FOR A LONG TIME NOW, I’VE been meaning to write about the television set in my Kigali dwelling but postponed the task for reasons I can’t explain.
Yet there is, there always has been, I now realise, so much to write about, so much to learn from this, my 28-inch LG television set from Korea, bought in Kigali with hard-earned Rwanda francs.
To begin with, I had bought the thing in a moment of sheer parental weakness when my daughter Tami insisted on her right to watch movies during her school holiday visits.
That being the purpose, and my five-year-old angel’s not-too-gentle insistence that she’d rather not watch TV in Kinyarwanda, we had not bothered to buy an antenna.
So all we did was watch Pocahontas and Bambi and Mulan and A Bug’s Life and Antz all through the holidays.
Well OK, we may have run out of DVD movies and sent for reinforcements such as Lion King and Tarzan of the Apes and Princess Jasmine from our Nairobi library.
Oh, yes, we had to.
Not just because most DVDs we found in Kigali were of familiar movies but only in French, but also because the only movies we got in English were rather poor copies of camera copies of Hollywood blockbusters recorded on blank rewritable DVDs with titles scrawled on in red marker ink, and even those at prices the equivalent of up to four times those of the “original” pirated movies on Nairobi streets.
Just like with the T shirts and jeans in some Nyamirambo shops (which turned out to have come from Eastleigh), we had learned the hard way that DVD movies and anything we really wanted could be a lot more expensive because “they come from Nairobi.”
BUT LET’S STICK TO THE Television set, hereinafter also referred to as the thing, the offending box, or just “it.”
Whenever Tami went back to school in Nairobi, it would go dark and silent. It would just sit there, a useless box taking up valuable space, giving nothing in return.
After a while, I got my own movies and started putting the thing to use occasionally for personal entertainment. But alas, my threshold for movies not being what it used to be, I soon found myself scouring the seedier side of Kigali city in search of an antenna powerful enough to transmit Rwanda Television to the hillside on which I reside.
This called for one of those tough-looking aerials with a booster that says you can receive a signal no matter where you are, no matter which hill stands between you and the transmitting station.
You can guarantee its authenticity by the serious-looking Chinese markings on the carton. And the way its power cable tends to heat up when left on for too long.
But alas, the picture wouldn’t come on no matter which way I turned said antenna.
Sound, I could get, but no picture!
AND THE SOUND I COULD get only went to confirm my daughter’s suspicion that all you could get from the box was in the two languages I can barely compose a sentence in on pain of death: Kinyarwanda and French.
No matter, my technically minded friend tinkered with the aerial and voila! We achieved video — and a very clear picture at that!
But this, unfortunately, was at the expense of the quality of sound, which now acquired a persistent background white noise of the irksome variety that completely refused to go away.
But the persistent white noise and the language were not even the main problem for me.
Having come from a country that has long enjoyed the dubious distinction of having more TV and radio stations than any other in East Africa, the singularity of Rwanda Television, its singularly unimaginative programming and almost total lack of graphic integrity were almost too much to bear.
Even more confounding was the station’s insistence on having many lengthy textual announcements all appropriately titled “Itangazo”, all scrolling down the screen of the box for what seems like hours on end right after the news (Have these guys never heard of flash cards?)
Even worse, the box would at times drive me up the wall with endless (sometimes live) raw footage of conferences and seminars and events and, the worst I ever experienced, over 30 minutes of a bunch of very unfit, very lethargic people in a fitness class aired one evening at dinner time.
I was going to write to one of the country’s top information officials about all this but I was reliably informed he had been arrested and was being held at a police station.
“Have they,” I asked the reliable informer, “grilled him about the Silent Text Ads yet?”
“What? Probably doesn’t even know what went wrong,” explains the reliable source as patiently as only a reliable source can.
“How about the gym classes,” I persisted rather uncharitably, hitting the mute button and eliminating the useless noise I had been trying to out-shout throughout the conversation.
“He probably doesn’t know what went wrong,” he droned on, ignoring my concerns completely, “When you are the boss, anything that goes wrong is your fault.” Tru dat.
As I ended the conversation and hoped we had communicated, I noticed how calm I had become.
Now that the sound on the box was off, the pictures jumped harmlessly up and down and across the screen, providing some sort of kaleidoscopic lighting around my dwelling, and a warm atmosphere that can usually only be achieved through the lighting of a good fire or vigorous rubbing of the hands.
With the sound off, even the aforementioned offensive Itangazos seemed perfectly harmless on my Korean made LG television with a paranoid Chinese antenna.
