TV soap battles HIV in South Africa

By JOHN CARLIN

The mother has died and the father is bed-ridden, coughing himself to death in his shack, victims both of the terrible disease that afflicts one adult South African in five.

There are three children, none of whom appears to be HIV-positive. How will this tragic family, shunned by neighbours and relatives alike, get by? What will become of the children when the father is gone?

Meanwhile, back at the clinic, the question is this: will the ruggedly handsome male nurse succumb to the charms of the super-sexy black lady doctor, or will he get back together with the beautiful white girl who dumped him two years ago?

Welcome to Soul City, a weekly television drama with whose characters almost the entire black population, and a good part of the white, are intimately familiar.

No less popular is Generations, a daily soap peopled mainly by black characters who lead glossily melodramatic lives in the style of the US soaps that used to be huge in South Africa until the post-apartheid explosion of the domestic industry.

The slickly produced Isidingo, another daily staple of the South African TV diet, offers a more multi-racial example of the boom in the soap opera genre in the decade since the completion of the best real-life drama the country will ever produce, Mandela's long walk to freedom.

Forty years of apartheid left behind a psychological disaster area: black people felt humiliated, and short on self-esteem; white people viewed them with guilt, and therefore fear. Apartheid had also kept blacks down by giving them inferior education. This was no basis on which to build an enduring non-racial society.

Large numbers of ordinary black people had to be re-educated fast, or South Africa's dream of becoming a competitor in the global economy would never be realised.

The number of South Africans regularly watching television has risen by 50 per cent since the arrival of democracy, and in some respects, television has played a more influential role than government in helping to change entrenched mental habits.

The homemade TV dramas have had the greatest effect. In some cases, the purpose has been to educate; in others, it has been to attract lots of viewers and make lots of money.

But in both cases, consciously or unconsciously, the underlying dynamic has been educational - because there is a hunger that must be appeased, among black people more than white, to present a vision of the world and a model of social behaviour that corresponds to people's aspirations to improve their lives.

The producers of Generations, the top-rating soap, put out a racy series packed with love, jealousy, greed and good-looking men and women. But look more closely and you will see something unique.

In an African society where men have treated women with barely more respect than whites have treated blacks, and where discussion of sex (however enthusiastically practised) has typically been taboo, Generations presents an idealised world where all this has changed.

You see women alone discussing men, observing how some "make the blood race" while others "are decent but don't spark passion inside you" - conversations that would be tame in a European soap but suppose a revolutionary female emancipation in South Africa.

Even more remarkable is to hear emancipated young black males talking dismissively of some men as "chauvinist pigs".

Isidingo, the second-most popular soap, deals more with black-white relations, presenting a world in which the ancient tensions have disappeared, where young black and white people function together at work and socialise together at trendy bars.

In these bars, beautiful black girls sit side-by-side, at times arm-in-arm, with cloned David Beckham blonds, comfortably flirtatious, naturally contemplating post-prandial sex.

"These programmes present a new idea of what is normal," says Indra de Lanerolle, who runs Ochre, one of South Africa's biggest private TV production companies.

"And it is not ramming these ideas down people's faces. It is what people want to see and hear; it's what they genuinely aspire to. Otherwise it would not sell."

Programmes such as Generations and Isidingo, and many more like them in a country that has 11 official languages, offer a faithful mirror of how South Africa's great social experiments are unfolding 10 years down the democratic road.

Nowhere are the experiments being conducted with more rigour than in Soul City, a programme, built around the life of a medical clinic in a black township, that has set out purposefully to use drama as a means of restoring South Africa's damaged society to health.

The programme has defined its mission as changing people's attitudes and habits on everything from literacy to domestic violence, depression, asthma - and Aids. No country in the world has more people living with HIV; no country has lost more people to the disease.

The Government, until recently, has been spectacularly remiss in dealing with the catastrophe, in terms of both its medical and its social consequences.

The episode of Soul City about the three children whose mother had died of Aids and whose father was dying sought to overcome ignorance about how to care for victims of the disease - an issue of urgent practical significance to almost every South African.

The drama and production side of the series is handled by de Lanerolle's Ochre company. The message is decided and honed by a non-government organisation (heavily funded by the European Union) that calls itself, with little exaggeration, "Soul City: the Heartbeat of the Nation".

Sue Goldstein, head of research, leads a team that does exhaustive field studies, chiefly among poor black people, to identify social and health problems of national importance and then establish the best ways to resolve them.

"Before producing the episode on the Aids family we follow our usual practice of holding extensive focus groups in both rural and urban areas," says Goldstein.

"We talk at length to individuals, including masses of Aids orphans. The next stage is to analyse the research, incorporating experts in the field of HIV. Then we sit down with the people at Ochre, the producers and writers, and work out how we can create a new role model for people to follow.

"Once the script is written, we test, we do readings with different focus groups, we test it with people who have HIV. And we adapt the script to tailor it to suggestions people make. Once the episode has been broadcast, we go back to our focus groups, hand out questionnaires to 2000 people and try and judge the effect we have had in changing perceptions.

"The evidence so far over these 10 years has shown that we have been effective."

- INDEPENDENT