Black television audiences in the United Kingdom have complained for decades that they don’t see a lot about themselves on public television. They point out that when broadcasters deign to put out content for them, they invariably show — in the words of British documentary maker Robert Beckford — rather a lot of ”music, sport, sexuality, rap, riot and rape”.
South African viewers of BBC Entertainment (DStv channel 120) will watch a lot of murder on the BBC series Crime and Justice this month. The portrayal of crime in these BBC dramas does not conform to racial stereotypes.
The channel will also flight Kenneth Branagh as Detective Wallander in an eponymously titled show created by Swedish writer, Henning Mankell. Rupert Penry Jones stars in Whitechapel: Criminal Justice, an updated version of Jack the Ripper, and British actor Shaun Parkes stars in a three-part drama about Africans living in London.
Moses Jones is about a cop with a Ugandan background asked to investigate the case of a Ugandan vagrant whose remains have been found in the Thames River.
The Mail & Guardian spoke to the producer of the series, Cameron Roach, who previously worked on hit shows such as Footballers’ Wives, Bad Girls, Casualty and Life on Mars.
Roach, who lives in London, confesses that he didn’t know much about Ugandans until he started working on this gripping three-part series. ”What interested me most was not that it was about Ugandans, but that it was about a minority living in London.” He was totally oblivious of the lives, fears and culture of this minority — even though he considers himself a Londoner.
When he immersed himself in the script, Roach was intrigued by the stories about immigrants fleeing war, victimisation and poverty. ”These were people living in our city and yet we rarely heard their story.”
He said the cast of the series is not wholly Ugandan; in fact, a good number of them are Nigerian. ”We were interested in people who could bring these characters to life,” said Roach (he could also have said these characters were supposed to have accents). But they had to get one defining Ugandan trait right, thus the band that plays at a Ugandan nightclub, quite a central motif in the drama, is indeed made up of migrants from Uganda — some of them even had stints as child soldiers.
It was important not to fudge a cultural space like a club, functioning as a central place of communion and a shrine at which the ritual of identity politics is enacted.
Roach said that music is fundamental for immigrant communities. Indeed it is, as any visit to Kin Malebu, a Congolese venue in Yeoville, will show. It also explains why Oliver Mtukudzi has become iconic in the minds of Zimbabweans. For a people cruelly cut off from home, he is a cultural template on which they imagine a distant, receding notion of home.
Roach said that whenever Ugandans are feeling homesick, they congregate at the shrine. ”It’s like the one night when these people become themselves. The club becomes a church, a place where they come together. For Mutukula, the villain of the series, the ultimate humiliation comes when he is thrown out of the club,” Roach said, adding that the club ”is that one place in the community where everyone meets; the music is the one thing that makes them feel happy”.
I pointed out to him that some viewers may quibble with the portrayal of Ugandans. There’s witchcraft, thuggery and murder in the series. ”We are just telling one story and we are in no way stereotyping people. On the face of it the drama might appear to be a stereotype, but it’s more intelligent than that.”
Roach said that by portraying highly educated people scrubbing toilets and doing other menial work, the drama attempts to jolt the West from its indifference. ”In Western societies we have become dismissive of people in lowly paying jobs. These people could be working in other sectors of the economy,” Roach said.
I enjoyed the series and I guess the drama is certain to be popular with the African immigrant community in the United Kingdom. Roach said they recently did a screening for an African audience in north London and: ”They loved it. They were really pleased that Uganda was on BBC, that their community had a voice.”
Stephen Bourne, author of Black in the British Frame, a history of British television and its interaction with the black community, would perhaps be ambivalent about Moses Jones. He famously said content directed at black people is ”low-brow nonsense”. But I guess he would welcome the presence of what is perceived to be an insignificant community on Britain’s public television.
To put this in perspective, imagine the (supposedly pan-African) SABC carrying a drama series about the Senegalese community living in Johannesburg.
The contentious politics of representation aside, Moses Jones is a thoroughly enjoyable series, showing the incremental gains that minorities are making in mainstream broadcasting platforms.
Moses Jones airs on BBC Entertainment (DStv’s channel 120) from June 15 to 17 at 8.30pm