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The gradual transformation of South African television from a mainstay of apartheid to a tool for building a multi-racial democracy is one of today's most under-reported media stories. Prime Time South Africa gives Americans a chance to see the first tentative steps - some inspiring, some merely silly - in this unprecedented telecommunications experiment. The six examples compiled here, representing both public service and entertainment programming, hardly represent a typical evening of South African television. Rather they've been chosen to demonstrate the variety of ways the media is portraying South Africa's new, post-apartheid dispensation. SOUL CITY Imagine that ER and General Hospital were set in a clinic in a South African township and that the story lines were written to address particular public health concerns. That's Soul City, an internationally acclaimed program now in its third season which has become the most widely watched dramatic series in South Africa. LOCAL VOTER Local Voter explores an innovative approach to voter education and was telecast in preparation for the first local elections in which black South Africans participated, November 5, 1995. We've selected a 10 minute excerpt from this relentlessly upbeat but commendable "game show" format program broadcast from Soweto. It intersperses questions to the three contestants with brief video inserts explaining the structure of local government and stakes behind the elections. RHYTHM AND RIGHTS Rhythm and Rights is the name of a fictional "call-in program" at a community radio station where listeners discuss whether their rights have expanded in post-apartheid South Africa. The program also draws attention to the new, under-funded community radio sector which was recognized, alongside public and commercial broadcasting, as a key component of a democratic media policy. COMMERCIALS We have also attached three commercials which show that determined advertisers can even use the successful struggle against apartheid to sell motor oil, pick up trucks or telephones. GENERATIONS Generations, one of South Africa's most popular prime time programs, made history as the first soap, produced, directed, and written by black South Africans. It portrays a society obsessed with power, money and sex, in other words a world not dissimilar to that of our own soaps. GOING UP This English-style sit-com draws together a "cross section" of the new South Africa in a law office where the focus of attention seems to be women's breasts and double entendres about them. The white senior partner is loveably befuddled, the black junior partner raffish, while the "Coloured" secretary is gamely learning to speak South Sotho. This episode features a fast-talking African American film producer/ huckster who has returned to the "mother continent," bodacious starlet in tow, to produce Revenge of the African Vampires II to help his "African brothers."
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