Robert Kirby
Channel vision
I grew wary of the SABC’s motives in broadcasting the now notorious documentary on Sierra Leone after they had given the umpteenth advance warning about the programme: “It includes graphic scenes of extreme physical violence … will be offensive to sensitive viewers … blindfold the children.” In yet another grimy departure from both taste and moderation, the SABC programme trailer actually showed shots of a youngster about to be shot, fading these out at the last moment. “Did this innocent young boy get brutally shot? Be sure to watch Special Assignment this Tuesday and find out.”
All the tacky hype surrounding Sierra
Leone: Out of Africa centred on it being “authentic” violence. Apparently we have a brand new thug on the Auckland block: the snuff documentary. The SABC have long been showing signs of their partiality for this gruesome televisual estate – the Terrible Kingdom of Pauw? God only knows how many times they’ve broadcast that shot of the Congolese fellow being shoved over the edge of a bridge. Special Assignment likes to film vicious midnight floggings; there’s nothing that attracts an SABC news camera like a really opulent bloodstain. Mr Samura’s footage was grist to an assembling mill.
On the radio the very next morning, the same SABC was prompting its listeners to fax and phone in their requests for a rebroadcast of the programme. In this way the exercise may be passed off as “fantastic public demand”.
As to the piece itself: true, it was awful but at all times I was kept aware by Samura of how very dangerous it had been for him. Often this seemed to be the main thrust of his reportage. In this wise the documentary was unnervingly pornographic, the obscenity of violence for its own sake. A few months back the SABC showed its own Special Assignment documentary on Sierra Leone, a noticeably better piece in that it added context. All Samura did along those lines was to reiterate what has become the traditional African political funk-hole: blame it all on either colonialism or Western-inspired greed.
But I would ask Mr Samura one simple question. If there is the remotest chance that the presence of television cameras will further foment violence, then why brandish them? It’s all very well to expatiate in poignant tones whether the pointing camera actually prompted the soldier to shoot the boy. But if that was ever a danger then stow the camera. Unless the interests of journalism supersede moral alternatives.
Following the programme came the studio discussion. You have never heard piety so flatulent; the wringing of distraught hands, the stroking of distressed brows. Funniest was the vindication offered by one of the participants who said broadcasting such programmes would ensure that such horror never happens again. Sounds intensely profound, but actually is like saying that if you show enough blue movies, pornography will cease to exist.
The studio discussion sent me back to a recent article by Glen Newey, in the London Review of Books. Newey reflected on what he terms atrocity moralism: “… all the double-minded scrabbling for the mot juste in the shadow of the unnameable … they speak of the unspeakability of it all, and then they go effing the ineffable, at monstrous length. This is called doing justice to enormity.”
If any credit might evolve from the showing of this programme, it will, by default, belong to the SABC. They have this peculiar capacity to do smart things entirely by mistake. In this case their decision to air the programme was a gesture of latent cognitive independence from Mr Mbeki’s insistence on an African renaissance.
As to whether the programme should have been shown at all, well that was always a given, if only to illuminate the hypocrisy of a Tony Blair who recently overruled his foreign minister and allowed the continuing supply of spare parts for British Hawk fighter jets to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, so that these aircraft could continue to contribute to the unstoppable and just as brutal war in the Congo. It will also exhibit – for a few days anyway – the pitiless dockage of Kofi Annan’s soft-soap inducements.
It is with real regret that shortly we will have to say goodbye to Tumi Makgabo, off to Atlanta and CNN. She is by far the best newsreader SABC TV has had for years and, as much as we will miss her charm and quiet authority, she deserves as wide an audience as possible. She’s as good as you’ll find anywhere.