Clasificación de los textos: criterios

The controversy over The Yar‘adua Interview had not gone before another BBC broadcast on Nigeria sparked a new one: this time on alleged negative portrayal of

the Nigeria‘s biggest city in its television programme. Welcome to Lagos was a three-part BBC documentary series that explored ‗the lives of slum dwellers who are living at the sharp end of the fastest growing mega-city in the world‘ (BBC2, 2010). Lagos, Nigeria‘s largest commercial centre, has 16 million inhabitants with an annual growth rate of 600,000 (BBC2, 2010). The BBC‘s series, directed by Gavin Searle, looked at the lives of those at the bottom rung. Produced by Will Anderson and narrated by black British actor David Harewood, it was run at 9:00pm on the 15^th, 22^nd and 29^th of April 2010 on BBC2.

The first episode featured the lives of people who live on top of Olusosun rubbish dump in houses built with scraps. About one thousand people live on this rubbish dump, and the film focused on the everyday life of two of its dwellers, musician Eric Obuh (nick-named Vocal Slender) and trader Joseph Orji, who earn their living from the scraps in the dump. ‗If there was a bigger, dirtier, ―stinkier‖ dump where I could earn more money for my family, then I‘d go there to work,‘ Joseph declared (BBC2, 2010). The second episode portrayed the lives of those who live and work on the floating slum of Lagos Lagoon. Here, 65-year-old fisherman Chubbey, who has 18 children and five grandchildren and lives along with them in houses built on rafts, provides for himself and the family on the earnings made from building fish ponds and renting out rafts. On another side, two young men, Kissme and Daniel, earn their own living diving in the Lagoon and digging out sand that they sell to builders. The third and final episode was about the everyday life of those who live in illegal shanties on the beach of Lagos. Housewife Esther Ogunleke lives here with her husband, Segun, in a house they built with scraps of woods, cardboards and tarpaulin that was under a constant threat of government‘s task force which regularly demolishes such illegal dwellings. Esther is worried about this, as she does about another woman‘s text messages she discovered on her husband‘s mobile phone (BBC2, 2010).

In terms of technical and production qualities, Welcome to Lagos is an innovative television piece with entertaining narratives that took four months of hard work to produce. The BBC hailed it as a series that highlighted how the poor were adapting to modern city life, especially now that more than half of the world‘s population live in cities. ‗With extraordinary access to some of the poorest parts of

town, the series celebrates the resilience, resourcefulness and energy of Lagos‘s 16 million inhabitants, and shows how successfully many of its slum dwellers are adapting to the realities of the world‘s increasingly extreme urban future‘ (BBC2, 2010). The film received rave reviews in the UK media. The Guardian in London did an editorial in praise of it, saying it was worth ‗a repeat‘ as the stars in the film

‗do not wallow in self-revelation, but are ordinary, resourceful people who get by‘

(Guardian, 2010). Television critic Sam Wollaston (2010) said the series was

‗extraordinary‘ as indeed the life in Lagos has always been. ‗It doesn‘t pretend that life is brilliant for these people, but nor does it feel sorry for them. It‘s more a celebration of their resourcefulness,‘ he wrote after watching just the first episode.

British journalist Rachel Cooke‘s hyper praises came after watching just the first ten minutes of the first episode. ‗Ten minutes in…and I understood that Welcome to Lagos is great: one of the most moving, interesting and uplifting things I have seen in years,‘ she stated in the New Statesman. ‗If David Cameron really wants to teach young people life lessons, he should just send every 14-year-old in the country a DVD of this series‘. For her ‗this documentary shows the BBC at its best‘ (Cooke, 2010).

But for many Nigerians, including some prominent personalities, the documentary provoked negative feelings towards the BBC. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka condemned the series as ‗condescending‘ and unworthy of the BBC. ‗There was this colonialist idea of the noble savage which motivated the programme. It was patronising and condescending,‘ he argued. ‗There was no sense of Lagos as what it is – a modern African state. What we had was jaundiced and extremely patronising. It was saying ―Oh, look at these people who can make a living from the pit of degradation‖‘ (Dowell, 2010). Lagos State information commissioner Opeyemi Bamidele shared that view and sent a complaint to BBC demanding that it should commission an alternative series to ‗repair the damage…caused to our image‘ (Dowell, 2010). Nigeria‘s high commissioner to Britain Dalhatu Sarki Tafida who equally forwarded Nigeria‘s protest letter to the BBC described the documentary as ‗a calculated attempt to bring Nigeria and its hardworking people to international odium and scorn‘ (Nwaubani, 2010). Sultan of Sokoto Saad Abubakar, the traditional head of Nigerian Muslims, went even further: he wanted the government to remove BBC from the cable and satellite portal that beams its

television programmes in Nigeria. ‗If I were the government, I would ask NBC (Nigerian Broadcasting Commission) to yank BBC off DSTV (‗Digital Satellite Television‘ that provides cable and satellite services from South African-based media firm Multichoice) until they apologise or show the positive side of Lagos,‘

he told a government peer review team that visited him in his palace few days after the series were broadcast (Shuaib, 2010).

Those were the reflections of the sharp contrast between the Nigerian and UK audiences‘ reception of the series. It has some similarities with the case of the Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 Danny Boyle-directed British film, set in the mega-slums of Mumbai in India. While the film was greeted with critical acclaim in the West winning several Oscars and other awards, many Indians dismissed it as

‗defamatory‘ and unreflective of the real life situation in their country—it even sparked off street protests by slum dwellers who objected to their depiction in the film as ‗slumdogs‘ (Weaver, 2009). The contrast was equally clear in the film‘s reviews. Wall Street Journal‘s film critic Joe Morgenstern (2009), for instance, described Slumdog Millionaire as ‗the film world‘s first globalized masterpiece‘.

But Indian critic and writer Gautaman Bhaskaran (2009) dismissed it as

‗superficial and insensitive‘. Significantly, Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie (2009) was strongly dismissive of it, saying it failed the test of plausibility—striking a cord with Soyinka‘s condemnation of Welcome to Lagos.

The factual-fictional divide that differentiates the two films did not alter the similarities of the reactions they generated.

However, while Slumdog Millionaire—as a work of fiction that blends Hollywood with Bollywood styles—has an artistic licence to exaggerate reality or even be far away from it, Welcome to Lagos is a factual documentary with no such luxury.

And being the product of a medium that builds its reputation on claims of impartiality, it tends to carry a stronger stamp of authenticity. The sharp contrast in its reception by Western and Nigerian audiences reflected both the cultural tension and cultural relativism that often mark such encounters. While the depiction of how the urban poor endured (and ‗enjoyed‘) the harsh life of Lagos slums served as a source of entertainment to some Western audiences, it was seen by many Nigerian audiences as a deliberate attempt to sustain the stereotypical Western

depiction of Africans as ‗savages‘ (in Soyinka‘s word). It was an age-long ideological and cultural contrast in perception. But it also highlighted the complexity of reception research. The fact that it is the Western-savvy non-Westerners, Soyinka and Rushdie in this case, that show more strident opposition to the Western media‘s portrayal of their societies underlines the depth of such complexity.

Summary

The BBC and Nigerians, as highlighted above, have a long and complex relationship that began in the 1930s and has been undergoing transformation ever since. This chapter has traced the historical development of such engagement, its changing nature and the emerging trends being shaped by the changing dynamics of global geopolitics and advancement of communications technologies. It has touched on the BBC‘s roles from its early days as Empire Service—advancing the interests of the British Empire and informing its citizens and colonial subjects of developments at home and abroad—to its present position as the best known global broadcaster with its inherent contradictory functions in providing impartial news and enhancing British public diplomacy. Also discussed was the BBC‘s complex relationship with its funding body, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the difficult balancing act of attending to its demand and that of the audiences.

The BBC‘s interests in Nigeria, first as a British colonial outpost and now as the largest radio market for the broadcaster, were equally brought into focus. Its role as provider of information to colonial Nigeria through wired broadcasting and its assistance in establishing local broadcasting outfits as well as the establishment of the BBC Hausa Service and the latest expansion of its operations in Nigeria were all highlighted. The Nigerians‘ engagement with the medium that they regard as the leading foreign broadcaster in their country, their consumption of its products and their perception of its coverage of their country—sometimes with admiration, sometimes with suspicion, but mostly with passion—was also briefly discussed here. They all form part of the landscape into which this study attempts to probe deeper.

V

Methodology

Introduction

The methodological endeavour of this study is primarily grounded in the qualitative research tradition, but without neglecting the essential ingredients of the quantitative approach, as it also utilizes massive quantitative data derived from a positivist research culture. Qualitative methods were used to obtain the primary data that was amply supplemented by statistical data originally drawn from large scale surveys. It is a unique approach designed to meet the novelty of this research, which is focused on unveiling in detail the relationship between the BBC World Service and its audiences in Northern Nigeria. Specifically, focus group discussions, in-depth individual interviews, qualitative content analysis and documentary research techniques were employed for the study. Statistical data drawn from large scale BBC audience surveys were amply used to complement the primary data obtained through the qualitative research tools. This chapter unpacks the methodological strategies employed for this study, the justification for applying them, the sampling procedure used, the areas covered by the study, the background of the participants drawn, the nature of the data generated, the ethical issues involved, the problems encountered, and how they were resolved.