focused on the role of media in the transition to liberal democracy in

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South Africa. His research interests are media and political power, social movements and the politics of identity. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University and held fellowships at the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Jacobs has also worked as a journalist and political researcher for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA). Address: Communication Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, 4741 Haven Hall, 505 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. [email: shja- [email protected]]