Media News

LIGALI Comment

In the BBC response to our letter Jana Bennett asserts that anybody of any ethnic background is capable of making a programme about African history and culture.

This is true.

A German COULD lead an extensive series about the Holocaust, a man COULD lead a series on feminism, a meat eater COULD direct a series promoting vegetarianism, a fifty plus son of a vicar playing anti-African hip hop COULD (and does in the case of BBC Westwood) play to a predominantly european audience, and to pay homage to Bennett’s ill conceived suggestion, a child borne from rape COULD make a programme about the 'benefits' of rape.

But the real question is SHOULD they?

What a lack of cultural familiarity and abject absence of empathy guarantees is that neither are capable of making accurate, sensitive and respectful programmes about their specific topics. Especially if they personally belong to the oppressor group and is exploiting or abusing their position of power to dominate or subvert the story, history or culture of the oppressed.

Bennett claims the BBC expects programme makers to be ‘cultural navigators, able to transcend all boundaries and make fair, accurate and balanced programmes about anything’. A laudable aim possible perhaps in a simple tellytubby world.

What Bennett doesn’t reveal is that the BBC consistently fails to achieve this. In fact as a key partner of the Cultural Diversity Network (http://www.cdnetwork.org.uk/)
the BBC remains fully aware of the issues of anti-African programming that permeate throughout British broadcasters. Sadly the CDN only meets six days out of three hundred and sixty five a year to put in place revolutionary plans to actually do anything about it. Typically organisations such as Ligali are excluded from these back patting high level meetings.

Returning to the issue of programming for the Maafa 2007, we believe it is essential that the majority of programming commissioned is authentically Africentric. Not ‘black’ – led, not ‘white’-led, but African led. The BBC has habit of using the names of so called ‘black’ individuals and organisations that are not brave enough to stand up and claim their African identity to sanction, prove and give 'official' approval to the BBC's anti-African actions.

However there is a simple litmus test for these situations. It states that any African who is not confident and assertive enough to reject the eurocentric ‘black’ epithet, ashamed to refer to themselves primarily as African, is unaware of African socio-political history and does not embrace a substantive amount of African cultural values should not be a key partner, collaborator or producer of any form of media telling of the Maafa.

Ligali does not portray our view as the only view of African people in Britain, but we are an authoritative view with a conservative estimate of over one hundred thousand supporters and growing. This may not compare to the millions of europeans in the UK who back the likes of Lenny Henry and Ainsley Harriot but it is an authentic Pan African voice which consistently represents African people, history and culture in a manner that embraces the diversity of a people a billion strong on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora.

Bennett’s simplistic arguments denies the obvious fact that every single day the British media produces new anti-African literature and this has led to the existence of an overwhelming body of inaccurate, racist, anti-African media. The problem with this media is that not only does it permeates BBC networks but it also influences British educational and media institutions.

It is this fact that demands the need for Africentric programming to override claims of faux-impartiality to redress an imbalance that perpetuates the legacy of a very real injustice still committed against African people worldwide.

The BBC can chose to be either part of the solution or as we suspect, an arrogant affluent and key influential partner in the continued existence of the problem.

“The person who has eaten and satisfied themselves does not care for the one who is hungry.”
African proverb