ADDIS ABABA — On a Saturday afternoon in one of Addis Ababa’s khat houses, a group of men and women chew the mildly narcotic plant while gazing mesmerised toward a television featuring a South Korean soldier stripped to his waist and holding a young lady’s hand while proclaiming his undying love — somewhat incongruously — in Amharic.
Broadcast exclusively in the lingua franca of Ethiopia — a necessity with 80 dialects across the country — and after decades of drab Ethiopian State-owned television, KANA TV marks a breakthrough in Ethiopian televised entertainment. It may also signal a shift in Ethiopia’s much criticised media environment.
Kana translates as something between taste and flavour, and Ethiopia’s estimated four million television households have found that this new private satellite television channel carrying international standard programming very much to their taste. When it first aired, KANA seized a 40-50% share of the prime time market.
“It’s a crazy operation,” co-founder Elias Schulze, the only non-Ethiopian amid the 180 staff, said.
“At the beginning it took up to 50 man hours to dub one hour and we had to produce 200 man hours of content every day.”
So far KANA has dubbed 2 300 hours of foreign content, requiring a highly co-ordinated operation: research and analysis to select which shows to secure, then negotiations and purchase, followed by translation, casting, acting, syncing, audio editing, video editing, quality control and then scheduling. Finally, everything is uplinked to satellite.
So far KANA has dubbed 2 300 hours of foreign content, requiring a highly co-ordinated operation: research and analysis to select which shows to secure, then negotiations and purchase, followed by translation, casting, acting, syncing, audio editing, video editing, quality control and then scheduling. Finally, everything is uplinked to satellite.
“TV here used to be so boring, all the channels showed mainly news,” an Addis Ababa resident and television viewer in her early twenties, said. “But KANA is pure entertainment, and people really like it.”
Ethiopia’s Amhara, the native speakers of Amharic, only constitute about a quarter of Ethiopia’s 100 million population. But before its launch, KANA conducted research that showed 70% of the country’s television viewers understood the language to a reasonable level.
That was an improvement on the 50% who could not understand the Arabic-language satellite channels that had come to dominate Ethiopian viewing.
“People watched them because they enjoyed the quality and good storylines,” Hailu Teklehaimanot, a producer and head of communications at KANA, and a former newspaper editor, said.
“So we thought why not make that quality understandable through dubbing, while at the same time, our staff got on-the-job training we could eventually use for original productions.”
About 90% of KANA’s current output is dubbed foreign shows. The eventual goal is for half of output to be home-grown productions like KANA’s new Masters at Work series, which showcases the works of Ethiopian singers, poets, fashion designers, photographers and the like.
“There’s a narrative in mainstream media — local and international — focusing on development or lack of development at the macro level,” Teklehaimanot said.
“But there is a different narrative at the micro level in which inspired young people are doing new things.”
One example of this on Masters at Work is a photographer Girma Berta, who specialises in taking photos on his mobile phone of simple images such as street childrens and street vendors going about daily life.
“The message I want to send out to young people with interests in photography is not to be scared to try new things,” Berta says during his Masters at Work appearance. “Also, I would advise them to use social media properly to share their pictures, because they can show their pictures to the rest of the world easily; I think until we can find the style of photography that defines us, we must search for it ourselves.”
No comments:
Post a Comment