I thoroughly enjoy LinkedIn. It functions as my CRM, I can keep track on who’s following me and I can connect to interesting people with whom I can make more meaningful connections at a later stage. I also use LinkedIn to show my profile to the world of business. But, lately something about LinkedIn has been nagging me.

The three-month field research in Southern Africa that my girlfriend and I executed has sadly passed. After a gruelling five-hour traffic jam (during which a three lane highway was temporarily transformed into six lanes) had caused us to miss our plane, we managed to catch our connecting flight to Europe in the nick of time.

After many a blog on media in Southern Africa, I reckoned it was time for a piece on that mother of entertainment: Hollywood. Hollywood is known for its three M’s: Movies, Moviestars and Money. But behind that glitter there is a much more powerful force: entrepreneurship. If it wasn’t for the unfailing entrepreneurship of Hollywood, I bet you: that Hollywood sign in those Hollywood Hills would have crumbled many a year ago.

Teaching Africans in rural communities with little experience in video how to work with this equipment in four days seems impossible: yet the organisation Self Help Africa is doing exactly that and in a promising way. We met Keelin and Tara, two Irish undergraduates working for Self Help Africa (SHA) in a concrete, congested and polluted city called Lusaka. In the rural communities surrounding this Zambian capital they are training locals how to work with a small digital video camera. But they are not just explaining what one can also find in a technical manual. Lighting, sound, framework, interview techniques,  storyboards, editing and other techniques related to making short films are also important topics. The results are short films and interviews by the local community itself that can be used to report to funders. In four days.

As a special bread roll, as a dish, as chewing gum, on backpacks, flags and t-shirts: U.S. president Obama is well represented and endorsed in Malawi. But why is America’s foremost citizen so popular in a country that -apart from aid- has so little to do with the States?

Can you imagine having to bury your loved one, creating a program in which his or her life is remembered in a respectful manner and having an entrepreneur talk about life insurance to the gathered grievers? This would be unheard of in the Netherlands. Yet, in Malawi it is common practise. In Malawi commercial messages and eulogies are a match.‬

In the Netherlands television commercials change every month or so, posters on bus stops are changed on a weekly basis and social media campaigns adapt their messages in real time to current headlines. Lifespan of commercials is short and, if anything, abundant. Not so in Malawi. One of the most striking forms of Malawian marketing is through stone and masonry billboards that have their messages painted on. Their lifespan is somewhat longer than most Dutch advertising forms: it will last until the paint fades. 

A bloody diaper of a baby. This gruesome photograph is well known throughout South Africa, as it is depicted in hospitals, police stations and other public buildings throughout its provinces. Originally targetting the belief that sex with an infant would cure HIV/Aids, the poster later was meant to open the general public’s eye concerning child abuse. This is not the only poster that will make your stomach make a 360. Here in Malawi posters that adress crime issues are graphic as well. On one poster we see a woman burning her child’s hand and on the other we see a man who has just defiled a small girl. Looking at these posters from my Dutch point of view, I cannot help but think that posters like that will never be hung up in the Netherlands. I have been trying to find out why I feel this way. I think there are a couple of reasons.