By Farayi Mungoshi

IN last week’s instalment, we spoke on how video games have been used to brainwash our minds, mostly children, how they have been used to programme people to be violent.
Previously, we have also spoken on how movies and music have also been used, especially by Western media to programme our way of thinking.
In some conversations with certain groups of people, it is normal to use obscene four-letter-words.
For example during my stay at the European Film College in Denmark, my principal Kjeld Veirup would repeatedly use the ‘F’ word when addressing the whole school.
Shortly it became normal and I would find myself using it more often even in writing scripts.
This is something that was against how I had been raised.
Growing up in the film and television industry in Zimbabwe, please note, I wrote my first television series in my last year as a teenager and the first television drama I acted appeared in was when I was nine-years-old.
And no matter how often artistes use vulgar language among themselves, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Co-operation (ZBC) has always stuck to its values disallowing vulgar language in any of their programmes, a culture I believe ZBC should continue to uphold.
By censoring or allowing the usage of vulgar language in a television series, we are actually teaching, programming or influencing the way we (the audience) speak in our daily conversations and ultimately how we see ourselves.
Whether it is for adult viewing only or not, we must be wary of making this kind of language common as it will affect the next generation.
Let me break that down a bit.
When the movie Boys in the Hood by Spike Lee came out in the 1990s, the use of vulgar language increased at most schools.
Mind you that was around the same period when Niggas with Attitude (NWA) was rocking the world with their rap music and singing all types of profanities.
The American church, women rights activists groups and even politicians, rallied together, calling for a ban to the music as it promoted gun crime and violence and was disrespectful towards women, calling them the ‘B’ word.
Over the years if you look around or listen to some of the lyrics by female rap artistes like Nicki Minaj, you would find that the ‘B’ word is no longer as ‘sacred’ or vulgar.
Some women, even in our own society, friends, cousins and sisters alike from Zimbabwe actually call each other now by the same derogatory ‘B’ word in their social circles.
How did it come to this?
How is it that our own sisters now refer to themselves and each other using this ‘B’ word as if they don’t know what it means?
Wasn’t this escalated through negative television content from the West?
Some readers may remember female rap artiste, Lil Kim who sang with Biggie Smalls and would repeatedly call herself ‘the Queen B’.
Thus should it come as a surprise that our own children now call themselves by such names, thinking it is cool?
Most people in their 40s and 30s, going down to the teenagers know what I am talking about.
You most probably have a friend or cousin that calls herself by this term.
No, it is not ‘cool’.
It is the name for a female dog and we all know ‘kuita kwembwa’.
What is even more disturbing is how Western media has always tried to associate this type of trash talk with black people.
And for a while, I actually believed that this is who we are, that this is how black people talk (of course I had been influenced by negative television and film to think like that) but that was until I went to the UK and found out that even the Britons were just as bad as I would meet and interact with them in the various warehouses I worked in while there.
Western media has intentionally pumped in millions of dollars to promote commercial rap stars that use this kind of language in a bid to downgrade us as a people when there are many more others that don’t talk in such a disrespectful manner.
The reason I found this article worth writing is simple: We are at the dawn of a new era in Zimbabwe, a revolutionary period in which we are tasked with defining who we are to the world through television.
With digitisation and the imminent opening up of 12 television channels, we will be required to create content that will run for approximately 90 000 hours per year.
That is something we cannot joke about.
It is a lot of content required, and as such, we will be tempted to become like the rest of the world and allow vulgar language on our television sets in order to meet our goals and targets.
And soon mentioning the name of God would be banned just like it is banned on the Mnet Movie channel.
We must not conform to the world.
The ZBC and those in the Censorship Board must not by any means bow down and conform to the rest of the world because by so doing, we will speed up our own demise and extinction of our culture.
Instead, let us look back into our history and fish out those stories that are yet to be told in film or television.
Most Zimbabweans know about Njelele, Chaminuka, the Mutapas, Mbuya Nehanda, King Lobengula and Mukwati, but not in detail.
It will not be long before this is all forgotten if we allow other cultures to take first preference over our own and on our own television sets.
That said, I will leave you with something to ponder over, something that almost sums up everything I have been saying over time in my articles.
It is a line by Samuel L. Jackson from the new movie Kong, Skull Island in which he says: “A camera is way more dangerous than a gun.”
It is entirely up to us how we orchestrate and direct our future.