Philippa Garson
Elmo should expand his cookie-baking skills to include detective work and do some off-set sniffing around, given the brewing controversy around Sesame Street, the pre-school television production in which he stars.
Questions are being raised in the United States Congress about whether the R25-million granted by USAid to the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) to produce an indigenous version of Sesame Street, in partnership with the SABC and the Department of Education, was money well spent and whether in fact South African education and broadcasting authorities had any choice in the matter.
Clearly irked by insinuations of being a sitting duck for US-based profiteers, the education department has rejected as “devoid of any truth” the suggestion that the project was “foisted on to South Africa”.
Deputy Director General Ihron Rensburg said the department was “determined that it will not be dictated to by USAid and US funding, nor by CTW”.
While acknowledging that the initiative came from CTW, Rensburg said the project fulfilled the department’s plan to provide cost-effective education to pre-schoolers via the broadcast medium.
In one of its biggest acquisitions, the SABC’s educational broadcasting wing bought the rights to broadcast a generic “culturally neutral” version of Sesame Street. Called Open Sesame, the programme is dubbed into Zulu and Sotho and broadcast in the mornings to children who are theoretically watching the programme at home or in pre-school. But just why CTW – in conjunction with the education department and the SABC – now needs to make an “indigenous” version is less clear.
Certainly the importance of early childhood educare and mother-tongue learning cannot be disputed, and using “edutainment” on the tube to teach small children in poorly resourced environments also makes good sense. But whether toddlers stand to benefit that much more from “culturally specific” animated creatures is less certain.
Also uncertain is how much other South Africans will benefit from the localised venture. Whether the partnership will create local jobs and impart some much-needed skills remains to be seen.
According to one US-based columnist, the money could have been put to better use on basic school resources. The making of a home-grown version is perhaps a cynical ploy to market Sesame Street’s fuzzy-toy paraphernalia to South African consumers, he suggests.
CTW has broadcast its hit show to 93 countries and made 17 indigenous co-productions, so the South African experience won’t be a first. But surprisingly little appears to be known about just what the production “partnerships” will involve.
Rensburg said the department was “determined” that the initiative would be jointly managed and “driven by South Africans so that it can address our South African needs. We expect the same reciprocity from CTW.”
He added that merchandising and the sale of indigenous materials, which would lead to long-term sustainability of the local version, were being discussed with CTW.
Education television head Nicola Golombik said inquiries around the nature of the partnership were “legitimate questions” which needed to be answered.
“As part of their grant, they are required to work in partnership with the education department and the SABC. We don’t have a formal relationship with them and we don’t yet know what this relationship will be,” she said.
Golombik added, however, that she had no doubt of the critical intervention being made by the programme in the under-resourced and under-funded area of early childhood educare.
“We can’t underestimate early childhood development as a learning area. The drop-out rate in grade one is astonishing and is leading to a whole symptomatic process of failure throughout the education system.
“There is an international body of research which says that TV and radio can play an important role in early learning. And CTW has been recognised as a world leader in this field,” said Golombik, adding that the local version would still draw a great deal from CTW’s “international library”, which would keep costs down.
“They have produced the kind of animation we would never have been able to produce locally. To develop a totally indigenous version ourselves would cost 20 times more than it now costs to broadcast the generic version,” she said.