Reality TV Africa

Big Brother 3: Africa just wrapped up, and it’s a pretty big deal here. In a real nail-biter, Ricco from Angola and Hazel from Malawi tied in the number of countries that voted for them, forcing a tie-breaker count of the percentage of actual votes cast. Hazel lost by a hair, meaning that Ricco took home the big cash prize of $100,000 USD. Though the second-place finish was a bit of a disappointment, making it to the finals has made Hazel a bit of a national celebrity. She’s big news in both The Daily Times and The Nation, and the President of Malawi issued a statement congratulating Hazel for making it so far in the competition. According to State House Press Officer Chikumbutso Mtumodzi,
the President feels that Hazel’s performance on the show proves that Malawians have got what it takes to perform in international competitions (like Big Brother Africa).

“The President is therefore encouraging all boys and girls, men and women to enter international competitions as one way of putting our beloved country on the international map,”

he said.
According to the Daily Times,

“the race also revealed that all Western African countries voted for Ricco while countries in Southern Africa voted for Hazel except Zimbabwe which voted for their housemate.”

Two things in particular strike me as interesting….
1) Reality T.V. is somehow everywhere. Though I haven’t been here long enough to truly experience the BBA hype, stories from other OVS tell of patrons jamming bars & restaurants to watch the show in scenes that look eerily like Survivor parties (the early seasons, anyway) back home. For those of you reading this blog for more academic purposes (*cough* HLS students), it might be interesting to think about how things as zany as reality T.V. can help us understand the ups and downs of globalization; I know that BBA is definitely giving me food for though on that front.
2) Regional and national pride. Though I haven’t really talked to anyone local about their take on Hazel’s second-place finish (something I intend to do in fairly short order), the fact that President Bingu wa Mutharika seems to see Hazel’s achievement on the show as a potential source of national pride intrigues me, especially in relation to the regional ‘bloc’ voting that seemed to occur in the finals*. I don’t personally take reality T.V. contests very seriously; in fact, I find the Canadian/American versions of shows like Big Brother (with a few exceptions) to be vacuous and irritating. But if Hazel really is an inspiration to Malawians (or Malawi as a more abstract concept), I wonder if there might be more to Big Brother Africa than meets my untutored eye. Politics and entertainment news are often closely linked (ONE anyone?) and I certainly don’t understand the links in Malawi yet… but Hazel has definitely got me thinking about the power of pop culture.

*If you notice me saying “seem” a lot, it’s because I’m looking at all this with an outsider’s point of view; as such, I probably got a lot of it wrong. But I thought it might be valuable to share my impressions anyway.