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Rea Tsotella
Moja Love (DStv channel 157)
Monday, 9.30pm
0 star out of five stars
I’ve given Rea Tsotella a rating of zero out of five stars. Why? Well, if you’d seen the March 25 episode, you wouldn’t feel the need to ask. If you missed it, you’ll soon see why the show is so destructive.
It isn’t just that Lindiwe, in a country struggling with horrible levels of unemployment, suddenly found herself looking like a deer in the headlights on the set of an amateur-looking studio.
Lindiwe was lied to and lured there on false pretences and led to believe she was going to a job interview. Instead, she was confronted by her aunt Winnie and mercilessly slut-shamed for having sex with Winnie’s husband, even though he was nowhere to be seen with no blame assigned to him.
It isn’t just that Lindiwe may well be the victim of statutory rape after she explained that Winnie’s husband coerced her as a young girl into a sexual relationship with him. And it wasn’t just that the riled-up studio audience piled further shame on her regardless of her claim. The leering presenter of the show, Moshe Ndiki, not only egged on the audience, but tried to goad Winnie and Lindiwe into a physical altercation, stopping short of outright ordering them to come to blows for the audience’s entertainment.
In last week’s April 1 show a mum accused a man of raping her daughter when she was seven and the host – Bishop Makamu this time – told her she should “forgive” the man.
This happened as doubt was cast on whether the accused was actually even the real rapist.
The atrociously produced Rea Tsotella – with its terrible sound quality, unbearable editing and rudimentary set – shamelessly exploits its “guests” and the in-studio audience for the delight of the viewers at home. With presenters Ndiki and Makamu serving as alternate ringmasters of this circus, neither the stoked-up studio audience nor the people lured to Rea Tsotella’s set seem to realise that at this performance, they aren’t the spectators – they are part of the clown show.
South African television should be better than this bottom-of-the-barrel exploitation at which bodyguards hover on the set’s edge, ready to “intervene” once guests start hitting each other and snatching wigs. Not long ago the show even went as far as to goad a frail gogo into physically attacking her own daughter.
Viewers can put a stop to this destructive form of so-called entertainment by changing the channel and saying no to this mess.
The problem isn’t that Rea Tsotella is (supposedly) showing South Africa’s problems – I believe we should share our issues. The problem is that Rea Tsotella gleefully dishes up other people’s pain as entertainment, makes no attempt to rectify the damage it has done and still has the gall to describe itself as a show about “conflict resolution”.
