美国国家公共电台 NPR Why East Africa Is Hooked On Telenovelas

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

If you turn on a television in East Africa, you'll eventually see something like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "YO NO CREO EN LOS HOMBRES")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You asked for my trust, Daniel (ph). You asked for my support.

SIEGEL: That's a scene from "Yo No Creo En Los Hombres," a Mexican telenovela. It's a genre 1 that is booming across the continent. NPR's Eyder Peralta reports.

EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE 2: The offices of Dubbing 3 Africa still very much feel like a construction site.

PASCAL KOROSO: So still under construction. We're setting up some more studios.

PERALTA: That's Pascal Koroso, whose company dubs 4 Latin American soap operas. His company started just a few years ago with two people. Now, he's got 250 workers, and he's about to double. Across sub-Saharan Africa, he says, telenovelas have struck a nerve. Almost all cable companies now have at least one novela channel, and that means Koroso has people dubbing them 24 hours a day.

KOROSO: The themes are things that Africans identify with a lot - you know, the corrupt 5 politician who rigged an election. You are in problem, your marriage is, you know, having a rough time. Who do you talk to? You don't - we don't know a psychologist. We know our priest (laughter).

PERALTA: Koroso says you also have to look at the economic boom taking place in Africa. People are making a ton of money right now, but the vast majority of Africans are still poor and telenovelas are aspirational 6.

KOROSO: Everybody aspires 7 to be rich. Everybody aspires to move into the middle class, so these sort of stories sort of reason it in terms of people seeing something that is possible for them.

PERALTA: And really, telenovelas are everywhere you turn.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WHAT LIFE STOLE FROM ME")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) You sold me, Mom.

PERALTA: They're on billboards 8, in restaurants, in government offices. This is from the Mexican soap "What Life Stole From Me."

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WHAT LIFE STOLE FROM ME")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Your very own daughter.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Understand me. We were about to lose everything, and I - I was very desperate, so desperate.

CAROLINA ACOSTA-ALZURU: These things resonate in cultures that have undergone historically upheavals 9.

PERALTA: That's Carolina Acosta-Alzuru. She studies telenovelas at the University of Georgia. She says novelas are not about their ending. Instead, they focus on drawn-out struggles. It's storytelling that thrives in the middle, that savors 10 suffering. And so it's no surprise, she says, that they come from Latin America.

ACOSTA-ALZURU: We endure. We suffer that heartbreak. We leave the heartbreak in a very peculiar 11 way.

PERALTA: What Acosta-Alzuru has found is that the export of telenovelas works in a cycle. They're first dubbed 12 in a local language, and then, as countries start coming to terms with their own heartbreak, they produce their own novelas.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LIES THAT BIND")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Move.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Please, stop disrupting the church.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) You are disrupting this service. Who else would you be saving this seat for other than Richard Juma's second wife?

PERALTA: Dorothy Ghettuba produced "Lies That Bind," one of Kenya's most successful homegrown soap operas. It's about a magnate who dies and leaves two families fighting for his inheritance. Ghettuba says she remembers being inspired by Mexican soap operas since she was a kid. At boarding school, the girls would fill a TV room to watch "Rosa Salvaje." One time, there were so many of them sitting against a wall that the wall tumbled.

DOROTHY GHETTUBA: One girl was not very quick, so she had, like, her leg broken. She went to the hospital, like, saying, damn, I'm missing the (laughter) soap series.

PERALTA: And as a storyteller now, she realizes "Wild Rose" worked in Kenya because it was the story of urbanization.

GHETTUBA: A girl comes from the village, and she gets a job as a nanny or housemaid in a big mansion 13, and then hell breaks loose when she's pretty and the father of the house sees her and the beat goes on. This stuff happens.

PERALTA: Bottom line, she says, is that telenovelas work in Africa because they feel authentic 14. Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Nairobi.

(SOUNDBITE OF CORNERSHOP SONG, "SLEEP ON THE LEFT SIDE")