Red Carpet, page 33
Or as Kenyan official Ezekiel Mutua told me: “People don’t eat freedom.”
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On the day after that Toyota van delivered StarTimes dishes to the villages around Suswa, a Chinese photographer came to the village to take pictures of the new subscribers for China Daily, a government-published, English-language newspaper distributed worldwide. In China, some citizens are skeptical of their government’s costly outreach to Africa, and StarTimes needed to promote the program to people back home. The photographer gathered folks like Jeremy Saitoti, a brother-in-law of the chief, who had just received a dish. On the day I met Saitoti, he was wearing a white knit baseball cap with a black bomber jacket over a gray T-shirt and salmon-colored jeans. The photographer asked Saitoti and his neighbors to retrieve their Maasai wardrobes.
Saitoti put on a blue-and-yellow plaid Maasai shuka, a shawl-like covering that hangs around the neck or off one shoulder. His mother wore one wrapped around her neck in a violet, orange, and yellow geometric pattern. They were joined by eight others, all in crowns and beaded necklaces, many holding Maasai walking sticks above their heads. Now the group looked like a stereotypical National Geographic spread of happy Africans, not far removed from the caricatures of Wolf Warrior 2. The only inconsistency was what they held in their other hands: a StarTimes dish, a flat-screen television box, a StarTimes decoder.
The China Daily photographer had Saitoti and his fellow Maasai place the StarTimes dish on the ground. With a video camera recording them, he had them dance around the dish in a circle, singing a tribal song of gratitude reserved for babies, freshly circumcised men, and newly married couples.
Enechipai enoolong’
Enechipai aake
“It is a happy day for this village / It is a happy day for these people,” they sang as they danced around the dish. Then the photographer had Saitoti and his family go inside their living room and turn the TV to the kung fu channel. He staged photographs of them sitting and watching. He asked them to smile.
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“I watch a lot of kung fu,” says Grace Waithera as soon as I tell her I’m in Kenya to learn about StarTimes.
She lives in apartment number 3 in a strip of single-story rooms, located down a dirt path about a kilometer off Suswa’s main drag. Several different families live in these rooms, but the metal cerulean doors stay open, and neighbors float in and out. On a Sunday afternoon, most are still in their church clothes. Waithera, a tailor by trade, is wearing a perfectly fitted black blouse and fire-engine-red skirt.
Waithera subscribed to StarTimes several years ago and quickly became its biggest fan. Until the television broke down recently, she kept to a schedule of shows that ran more than twelve hours a day: Nigerian movies and Swahili shows in the morning, Chinese game shows and kung fu in the afternoon, Kenyan news and Bollywood soaps in the evening. She discovered kung fu after channel surfing for a Bollywood station, before realizing she didn’t pay enough to get it. She landed instead on kung fu, which came with basic channel packages. Her daughter stopped washing dishes—soon she stopped washing dishes, too.
“I can spend the entire Sunday watching it,” she said.
Since the TV was broken, she’s been spending more time in apartment number 8, a living area and bedroom shared by the children of Immaculate Wanjiku that’s become a gathering spot for kids in the neighborhood. There are two couches and a chaise lounge facing the television, beyond a front door that’s also always open but kept private by a rose-pink bedsheet barely moving in the still air. The voice of a Chinese soprano, singing the theme song of a costume drama about to start, floats through apartment number 8 when Waithera and I step inside.
It’s the unofficial playroom of the apartment block. Immaculate, who moved to Suswa in her twenties to study herbal medicine, stays down the hall with her husband. Immaculate largely raised their nine children herself when her husband disappeared for a dozen years, and Charity, a nineteen-year-old, is the oldest still living at home. Charity has long hair dyed maroon and a stud in her right nostril that the Maasai elders do not understand.
Before the TVs arrived, women used to sit outside and talk to one another, Immaculate said. (“About what?” I asked. “Other people,” her twentysomething daughter Ann said.) Now they’re inside watching TV, but that’s not such a bad development, she added. They can follow current events; nearly everyone I speak to considers Kenyan news broadcasts a must-watch. This week, there’s growing concern about a locust infestation in the north that’s threatening food supplies.
The service grew more essential when the coronavirus spread across Africa in March 2020 and StarTimes became an integral source of information, particularly for remote villages like Suswa. The company launched a new TV show in Kenya with daily updates on the pandemic and how to stop its spread. It aired on seven channels and on the StarTimes mobile app, translated into multiple languages. When Kenyan schoolchildren were still home from school weeks later, StarTimes partnered with a national education institute to broadcast lessons they could watch at home. In the summer of 2021, StarTimes announced another outreach effort, this one a video competition. Viewers were invited to send in short films detailing how Chinese investments had transformed the lives of everyday Africans. The theme of this year’s contest was infrastructure, and the Standard Gauge Railway was one suggested subject.
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Inside the apartment, the kids from the neighborhood discuss their favorite Chinese hero: the Monkey King, the country’s most famous mythical children’s figure. They watch him in Journey to the West every night at 7:40, and nine-year-old Lucky, a plump boy wearing a knockoff Gucci shirt and jeans, has started imitating his favorite character. The Monkey King is a mischievous prankster, so Lucky hides under the bed or behind the couch so he can jump out and scare everyone.
Waithera says the Monkey King is a good role model. “He comes up with ideas and helps the king,” she says.
I ask Lucky who his other heroes are. “Jet Li!” he says. When Dwayne Johnson is on television later, I ask Lucky who it is. “Um, the Rock!” he says. He gives me a power ranking—Monkey King is tops, followed by Dwayne Johnson, then Jet Li.
Lucky’s preferences speak to the crowded competitive field Chinese programming is entering here. No matter how cool Jet Li may be, he still can’t outrank the Rock, who in turn can’t match the five-hundred-year-old Monkey King. Even as Donald Trump turned some Kenyans away from America, most of those I met still embraced American culture, so long as it blended with their new Chinese options. As in most parts of the developing world, the Hollywood they knew was on somewhat of a delay—onetime superstars like Arnold Schwarzenegger still ruled alongside Dwayne Johnson. The Hollywood effort to penetrate the Kenyan market has been piecemeal, though DreamWorks Animation and Warner Bros. launched StarTimes channels that show Trolls and Denzel Washington movies on the same TV that Lucky watched. Netflix has invested in the continent, too, seeing it as an untapped frontier in the streaming wars, but its internet-based model has run into issues brought on by slow internet connection speeds and piracy.
Grace and Immaculate, the two moms in the room, agree that Chinese shows like Journey to the West are the better family option. “There are some Hollywood ones you won’t want to watch with your kids, the ones on late at night,” says Waithera.
A high school graduate with few job prospects in the area, Charity spends a lot of her day channel surfing. She loves kung fu movies, even if they have scared her off living in China. Living in the U.S. is preferable, she says, since in China, “you’ll be beaten even by children.” She worked briefly planting grass at the railway during construction and asked her colleagues about their school system and how hard they study.
The Chinese are “the only ones who can do the building,” she says of the railway. “Most of the people here are not educated like them.” Grace is an even bigger StarTimes fan, but she’s more jaundiced about the Chinese presence in town. “We don’t have jobs. There are some Kenyans who can do those jobs.”
“They have the skills,” Charity says, referring to the Chinese workers. “Their work is perfect.” Look at how they cook, she adds, referencing a Chinese cooking show they all watch on StarTimes. They have a methodical style and follow a recipe step by step.
Then the television goes out. It’s the midafternoon, and at first it feels like a blackout. But it’s because the TV bill needs to be paid. It happens every one or two days, when Charity or her mother must text a code that sends 100 Kenyan shillings—or about $1—to StarTimes for two more days of service. Of course, it often goes out at the worst possible moment.
“I’m crying, hitting the TV,” Charity jokes.
Later that night, the TV is back on, after Charity’s 100 shillings have gone through. After a Chinese game show airs, a documentary on the origins of kung fu starts. It is exactly the kind of programming that Chinese officials want people like Charity to watch. Men on camels cross the Mongolian desert and a narrator intones: “Chinese martial arts has a long history. . . .” An elderly Chinese man completes calligraphy brushstrokes on-screen. A talking-head kung fu master describes how the fighting style helped fight off bandits, and how it symbolizes the richness of Chinese culture. Charity has seen this show before.
“It’s boring,” she says, and changes the channel to a Spanish telenovela.
“Don’t twist the truth, Barbara!” a young Spanish woman yells at an older abuela.
After the telenovela ends, Charity flips back to the kung fu channel, which, she is irritated to see, is still on the boring documentary. She keeps it on, though, because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is starting soon. After Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi appear on-screen, Immaculate asks her to turn up the volume so she can hear it in the kitchen. A sharp whiff of cooked goat meat hits the living room, and dinner is ready just as the movie is getting good. The family closes their eyes as Immaculate leads the room in a Swahili prayer. On-screen, Zhang Ziyi rides through the desert as everyone eats their soup. There is a fight in the sand. The TV freezes. Charity stands up and presses a button on the decoder. Zhang Ziyi rides again.
The next night, we watch a 1980s kung fu movie, a dubbed escapade about three Chinese women who team up to take down a drug trafficking ring in the U.S. Ryan, a young boy in the room, asks Charity’s younger sister to draw a gun on his arm so he can flail it up and down, making spitting noises with his mouth to mimic the shooting of the Chinese soldiers on-screen.
At the end of the movie, the Chinese women take down the ring and are exalted by the American authorities.
“Without the assistance of those three Chinese soldiers . . . it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to crack this case, like stuffing twenty pounds of manure into a ten-pound barrel,” the police chief says in a representatively odd translation.
I ask Charity what she thought of the movie.
“The Chinese who were on the mission, they were fighting the drug traffickers,” she says. “The American police were not willing to help them. But they fought and won.”
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The Chinese campaign for African opinion is just the latest example of a superpower trying to win over the continent. In the 1940s, while Nigeria was still under colonial rule, loudspeakers were installed outside libraries, post offices, and other gathering spots so residents could hear English radio broadcasts. Few understood the English being used on the station, but dozens still gathered to listen, the radio “addressing contemporary native subjects as future colonial citizens,” as scholar Brian Larkin has put it. The English, hoping to boost crowd numbers, started incorporating music from the local Hausa community, along with recordings of overseas Hausa troops sending well wishes back home, a blending of local and foreign programming similar to the StarTimes channel lineup. It was a British effort to connect rural Nigerian communities, some of which were entertaining the idea of separation, with the larger project of the British Empire.
The loudspeakers were hugely popular, and soon Nigerians were requesting more speakers and more localized programming. The British built a cheaper radio set exclusively for the African market. England’s Public Relations Department used the broadcasts to counteract the parochial practices of conservative Islam and promote the investments they were making in the region. The radio programming became a place for boring but safe endorsements of British contributions—their own versions of Look to the East. A British engineer came on to talk about “Water Supply and Electricity Provision.” A British traffic superintendent filled in listeners on “How Trains Are Moved on the Railways.” A British health officer lectured “On Infectious Diseases and Their Prevention.”
Like their British predecessors, Chinese producers have exercised strict control over the messaging leaving their borders. Chinese soap operas are a prime example. These programs have been popular, since they often explore themes that will resonate in an evolving Kenya: tensions between the older and younger generations, or the clash of rural and urban communities in a country where development is happening at a dizzying rate.
But Chinese officials have made sure the nation exports only programming that shows their country in the best possible light, according to Dani Madrid-Morales, a professor at the University of Houston who has studied StarTimes. Madrid-Morales analyzed the most popular soap operas in China and found they often had an edge—or as much of an edge as Beijing would allow. There might be allusions to gay characters or story lines involving divorce. Chinese audiences gravitate to these stories, but these aren’t the ones that Beijing approves to send overseas. The soap operas available on StarTimes mostly show a China of sparkling new cities, where the young and old live together in harmony and prosperity.
Of the one hundred most popular soap operas in China, none were exported by the government. Instead, the exported programs were soaps that trade appeal for conformism. These main-melody soaps include Urban Emotion, which “presents an array of family plots in which the morally righteous protagonists fight against the ills (nepotism, bribery, individualism) of a profit-driven society.” Or there’s Naked Wedding, about a young couple who cause a scandal when they decide to elope but who ultimately learn “the importance of conforming to the norm and social orthodoxy.” This kind of entertainment in China follows an inverse dynamic: the more popular a show is in China, the likelier it is to portray a version of the country its leaders don’t want foreigners to see.
Here again was China’s Achilles’ heel, evidenced by the soap opera cleansing and Charity’s reaction to the boring documentary. Its leaders wanted to make movies that would charm the world as Hollywood had, failing to understand that it was often the unflattering cinematic portraits of America that had won over audiences. It was more than just Top Gun and Dirty Dancing that convinced global moviegoers that America was in charge, an idyll of democracy, heartthrobs, and cool clothes. It was also the movies that challenged the state, revealed the country at its most imperfect, shined a light on the mistakes of its past, whether in politics, war, or the community. Movies like Iron Man 3 and Transformers regularly cast the government authorities as bad guys who orchestrated conspiracies that the heroes must take down. These portrayals could convince viewers that American politics are corrupt, but the fact that such a movie could be made with these antagonists served a higher persuasive purpose. If a country is criticizing itself or portraying its leaders in a negative light, it signals an authenticity, a willingness to trust the audience. U.S. officials might prefer a different villain in some Hollywood movies with a cynical view of the American government, but they should understand that it is these very portrayals that might do the most soft-power work for them. Dissent proves openness.
By controlling which programs are exported to StarTimes, China makes sure that Africa watches Chinese entertainment that doubles as Chinese commercials. To a person, StarTimes viewers in Kenya told me China was a place with incredible engineering and construction skills, the kind they’d like to see applied to their country. The only China they saw was in an economic boom that never ended. Harmony and morality always prevailed.
In some cases, Chinese firms have made the programming easier to view by paying to dub the movies into local languages beyond Swahili, like African French, African Portuguese, and African English, which are often spoken by too few people to be considered economically worthwhile for Hollywood. But many of the residents I spoke to are more willing to watch dubbed entertainment than subtitled, and Chinese firms will eat the cost if it shortens the bridge to appeal. A young finance manager at one dubbing firm, Gladys Mwita, told me she worried it was a neocolonial campaign. “You see the way we were colonized by the British. Now we relate more to China, we get to know them, we try to behave like they behave. The kids who are growing up now, in twenty years . . .” She mentioned a niece who gets into debates with friends about preferring Lady Gaga to Cardi B but who also wants to find a pair of shoes like the ones she sees on Chinese soaps. It made her think her niece’s generation will grow up equally aligned with the U.S. and with China. In this family, the future of the global world order—one of smaller countries needing to ally themselves with America or China—came writ small.
Mwita was among those Kenyans I met who drew the strongest parallels between the Chinese and the colonialists, but she admitted she was not the perfect messenger. She signed up for StarTimes herself. It was just too cheap to pass up.
