America dreaming

Hollywood and the Americanization of my (our?) South African mind

The first TV event I remember getting a real kick out of was Knight Rider.

I call it an event because it was the digital Dark Ages of 1982. Television broadcasting had been in South Africa for only eight years and people were still throwing parties to introduce their new TV to friends and family.

I was six going on seven and boarding with a family on an apple farm, and the family had decided it was time to get a television. It was A Very Big Deal.

I shared a room with their youngest, and we were under strict instructions to be in bed by 6 pm. But summer days are long here in South Africa and the sun up ’til late, and when there’s great excitement because the neighbours have come to the Special Lounge to watch The Television there’s no telling little savages to calm down and go to bed.

But they did, and so we put our little savage minds together and hatched a plan: Once everyone was settled in on the assembled couches and chairs, we would belly-crawl down the passage and take turns to snatch glimpses of the telly, which, luckily for us, faced the towards the door.

The execution of this plan was flawless. Only problem was, we understood almost nothing about what we were watching.

Sure, I’d seen a TV before, a small box at my grandfather’s house where he’d once allowed friends and family to gather around and enjoy a few minutes of Haas Das se Nuuskas. And I’d seen movies before. My gran had already taken me to watch screenings of The Water Babies and Bambi and The Fox and The Hound and Snow White. I was cinematically literate.

But this was different. This was fast cars and helicopters and dust on highways and wide open spaces and … America.

America.

Little did I know that Knight Rider had given me my first real hit of Americanism and from then on, I was utterly hooked.

And of course I was. I was primed for it. I’d already been drip-fed Americanism before Mr Knight and K.I.T.T came along.

The music around me was saturated with it. My grandmother’s Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, my dad’s Billy Joel and Mamas & Papas and Jim Croce, my aunt’s Kenny Rodgers and Dolly Parton. (Later, I would glue myself to Radio 5’s Top40 every Sunday after church and soak in Madonna, Michael Jackson, Wilson Phillips … the first tape I bought with my own money was Anita Baker’s Compositions.)

And then, very soon after Knight Rider, the other TV shows came: Thundercats and Gummi Bears and Magnum PI and MacGyver, Murder She Wrote and China Beach. I knew about the Vietnam War before I knew what Apartheid was. Before I understood what racism was, there were The Huxtables in The Cosby Show and the Banks’ from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And if I didn’t get enough happy families from those shows, there were the Keatons from Family Ties and the Seavers from Growing Pains and the Bowers and the Micelli’s from Who’s The Boss.

There are dozens more I’m not listing.

While I waited for my dad to fetch me from after-school, I watched Loving and Bold & the Beautiful and Santa Barbara, and when I bunked after-school to hang out at Natalie’s house I watched Neverending Story and The Secret of My Success and Licence to Drive on repeat (sorry again Nats, it was a bad time). Movie nights at friends’ houses meant Nightmare on Elm Street and Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone and Back to The Future and sci-fi fantasies by Steven Spielberg. ET changed lives. The Westerns and musicals and great epics of early Technicolor movie-making that filled the time slots of our local telly broadcaster so desperate for content told me that even bad times could be beautiful and that the good guys always won.

We all suffered.

Still dozens, hundreds, thousands, more.

By the time I was in high school I was buying imported teen magazines, believing in the myth of the all-American girl and comparing myself to Cindy Crawford, cutting out Johnny Depp pictures, ogling New Kids on the Block, and discovering sex through the well-thumbed copy of I’ll Take Manhattan that I found in my parent’s book stash and watching Twin Peaks (something I could do because no one had any idea what the fuck was going on).

Even my favourite authors were American: Queens of the dark realms, Tanith Lee and Anne Rice.

Of course, there were the South American and UK and European authors and music, and later, when I was being artsy and brooding, French and Spanish and German and Chinese art-house films.

But as a disinherited child of empire, that first shot of pop culture to my still-developing brain – what I heard, read, and watched – came courtesy of the US of A.

The world was America and America was the world.

And I never gave this a second thought until the other day when someone, a South African, asked me, also South African: Are you a Democrat?

I said, disparagingly, “No, because I am South African.”

Duh.

But something in me jangled.

It was just after the US election and feelings (mine) were still running high about (my fellow?) Americans voting in such a debased character as Trump.

Something in me jangled because, even as a South African of British descent, living on the other side of the world, I did identify as Democrat.

If I had voted, regardless of the less-than-perfect front (Harris) and the recent less-than-perfect management of federal foreign policy (unfettered support for Israel) I would’ve voted in the system the Democrats stand for.

And this strikes me as wild.

I’ve been so Americanized since before I could properly identify an ‘I’, that I have deeply held opinions and too much knowledge about a country I have never physically stepped foot in.

How did that happen? Well, I’ll tell you. Or rather Prof James T Campbell will tell you in his excellent paper called The Americanization of South Africa.

But in terms of TV, and especially TV from my white, English perspective, it happened because in 1976, when the National Party or Nats (the Apartheid governing party) finally allowed television broadcast in the country, Equity, the British actors’ union that had already banned their members from working in South Africa, extended their boycott to include banning the sale of all filmed or taped material to the country.

Consequently, the only English material the government could buy in en masse, just as local television broadcasting kicked off, was what was coming in from the US.

Up until then, English-speaking South Africans had drawn heavily from Anglo-American culture. With the ban, the ‘Anglo’ was soon overwhelmed by the ‘American’ and that was considered that.

Since the Nats controlled the media, when telly came along they got stuck right in, promoting Afrikaner cultural nationalism by pouring government funding into producing Afrikaans shows. The black majority – comprising at least 11 different ethnic groups and languages – and the English whites were thrown a few bones of local production but were otherwise dished American show after American show.

And more than show after show: American advert after advert, food after food, music video after music video…

The dream America had of itself, the way it imagined the world around it through Hollywood’s vision and created its internal narrative through its music and writing and advertising, became such a part of our own national psyche that what happens now in America really means something here.

And not just in the way that American politics affects global geopolitics, but culturally, socially, psychologically, in the way that makes quasi-Americans out of South Africans.

So hence, we have Trump supporters and people who consider themselves MAGA; the US’s sociopolitical movements are quickly adopted here even if there is no correlation with our own lived experience; hence we see families and friendships break apart because of differences in opinion about American talk show hosts and podcasters … hence, I am asked if I’m Democrat and my internal register pings “yes”.

Anyway. It’s weeks after the election. I’ve calmed down now. But this point remains with me: the Americanization of South African pop culture, of my own mind…

It’s also helped me shape how I view my own writing.

Ever since I was told that The Fulcrum was not publishable locally because it wasn’t a South African story or didn’t have South African characters, I’ve felt somewhat guilty – and burdened – by my lack of inclination to be South African, to insert South Africanness – its people, its places, its history – into my work. I’ve tried. But every time I do, the story seems to shrivel up in front of me. There’s too much reality here. Too much trauma.

Even without the deep influence of America on my early awareness, my storytelling roots are not in South Africa. My family geography is a foreign soil, fragmented and displaced; I have no ancestors here whose voices speak to me; I have no tribe I can speak for. It leaves me feeling untethered, drifting between ideas of identity and home, never really finding solid ground in either.

And although there is a kind of loss in that, there is also freedom. Both personally and how I work with story.

So. Those have been my some of my thoughts over the very long weeks since I’ve last posted anything. Lots of thinking, very little blogging. Also, the more I get stuck into my next book, the fewer words I have for newsletters.

Hopefully this one’s many, many, many words will make up somewhat for that. If you’ve made it all the way to here, I am grateful.

Hope the end of 2024 is treating you well.

Love & light,
t

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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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