Matthew Krouse Down the tube
`Greetings to Germany from the youth of South Africa!”
They could have been words on a corny postcard – a happy message to friends, from friends far away. But they weren’t. Rather, they were the prelude to an in-your-face cultural confrontation that, with the aid of advanced technology, will be aired once a week.
SABC Education’s new baby, YNTV (Youth Network Television), has been commissioned from Ubuntu Productions and has been made in conjunction with the National Street Law Programme. Basically, the programme presents viewers with a simultaneous look at two studios – one in South Africa and another in a city overseas – linked with the use of digital telephone lines. Issues affecting a broad cross-section of the youth are discussed, things that are usually swept under the carpet, or are often left unsaid.
The first episode is on February 24 at 6.30pm, when our youngsters come face to face – or tube to tube – with their counterparts in Munich. Youth, the producers define as anyone from 14 to 25. And even though it’s the age when most humans are at their best looking, it’s also the age when they’re at their most headstrong, each a little messiah out to change the world.
“It is the youth’s turn to speak about the issues that affect them around the world – to make the world a better place,” says Clarence Ford, one of the South African team’s young anchors.
The discussions that follow have the capacity to address many of the issues vital to the youth. Why is there racism in the world? Is South Africa’s history of racism at all common to other countries?
Why, in relation, is it important that these young individuals should have a forum in which their curiosities can be addressed?
Bearing in mind that, for people under the age of 20 the apartheid system is something they only know by proxy, a programme like this serves to remind them how much a part of apartheid politics they are.
No doubt, every voice they hear, from overseas, will remind them that they are living in an apartheid-ravaged world. Just in case they try to part with the South African reality, there are young people like them, in Ireland for example, asking questions like, what did the Truth and Reconciliation Commission mean for you?
Likewise, just in case young people assume that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe’s problems have been solved, there are neo-Nazis their age that demonstrate the ghastly outcome of xenophobia and white supremacy.
As a background to the questioning, actual footage is supplied. In the German programme, in case local viewers were too young in 1989, the Berlin Wall falls again. In case young German’s think that post-apartheid South Africa is a paradise, the student riots at the Vaal Technikon serve as a reminder that the racial panacea is negotiated, not supplied.
Babs Mhlawuli – who appeared at the TRC, is shown reliving her moment, re-experiencing the loss of her family. And when her Irish counterparts confront her she says that she is prepared to forgive and forget.
“Amnesty is not going to bring back the people I lost,” says the brave Babs.
These are the big moments in the life of YNTV, and one gets the feeling that the format is perfectly geared towards the major revelations that will no doubt come.
But it’s not these that hold the biggest surprises.
In the second programme scheduled, the Irish youngsters sing a song for their African broadcast partners. In return, a South African obliges his new Irish friends with a little ethnic dance. It brings to the surface a mutual admiration, across continents, in which young people fall in love with their differences.
It’s a moment of simple indulgence in which the players realise their roles with perfection – they also do it for the cameras hoping, in turn, to impress the big, wide world.