Mpali and Ready for Marriage

Perhaps one day we will know just how much damage was done by "Ready for Marriage" or as the spinners called it "R4M". In case you have just gotten off the bus, R4M was a "reality" television programme produced and aired by Muvi TV between 2007 and 2014 hat had at least twenty young women contestants competing to see who was most ready to get married. The prize being a fully sponsored wedding initially, with other prizes added for runner-ups and so forth. The programme would go on to run for at least four seasons, with various spins on it including one season in which contestants were drawn from sex workers.

The saddest part for me was seeing young women competing to be considered the most ready for marriage. Seeking public approval through different tasks that were considered standard for a married woman, cooking, making the bed, sewing and many other typically stereotypical renderings of the girl child. The audience had its fun of course (you don't get to have four seasons unless the audience is enjoying it). The show had everything, sordid back stories, scorned lovers, sleazy tabloid worthy affairs, heartbreaks and everything in between. The public lapped it all up!

Perhaps lost in all of this was just what this programme was doing to young women allover the country and the contestants themselves in being reduced to pandering to popular characterization of the ideal female child, i.e one who is only good to the extent that she is able to meet and perhaps exceed a man's expectations. Certainly the show did its part to inculcate these values, often deriding those that did not meet the standards in cooking or weren't towing a certain moral code expected of married or soon to be married women. The grand prize of a wedding only further entrenching the flawed notion of measuring a woman's success by their marital status.

You would think we have learnt our lesson. Drawing from the same well of inspiration, albeit with more than a hint of plagiarizing Lola Shonayeni's "The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives", comes "Mpali". Mpali tells the undulating stories of over six women and their interests, who are all married to Nguzu, an oily faced, blubbering slab of flesh who owns a farming plantation. Aside from dabbling in local gossip, the women spend the majority of the time fighting each other and playing a stupid game of revolving chairs with the aim of being the "one" to sit next to Nguzu. For his part, Nguzu does little to quell the fights, let alone empower the women, languidly and in annoyingly "slow motion" English, fleeting in and out of their lives as he sees it fit. The show is quite popular, with many of its "stars"slowly carving out celebrity identities in a Zambian society so hungry for celebrities.

Behind all of this, there appears to be little said regarding how damaging this show is to the advancement of gender equality, let alone the rendering of women in society, as perhaps little more than tools at a man's disposal. There was a time when I thought the writers would redeem themselves, by allowing the "head wife"to take over running the farm's affairs. However, like pigs going back to the mud, they ensured normal service was resumed in record time by characterising the first wife as a bumbling, incompetent crook who was out of her depth. Two weeks later, the farm was back under Nguzu's control, the head wife was begging for forgiveness and everyone was rejoicing...yet another victory for male domination.

I know what you are thinking. "I am bitter and I should cut TV some slack. Mpali is a work of fiction and Ready for Marriage was nothing more than an over-hyped game show. I shouldn't get worked up over such things... etc". I suppose that is the easy way out. However if popular media and works of art are a reflection of society (which they are), then we are only slightly better than the dark ages when women were counted along with horses and donkeys as a part of a man's possessions. I believe these tools should be deployed to also advance the type of society that we aspire for. Unfortunately I don't see any of that in these lazy pieces of television programming. They both reek of testosterone, you can smell them from a mile away. Art, in whatever mold should do more for our women, who have been existing on the periphery of social justice for a long time. R4M and Mpali are an impediment to this.