For the longest time, I have been listening to the BBC, a habit I picked from my own grandfather in the early 1960s, soon after independence. That, and reading the hard-copy of the Daily Nation has been the way I get to know how the world is.
Sadly, over the last few days, I have decided to ditch “Bush House”. The reason is very simple.
Bluntly, the BBC has refused to change with the times. Today, in 2018, the broadcaster still behaves like a colonial bullhorn, belittling people of colour and reinforcing 18th century racist stereotypes. The BBC does this in a clever, subtle and covert politically-correct manner, such as running the bizarre Africa Eye programmes that reports only on the crazy and odd about ‘Africa’, which one would be forgiven to think is a country and not a continent.
If you have listened to the BBC in the last few months you would have heard of the HIV+ Hyena of Malawi who sleeps with under-age girls, the serial rapes of South Africa, the secret detention camps for mentally-challenged Kenyan Somalis, the human sacrifices of Malawi etc etc ad nauseum.
In the same period you would have heard zero about Nairobi’s changing skyline, the vibrant Nairobi Stock Exchange, the rebirth of the Ethiopian economy, Rwanda’s ICT revolution, Malawi’s farming success, or anything good to do with Somalia. Basically, nothing positive from the cesspool/shithole that is ‘Africa’.
Similarly, on the flipside, you would not have heard funny programmes about the gun murders of inner-city America or child pornography rings of Europe, their human -trafficking, serial killers, incestuous families, drug crises etc etc. These are not to be highlighted, apparently, lest they diminish the ethereal glow of White civilisation. There are no special ‘investigative’ programmes to tell you about the witches of France, the White supremacists of Arizona or the Nazis of Ukraine.
Now I know bad news make the headlines, and it is not the duty or responsibility of a historically White supremacist media organisation like the BBC, which used to call freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela, Dedan Kimathi and Robert Mugabe terrorists, to tell our stories. But as long as it is allowed to broadcast on Kenyan – and African - airwaves the BBC has a responsibility to report factually and responsibly on the people of this continent. Otherwise they should simply pack their bags and go.
For the English broadcaster to continue to perpetuate racial stereotypes of a savage, bizarre, dark Africa is unconscionable and unacceptable. That it is uses token people of colour to transmit this racist BS around the world is transparently offensive and downright despicable.
The BBC must become acutely aware that no so long ago it was complicit in the Nazi-type concentration camps in Kenya, for example, that saw up to 20 per cent of the Kikuyu population wiped out. It fully supported the pograms. It must work harder to atone for its support of the Gestapo states that were the colonial administrations in places like Kenya, Yemen, Rhodesia and Malaya, where record shows genocide and crimes against humanity were committed with wanton abandon and impunity.
For it to continue to brutalise the peoples of these countries and regions with unbalanced reporting that depicts them as little more than primitive living artefacts is to show a depravity of attitude that is both psychotic and sociopathic, at the very least. It is sick.
To be fair to the BBC, it is not the only White establishment that has failed to move on with the times. Virtually the entire White establishment has sanitised and distilled racism into an acceptable cocktail of doublespeak and parallel reality where ordinary words, experiences and realities are used to code for unspeakable prejudice and bigotry.
‘Africa’ is now code for ‘black’, as in ‘African migrants’, and children born of white and black couples, like Barrack Obama, are always black because one drop of black blood contaminates the pure ‘white’ lineage, as per the old rules of the South. It is not by happenstance that the president of the United States can call a black woman, however flawed she may be, a doggie. He was probably thinking of the other word with two 'g’s. Racism is alive and well.
The racism of the BBC and its compatriots may be much more refined than Trump’s, but to them all Africa is a cesspool - nay, a shithole - of poverty, corruption and disease, and the average African is a child-like creature that can only be saved from his misery and looming Chinese colonisation by good old Bwana Kubwa – the Big White Messiah, either riding a NGO SUV into a disease hotspot (a brothel, probably) or protecting the rhino from the Yellow Plague From the East (don’t ask where their own big game went).
I respectfully disagree, and vote with my ears. After 50 years, I have finally discovered the radio dial, and will change channels.
I will no longer engage with an old racist colonial relic that sees me as a big red-lipped, always smiling, dancing pickaninny, to quote immediate former British foreign minister Boris Johnson. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
PS: I am sending this to the BBC as well, with the link here so speak out your mind!