Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

When middle-class residents of Midrand near Johannesburg woke recently
to find a rash of squatter shacks had gone up in their backyard overnight,
they jammed the switchboard of the town council with complaints. And when,
a few days later, a noisy funeral was conducted in a car park on the settlement,
they redoubled their calls for action.

But neither the squatter camp nor the funeral were real. They were
part of a new South African soap opera, Soul City, which is intended to
raise awareness of health issues and what people can do to look after
their own health.

The drama centres on a health clinic that serves a poor community. It
has all the ingredients of a traditional ‘soap’: romance, tragedy, humour
and suspense. But the story addresses a range of serious issues, such as
antenatal care for pregnant women, the advantages of breastfeeding, childhood
diarrhoea, immunisation, household accidents and child abuse.

‘Dehydration as a result of diarrhoea is responsible for a quarter of
all deaths of children under five in this country, and it’s eminently preventable,’
says Garth Jafford, the man behind the new series. Years of working in community
clinics where he dealt constantly with emergencies that should never have
happened convinced him of the need to give people the knowledge to safeguard
their own health.

South Africa’s mass media are well developed and ideally suited to public
education, so Jafford and like-minded colleagues from the Alexandra Clinic
in Johannesburg, where Jafford now works, approached the South African Broadcasting
Corporation. They won backing from UNICEF and big business for a mass media
campaign.

‘It soon became obvious to us that we had to have access to prime time
TV,’ explains Jafford. ‘While education on television attracts an audience
of under 500 000, prime time drama reaches around 11 million viewers, a
third of our population.’

Before starting, the project team undertook a year’s research to establish
what the community’s priorities were and what cultural and economic factors
influence people’s attitudes and actions. The script for every episode of
Soul City was scrutinised and discussed by groups of people from Alexandra
township before filming began.

Soul City’s biggest audiences are in urban areas, where many who do
not have electricity run televisions off car batteries. But there are plans
to reach remote rural communities, where TV sets are scarcer, through the
Rural Television network, which places TVs in rural trading stores for the
benefit of commercial advertisers.

Practically every rural homestead has a transistor radio, and rural
communities are the target of a sister soap opera for radio, Healing Hearts,
which is broadcast twice a day on the three most popular stations – Radio
Zulu, Radio Xhosa and Radio Sotho, which between them reach 15.5 million
people. Healing Hearts is set in rural South Africa and, like Soul City,
every story has been pre-tested on the community.

National newspapers, with some 900 000 readers, are also part of the
campaign. Every day, a fact sheet is published on a health issue addressed
in Soul City. These will eventually be published together as a basic health
handbook and delivered free with the daily paper.

An independent team has just begun evaluating the campaign. ‘We have
high hopes that it will prove effective,’ says Jafford. ‘We’ve already seen
through our research that the episodes have an incredible power to stimulate
debate around the issues, and that’s how adults learn.’