CATO MANOR, South Africa — It’s 6 p.m. in this Durban township. Mama Imelda, her teenage daughter and niece are preparing to sit down to a traditional Zulu dinner of maize meal and chutney. Each dishes up a plate and takes her usual seat — in front of the television to watch soap operas.
The sounds of English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho languages float out of the TV, and at first the program doesn’t really command anyone’s full attention. Daughter Zama, 17, is on the phone and Mama Imelda is still fiddling with dishes.
Until a transgender woman appears on screen.
“Do you see that, man?” exclaims Mama Imelda, pausing to point at the TV and shake her head. Zama, steeped in MTV and American movies, just shrugs. For her it’s not an issue.
Soap operas, or “soapies” as they’re known here, have carved out a special role in South Africa, purposefully raising sensitive social issues that people might otherwise avoid: racism, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS and gambling, to name a few. But the chronic financial woes of South Africa’s public broadcaster, producer of the most popular soapies, is putting them and the network’s entire slate of programs at risk. Advocates are demanding that the government ensure a steady funding stream for what one screenwriter calls “the most successful storytelling platform in the country.”
Soap operas account for nearly 40 percent of television viewing here, a striking success in a country where the apartheid government didn’t even allow television until 1976. When it finally did, the first such dramas largely copied U.S. shows. The first locally produced soapie, “Egoli: Place of Gold,” debuted in 1989, as South Africa was on the cusp of major change.
Laurence Lurie, a longtime screenwriter for “Egoli,” says writers and producers realized they needed to create a show that would speak to all South Africans. At first that meant adding more racial diversity to shows that mostly portrayed white people.
As “Egoli” gained momentum, others copied and broadened the approach. Programs used so-called “drop-ins” — integrating current news events into the storyline. The prison release of Nelson Mandela, the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, and a visit by Queen Elizabeth II to South Africa all made it into soapies. So did social issues.
A World Bank study found that the storyline in “Scandal,” a South African soapie about a woman who borrowed heavily and lost the money to a gambling debt, improved financial literacy among viewers.
“Soul City,” produced by a non-governmental organization to raise awareness of HIV — a major public health challenge in the country — ran from the mid-1990s to 2014. It also addressed issues like child abuse and depression.
The long-running soapie “Isidingo,” with a team of black women writers, introduced a strong black female lead who ran a company and battled a lack of respect from white male subordinates. The show, which has been on the air since 1998, also introduced a character suffering from domestic abuse, and a sangoma — a traditional healer — thus airing an aspect of black South African culture that rarely had been shown in mainstream media.
“One reason ‘Isidingo’ is still around is because it purposely drives dialogue and forces people to have those important conversations about the social issues that are represented on the screen,” says Nkuli Sibeko, a former writer for the show. “It allows viewers to have a dialogue in real life without using themselves as the example, or putting themselves into the context.”
The soapie “7de Laan,” which included the transgender character, is a family-oriented Afrikaans series set on a suburban street, and includes subtitles in several of South Africa’s other languages. Despite Mama Imelda’s discomfort, the transgender character did nothing to dent the show’s ratings.
Some critics say they would like to see shows promoting more traditional Christian morals. But Cape Town housekeepers Nosikhumbuzo Ngxokozela and Prudence Cekiso say they appreciate shows that address interracial relationships and domestic abuse because it helps them talk to their children about those issues.
Michele Tager, a senior lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Johannesburg who has studied soap operas, says their effort to address social and political issues makes them very different than such series elsewhere in the world.
“People connect personally to the characters. They write in to warn them of looming dangers or of developing plots against them; they send in gifts for an on-screen wedding,” she says. “Many people know the soapies characters better than they know their own neighbors.”
But funding is a big long-term risk.
Few South Africans can afford commercial satellite television, so they watch the three channels of the public broadcaster, the SABC, and e.tv, a smaller, free commercial station. The viewership for the SABC’s soapies dwarfs that for commercial stations. But the SABC’s finances are a mess.
On the brink of collapse, the broadcaster was bailed out by a government loan guarantee in 2009. But if anything, its problems have only become worse. Acting CEO James Aguma reported earlier this year that the broadcaster had written off $1.35 billion in licensing fees it was unable to collect from viewers. Facing an inquiry into contract irregularities and wasteful expenditures, he resigned in July.
State-owned SABC is projected to lose about $84 million this year, more than double its loss for 2016.
Soapies are one of the few financial bright spots for the broadcaster, but the advertising revenue they earn is nowhere near enough to fund them as well as public broadcasting staples such as educational and documentary programs. Besides its failing efforts to collect license fees, the broadcaster receives only a very small contribution from the national budget. Lawmakers bitterly criticized SABC management earlier this year for waste when an annual report revealed $382 million in spending in recent years that failed to follow proper procedures.
SABC must pay outside producers to make soapies, and can’t afford to cut funding too much because of the advertising revenue the shows bring in. Still, payment rates to independent producers haven’t gone up in a decade.
“It is drip feeding,” says Kate Skinner, a member of the Save Our SABC Coalition, a nongovernmental organization. “Production houses have been absolutely cut to the bone.”
SABC supporters hope that a new board of directors and a major shakeup in senior management will put the broadcaster on more solid footing.
The alternative, the possibility that the soapies will slowly fade away, “would leave a huge void,” Tager says.
“It is part of my life,” says Nonhlanhla Jiji, a single mother in Durban who watches every night with her 11-year-old daughter. “It is important. If Mandela dies, it is on the show the next day. If there is corruption in government, it is there. All these issues. Crime. Greed. The shows are real.”
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South Africa’s Popular Soap Operas Are Threatened by Budget Cuts originally appeared on usnews.com
