African Unification Front
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September 19, 2005
SABC to Launch Centralised Television Coverage for Africa
Africans will soon have at least one television network accessible from anywhere in Africa. Africa does not currently have a TV network with domestic African programming that is accessible all across Africa. TV coverage of domestic programs is fragmented because each TV station has limited coverage, and none covers the entire AU.
 Although there are over 100 TV stations in Africa, and anyone with a TV set can watch all kinds of shows, they are all watching different shows, and have no idea what other Africans are watching. The only shows that Africans are equally familiar with are foreign sitcoms, European and Asia shows, and of course the hollywood soaps, films and music. Many African shows are on TV, but there are no standard laws across Africa regulating the amount of foreign content, or requiring broacasters to air African shows accessible to all Africans in the same time frame.
The need for a single central television station with Africa programming has been expressed for many years. Kwame Nkrumah wished to establish an African Television Station to tell the African story, because it was important for Africans to tell their own stories and not rely entirely on foreign networks for coveraged on Africa. Today BBC and other foreign stations are the primary source of news programing. This means that Africans only learn about each other from foreign broadcasters.
Foreign stations do not answer to African taxpayers or voters, do not answer to African legislators, and are not responsible to the African public. Much of what foreign reporters call news is at best irrelevant, erratic, and incoherent from a Pan African perspective. At its worst, foreign news broadcasters are tendecious and opportunistic in the way they interprete information about Africans. Most journalists are ideologically backward, and lack sensitivity for legitimate historical African concerns.
Interviewers and reporters working for foreign media are generally guilty of nullifying and dismissing positive African developments. Positive, realistic and life-affirming aspects of Africa are denied expression and coverage. Instead they search for and focus on the scandalous, macabre and preternatural, going to extreme lengths to discover, invent, embellish and exergerate the otherworldliness of Africans, in order to exploit the shock value for no positive reason whatsoever except morbid curiosity, racism and greed.
 Kwame Nkrumah and other leading Pan Africanist have struggled against the corrosive and corrupting effects of the desparaging and discriminatory system perpetrated on Africa by Western media. There are perfectly positive examples throughout history that prove there are better ways to represent Africa, that are just as robust and rewarding and yet don't involve the vulger and grotesque circus promoted by foreign media.
The South Africa Broadcasting Company (SABC) Africa, is preparing to grant Kwame Nkrumah's wish by launching a twenty-four hour TV station for Africa, with All-African programming. Perhaps one of the programs they should produce can show how during the Classical and Renaissance periods Europeans attributed virtue and sensibility to Africa and Africans.
Increasingly in the last 20 years, as the sensation of the struggle for independence and against Apartheid has worn off and no longer catches headlines, foreign media has steadily reverted to portraying Africa as the 'dark continent' or 'wild continent' by screening only negative events, promoting outlandish images, and minimizing the responsible and constructive aspects of African society. Reporters are still perpetuating an alarmist image of doom, gloom, dread, frenzy and most importantly, propagating a sense of failure and hopelessness.
Most commentators used by foreign media as "experts" on Africa are adventurers exploiting Africa in order to bolster their reputations for machismo and toughness. Their propaganda about Africans has not changed since 1850 when slavery, class-warfare, decontextualised spiritualism, and racial perversions engrossed promoters of European imperialism and the so-called "explorers".
By rehashing the most regressive colonial discourses about Africa, foreign press workers create pressure in all other institutions and sectors of society to engage in Africa Bashing. The media in the West is obsessed with the production of demoralizing and hysterical propaganda about Africa. The staple narrative about Africa in the foreign press is a grotesque litany of agitation, terror, infection, absurdity and disorder.
At the conference of African journalists inaugurating the SABC plan for an all-African station, Salim Amin, the CEO of Camerapix in the UK and South Africa, spoke about the negative attitude pervasive in Western media. Amin presented a depressing picture of the way Africa has been portrayed unfairly by western press as a place of corruption, diseases, civil strife and tribalism. He questioned why Africa does not have a news media to tell the African story.
Amin also mentioned that North America has CNN and Sky News, Europe the BBC, with the French also opening a new news channel to tell the French story. He further listed South America as having one, the Middle East three, Russia and Asia many. "It is only Africa that does not have a TV station to tell its story."
In his remarks to the largest gathering of African journalists, on the theme "Television in Africa, Television for Africa, Television by Africa", Phil Molefe, the head of SABC Africa, said African programming on his station would be broadcast on every African television by the end of 2005.
"There would not be the need to depend on CNN, BBC and other foreign media for stories from Africa as most TV stations in Africa do." Covering the entire African Union, Mr. Molefe said it is the aim of the station to market and distribute African issues to Africans. "If you do not tell your own story, it would be done for you and you may not like it."
Molefe said the new African station would reflect hidden treasures of Africa, as well as celebrate men and women of Africa. He also revealed that SABC is currently pursuing partnerships with broadcasting companies, and setting up bureaux all across Africa to cover news. He said the content on the station's broadcasts would not be South African but African.
Some programmes earmarked for the station are six news programmes including business news, technology news, health, Tourism, economic development as well as sports news. Speaking on the business news, Molefe said all stock markets on the continent would be reviewed with analysis of business events on the continent. The TV station would use both satellite and national free-to-air technology to transmit signals.
Wilfred Kiboro, Chairman of the International Press Institute [IPI], placed the blame of under reporting of African news on the propaganda by the West to let Africa remain in the doldrums, and the ineffectiveness of African journalism. He said it should be the duty of all African journalists to rewrite western opinion of Africa.
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