I'm in Africa. I see junk TVs here. I also see junk cars and tires. And traffic jams. Tomorrow, I will go to Agbogbloshie, to make my pilgrimmage as an exotic photographer. But before I go there, I thought I'd refresh myself on the history of television in Africa. I'm still concerned with what I call "The Banana Peel Fallacy", which I described in 2009's blog "Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo".
Activist goes to the zoo and finds the floor of the monkey cages covered with banana peels. He takes pictures of the peels. But it is a fallacy to accuse the zookeeper or visitors of dumping their banana peels in the monkey cage. There is no evidence of "banana peel dumping".
As I said in the Zoo blog, I do not equate Africans with monkeys, but it describes both the fallacy of thinking you know what happened and a third party assigning victimhood to the consumer. In the analogy, the protester jumps to a conclusion. It's that protester who is seeing the emerging world as helpless zoo animals.
Most African cities had television in the 1970s. But like televisions in the USA in the 1940s, they were a luxury device which could never have been afforded by the average African. In the 1970s, Americans and Europeans read about Africa through the lens of Idi Amin and Mobutu Seko Sede, Apartheid regimes in South Africa. Barely a decade earlier, most of Africa was still ruled by colonial law.
By Louise M. Bourgaul (1995)
Technically, many capital cities in Africa had television stations in 1959 or 1960, at independence, but tended to be "an elite an urban phenomenon" (Borugaul), and stayed that way until the advent of the Videotape Recorder / VCR. The VCR meant that any better-off African, not just those in the capital, could brag about their TVs.
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| Zaire Television concern, Kinshasa, 1970s |
In the 1980s, black and white television was a forgotten technology in the USA and Europe, but some Africans benefitted by purchasing the used black and white televisions. But since it was an elite thing, most could opt for a used color TV instead.
While broadcast stations and programming were limited, the VCRs and cassette tapes were ubiquitous. To the consternation of Hollywood, Nigerian VHS copies of movies became a world industry. Few African households could have afforded legitimate versions, but in a way Nigerian "copyright pirates" were helping Hollywood, by bringing their music videos and movies to audiences who otherwise would have grown up with Bollywood posters. I watched Sly Stallone's Rocky and Rambo, and Phil Collins videos (too many times) on a visit to a village south of Bamenda in 1985. My friends say around, commenting on Phil Collins' lyrics. "It would appear he does not care anymore. No, surely, this man does not care."
Even my remote town in north central Cameroon had a few households with television before I left in 86. We had no post office, no bank, no hospital, and were blessed with a single paved road. The school I taught at was itself less than 4 years old. It was called a "pioneer post" by the Peace Corps staff, one of the most rural, a start-up program. But before I left in 1986, my landlord across the yard had a color television. It was used 1970s model, imported from England.
