Tanzanian Television
So, Tanzanian television seems to generally be rather different than American television. I’ve seen it a bit in random restaurants and whatnot, and a lot in the staff room at my school, which has a television that the teachers like to watch. The programming that I’ve seen the most includes:
Music Videos
The music tends to be:
1. American hip-hop
2. Tanzanian/African hip-hop
3. Tanzanian dance music
People dress really conservatively here, and expect people to dress really modestly and whatnot, so women’s clothes get nowhere near skimpy by American standards. But then the American music videos aren’t edited at all, and there’s a lot of stuff that I would expect to be totally shocking by Tanzanian standards, but people don’t seem to have a problem with it, even though you don’t see anything like that in the Tanzanian videos. I’m still trying to figure this out.
Dubbed Soap Operas
I’ve seen two separate ones, both of which were originally Spanish-language (not sure which country they’re from). One of them, called “Mi Pecado”, is regularly watched in the staff room at school. Note that they’re dubbed into English, rather than Swahili.
Chinese Medieval War Films
(Set in medieval China, btw.) I’m not sure if it’s films, or if it’s an actual TV show. I think maybe the title I saw once was “Country of the Wind”? The audio is still in Chinese, but it/they has/have got English subtitles. It’s got feudal lords and whatnot leading armies against each other and having dramatic reasons for doing everything they do. It’s also got kung-fu-swordfighting, which is pretty spiffy.
Soccer
Which is “football”, btw. “Football” as Americans understand it is entirely unheard-of here. It seems that you mostly see either Tanzanian or English matches.
News
They have news, from various channels, including BBC and CNN. Some of it is in Swahili, some of it is world news in English.
Ze Original Comedy
There’s a Tanzanian sketch-based comedy show, a la Monty Python’s Flying Circus, that’s really popular here. It’s all in Swahili, and I’m afraid that my Swahili is still bad-enough that I can’t understand most of what they say.
