Photo: Netflix / BBC promo 
It’s been a bit of a heavy week over at Daily Maverick HQ. The Gathering was intense, with whistle-blowers – including those behind the #GuptaLeaks – and journalists sharing emotional stories of the cost of truth.
But truth doesn’t always come at a personal cost. Our weekend watch-list has a mix of all sorts.
Africa’s Great Civilizations
First, a warning. PBS Africa’s Great Civilizations was made for Americans. Produced, written and narrated by outspoken US intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr, the show takes a journey to “undiscovered” sites across the African continent. Well, undiscovered to Americans, perhaps.
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The six-part series was labelled as “popcorn history” in a City Press review when it first aired in 2017. A lot of the criticism directed at the show is fair, including the fact that there aren’t nearly enough African scientists who feature.
A lot of what you’ll see is stuff you’ll already know. Africa is the cradle of humankind and the narrative of the origins and intelligence of humankind has been distorted.
But for those of us who don’t spend our days buried in science journals, the show offers lots of starting points to explore history further.
Like the Blombos Cave in South Africa where the earliest known examples of human creative expression go back almost 80,000 years.
To his credit, Dr Gates does try, right from the get-go, to change the narrative of what some believe about Africa. In part one, he says: “When those early human beings migrated out of Africa. They weren’t travelling alone. They were carrying something within them, and that something had developed slowly over millennia. It was culture.”
Available for free in some regions on pbs.org
Afflicted
As the world gets weirder and a bit more wonderful, the afflictions we suffer do, too. This series tracks seven different people, all who suffer from new and unexplained conditions.