Dear Diary,

I am feeling rather stressed; there seems to be no end in sight to the Januworries that plague my soul and bank account. Tomorrow is my deadline to file a review of the first month of new season of The South Africa Show telenovela. In the words of Dame Shirley Bassey, “wheeeeeeere do I begin?” The talented and generous writers have packed the first month of season 29 of this Nollywood-class series with so much drama I don’t know whether to be seriously impressed or offended.

Sometimes, in the serendipitous silence of Stage 6 darkness, I find myself contemplating our continent, thinking that perhaps we might have a bit of a PR problem. And I wonder if shows like this one, as entertaining as they are, do us any favours in the eyes of viewers, both local and international. 

There’s that saying, “This is Africa”, usually abbreviated to TIA and often used to shrug off some of the more peculiar aspects of African life. I’ve never liked it. As a bona fide member of many marginalised communities, I do my best to be as easily offended as possible, hence I generally find the use of TIA to be quite derogatory.

But, sometimes, when I watch The South Africa Show, I can’t help but imagine that the director and writers got tired after brainstorming a few ideas, decided to mix up a gallon of Klippies and full-sugar coke, passed on the ys and mixed in a chilled 1.5-litre bottle of Autumn Harvest Crackling instead; chugged it down and said, “Fuck it, TIA, let’s throw everything at it! Let’s write like the Cape Town wind, bitches!”

I could not have imagined a year ago that, when incorporating real-life storylines into the show, such as Russia’s war on Ukraine, that the writers would position this fictional country as an ally to Russia. Back then, they positioned the country’s Minister of International Relations, Naledi Pandor, on something of a moral high ground. Her department was unequivocal in its stance, immediately calling “on Russia to immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine”. I absolutely loved that choice on their part.

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But, this show being the whiplash fest that it is, it seems they’ve decided to go in a different direction this year and present her as something of a villain, the unbeatable final boss of Januworries if you will. She’s gone all buddy buddy with the Russian Foreign Affairs Minister: ‘Okay, okay, fine, come thru Lavrov, let’s party like it’s 1999. How’s about a joint naval exercise in Feb? Let’s do it in KZN, invite China, it’s gonna be a blast!’ 

I’m just not convinced this plot twist was the best choice, and the script feels somewhat contrived. In one episode, the Pandor character actually said she can’t repeat her anti-war sentiments of yesteryear because … wait for it … “to repeat that statement to Minister Lavrov today would make me appear quite simplistic and infantile … because I don’t wish to appear as though I don’t know what has occurred in the world”.

Imagine a real minister using that lame excuse to partner with the world’s current No 1 villain. It just doesn’t ring true. Bad writing, in my opinion. But I do have to be honest and say that by the time this storyline appeared towards the end of January, I should have been less surprised than I was. After all, the month opened with peak batshit craziness, with a revelation early on in the season that there had been an attempt on André’s life, the show’s outgoing Eskom CEO. That should have been enough to build an entire month’s worth of story lines, perhaps even inspired an entire spin-off. Not so for The South Africa Show. Nicolas Cage’s entire movie canon could never!

I’m not a big fan of tragic storylines and sad endings, so I was relieved to find out he had survived. I also hate it when they kill off good looking characters, and I hope the silver fox stays on for a couple more seasons. As the late great Andre Leon Tally once said, “it’s a famine of beauty, it’s a famine of beauty honey. Our eyes are starving for beauty!”

Meanwhile, on the eastern side of the country, in eDikeni, home to this fictional country’s troubled University of Fort Hare, an attempt was made on the vice-chancellor’s life, allegedly because he was on clean-up mission of the historic university where so many African leaders were educated in the mid-20th century. And just as I was about to weep for the fictional country that might have been, the vice-chancellor of the show’s other popular university to the west, an intriguingly written character by the name of Professor Phakeng, posted pictures of herself posing with a rifle, and captioned it: “Somewhere in Africa.” TIA indeed. 

Somewhere in Africa pic.twitter.com/9Uc6vGLCn4

— FabAcademic 🏳️‍🌈 (@FabAcademic) January 3, 2023

All this, of course, is set to the background of that whole Stage 6-no-electricity-storyline, where these people somehow magically make an economy work on less than half a day’s electricity supply. Seriously, I’m not sure how much more I can take, I’m going to need the writers’ room to come up with less offensive tropes. We can’t still be writing about Africa like this. I’d say I’m hoping for a more Afro-optimistic February from this show, but that would probably be bad for ratings. And anyway, TIA. DM/ML