The Manyority Report: A Glaring Sign of Lesotho’s Content Creation Problem

“Is this thing on?” I ask for the second time now, tapping a finger against the dead head of the microphone in the small Maseru East school hall where I am invited to talk to Grade Sevens about the subject of ‘Creativity’. The mic obviously doesn’t work, like all things in Lesotho, either they don’t work or work long enough just to default to their natural state of incompetency. At this point our mediocrity should be our badges of patriotism. The more we lean into our deficiencies, perhaps the more they will gain an endearing quality, like a drunk uncle at the function who can barely tie his shoelaces.  He gives us a strange sense of joy because he is our measuring stick; at least, even at our worst, we are not like him.

I watch one of the teachers duck away to fix the technical problem as if he’s ducking away from the weight of embarrassment. For a long while, I stand in silence in front of the sweaty-faced kids in that hall with the peeling green paint. Because at this point when talking about creativity in Lesotho, what else is there to say? To even speak about this subject would be like being forced to wash yourself in a dirty river, you emerge with the illusion of cleanliness but can never be truly clean. Because as it stands, there is no such thing as creativity in Lesotho. Me standing on a stage in front of the future leaders of this country to talk about its existence is more dishonest than believing people’s husbands and boyfriends in Maseru are straight. As an awkward silence descends upon that hall, I try to quell my sudden nervousness by having a drink of water from the bottle I was given before my talk.

In better circumstances this action would be merely to quench my lenyora, and not the type of mindless fiddling adults do in front of children as they act like they know what they are doing when they are just as confused as them.

It is Lesotho’s latest attempt to provide anything other than the war on our intelligence waged by LTV daily on our screens—The Manyority Report—that is on mind as that water runs down my throat; the association between water, manyora, and creativity inevitably being an idea my mind grasps at the ready. The interconnectedness of water, and its absence, brings to mind images of cycles, life cycles, cultural cycles. We are supposedly made of 60 percent water. Water makes 71 percent of our planet’s surface, it gives life, and in some instances takes it. Its abundance, infuriatingly so, exists in tandem with drought; drought in our land, drought in our creativity. Thirsty though we are, the manyora behind The Manyority Report, though astutely identifying the need for counter-cultural nourishment, intellectually, creatively, politically, ironically in a land famous for its water, make one shirk from even being called a lenyora just because of how unsexy in sounds, and desperate. I am surprised the irony eludes our manyoras of note. 

The Manyority Report; a satirical news platform broadcast on Leseli Hub TV, unfortunately, is one such confused adult that I mentioned earlier. Left alone to entertain a child that is not his, he takes all sorts of ramshackle toys he can find, while nervously looking around for the child’s parent to come back and save him from the sudden role of jester that he is forced to assume. So, he presses the toy’s squeaky function literally every second by inserting laughing tracks, because he knows that the toddler’s laughter could just as easily, and quickly, turn into tears.  He begs for laughter at every second because he doesn’t trust his own material to provide breathing space for it, doesn’t trust his own comedic timing for the matter.  He doesn’t regard the toddler as a human being with their own consciousness and system of thought, treats them as a sub-adult who needs to be told when to laugh through stuffing each joke with these laughing tracks that blare at us constantly from our screens before either one of the manyora can even finish their joke. But perhaps it’s because our manyora are just that thirsty for laughter.

When American sound engineer Charles Douglass pioneered ‘canned laughter’ in the 1950s, it drew welcome criticism for its reliance on ‘artificial laughter’ in order to bolster the humour of the jokes and gags on television. Even in their 50s racism, white people had enough of a moral compass to be concerned about the morally questionable act of creating ‘artificial laughter’ in comedy.  Though we are years and continents away from that time, this is a concern that should still persist in The Manyority Report’s green screen halls. When Charles Douglass died, his son had this to say about the divisive nature of his father’s invention,

‘On some of the shows it was abused. They wanted to keep adding more and more laughs, and it would go overboard. They thought it was going to be funnier, and it wasn’t. A lot of producers would have the laughter almost louder than the dialogue, and that ruins it’.

Which is a thought that plagues my mind as I brave having to interrupt my talk every five minutes for trips to the bathroom because of the volume of water I am guzzling down. If the show has to stuff so much canned laughter in its runtime, is it really funny? Perhaps more sinister is what I call the TikTok-ization of humour; where comedy video clips are edited alongside preexisting viral TikTok clips in order to overcompensate for the lack of punchlines. This is the worst kind of intertextuality, akin to that dangerous practice of men putting two condoms on to get double the protection, unaware that the increase in friction only increases the chances of the condom tearing. And The Manyority Report is dangerously close to catching something nasty. But at least modern medicine has by now come up with more convenient ways of guarding against STIs. Its next research should be to try to figure out why Lesotho’s creative sector is not….creative.

And that’s why, unlike the many people who endeavour in creative careers in this country, I decide to be honest, both to myself and towards the kids in that hall. Once the teacher comes back, and the mic is buzzing lightly again, I decide to change the topic of my talk to water.  It’s more synonymous with Lesotho than creativity is after all.

‘How many of you like water?’ I ask the students.

No hands, only vacant faces.

‘How many of you like water only because you are forced to drink water?’

Though I see no hands again, this time, I see a couple of eyes look away from me at the fading green walls, as my question genuinely seems be something they grapple with.

‘Do you think you would like water better if you had a variety of flavours of water?’ I challenge, ‘What if water is good only because we have no other varieties of water….huh, manyora?’

Suddenly, the teacher tugs at my arm and brings my ear close to his mouth, ‘They haven’t had any water for three days as a result of WASCO’s shortage in the Maseru East area, it’s best not to touch on the subject of water’.

Right. Third-world country. How could one forget?

 I quickly switch gears.

‘How many of you want to be content creators when you graduate?’ I say.

Although a heady mixture of morbid excitement and distaste suddenly rises up in me now that the subject is content creation, which I view as a form of digital prostitution----capitalist hunger knows no end in commodifying our lives till even the act of taking a hike is a performance for views---their faces are still vacant. That’s when the teacher tugs at my arm again, ‘It’s best to stick to the subject of your talk. We don’t speak about such things here.’

‘You don’t speak about content creation?’

‘What is content creation?’ he says, ‘Please, sir, stick to your talk. You just came here to show the pupils how to do some creative things.’

And therein lies the problem. I had to leave these kids with something, but God forbid I leave them with a dishonest talk, or at least, a dishonest report of the Lesotho they are going to meet once they emerge from the suspended state that is high school. As a responsible citizen, it is my duty to meet The Manyority Report insofar as they have asked to be met at. Content to me is a dirty word, no different from a fast-food mercantile attempt to ‘package’ art and sell it as a product. Including TikTok videos to overcompensate for the lack of substantial humour is to be asked to be viewed through a content creator lens. And the saddest thing about the state that these pupils find themselves in, is that we are positing ‘content creation’ as a way of out of unemployment without a true understanding of what that would mean in a specifically Lesotho milieu.

We are not far from organising a poorly attended protest led by rich kids in Ha-Thetsane with the slogans, ‘Lesotho must be monetized!’, without a true grappling with the reality of which Lesotho we are talking about. What does content creation mean for the average Mosotho, or even the call to monetize it? As much as our government does seem to be hearing this call for alternative routes out of the crisis of unemployment, it is hard to miss the wry, bemused tone in which they engage in this matter with; like they are taking a wet CheeseCurl from a child and forced to eat it only to appease them because they are watching, before spitting  it out in a serviette  later while they allocate funds to the ‘real’ entrepreneurs; the farmers and the coders.

Now, don’t get me wrong, all Lesotho politicians, including everyone in the ruling party, are but harlots who will lie in any bed that could pacify the masses through any PR and Brand Network tendered Youth Conference or Youth Dialogue to give the illusion of governance. But one can’t fault them for being unaware of the realities of Lesotho. We live in a country consisting of a majority rural population, and agriculture is the backbone of our economy. The urban Mosotho’s attempts to monetize content creation, or to import concepts from the West like a satirical news show, needs serious re-organising. And perhaps a generous reading of The Manyority Report would attempt to diagnose this as part of the reason why it feels so bland.

Apart from the fact that we have seen this format before in shows like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, and on the African continent, Late Nite News with Loyisa Gola, the problem with the show is that it parodies a parody. Parodies work best when they are parodying serious, and substantial existing models or institutions. A satirical news show in Lesotho finds itself in a comedic crisis; because no such serious models exist, Lesotho itself is a parody. How many times have you laughed when turning on the local news? So I guess one couldn’t blame the manyoras of the show for being so thirsty that they reach into the past….into the world of canned laughter and retro-aesthetics. With nowhere to go, the logical thing to do would be to reach into the past. They are disappointingly unaware, or perhaps, so thirsty that they don’t even care, that canned laughter has become passé. It is frankly concerning that it is used here without even a hint of irony.

A while ago I couldn’t resist attending Ghanaian content creator Wodemaya’s ‘Masterclass’ for content creators at ‘Manthabiseng Convention Centre. There, he spoke to some one thousand aspiring content creators about not only his success but the reason behind his insatiable fetish for Lesotho. He said that the reason he loves Lesotho so much was because it was unique and special, and that content creators should take advantage of this when making their content.

Wodemaya’s disturbing fetish for Lesotho (see his fixation with the ‘Titty Mountain’, Thabana-Li-Mmele for more disturbing examples of how this fetish manifests itself), brings to mind those men who develop a fetish for people with Dwarfism, or any other ism that seems to activate men’s horniness. I was fascinated to learn recently how many men’s bucket list moment is to sleep with a girl living with albinism, or to quote the exuberant young gentlemen who posted a disembodied Ken doll with dishevelled hair on social media to signal that he just had sex, accompanied it with the caption; ‘I finally cracked an albino!’ This invited alarmingly numerous comments from other men chiming in;

‘You are living the life of my dreams!’

‘You are clearly God’s favourite!’

‘Teach me your ways, Sensei!’

…among many other verbal ejaculations.

But I think Wodemaya was on to something.

One of the content creators at ‘Manthabiseng Convention Centre, in the Q and A session begged to differ with his advice.

‘As a Mosotho, I do natural hair content’ she said, ‘And for me, that’s what’s unique to me.’

Wodemaya didn’t seem convinced. He emphasised again that content creators should take advantage of Lesotho’s uniqueness. In a perturbing way, I slightly understand why one would find it necessary to publicise on social media after sleeping with their first albino. The Albino Cracker, Wodemaya; people like that probably understand that sometimes the eating is so one-of-a-kind that it’s impossible not to share news of the experience with the world. Maybe there is wisdom in listening to them when they tell us to try some of it for ourselves. After all, what does it say about the creative sector that a Ghanaian content creator profits so handsomely from content centred on Lesotho’s uniqueness?

And I am not saying the good folks behind The Manyority Report should suddenly shoot an episode in the highlands and suddenly trade in their cheap suits for blankets and cast themselves as shepherds who hear news from a solar powered radio and present the news in a satirical way (you see where I’m going with this?) I am just wondering out loud; why after watching The Manyority Report, am I still left thirsty?

When I finish the talk (I don’t even remember the nonsense I spewed) I don’t finish the water in my bottle as I make my way outside. I send my half-hearted goodbyes to the school faculty and thank the principal for having me, but on the way to my yellow Honda Fit, I hear the pitter-patter of probably a hundred feet. I turn back. In that water-less Maseru East sun, I see a sea of students, looking back at me. Had my talk been that inspirational? But no…I quickly realise that their eyes are trained on my water bottle instead, the remaining liquid swirling weakly at the bottom, refracting the light. They want a sip of my water. There is no way of telling them that after watching The Manyority Report, I was left just as thirsty as them, and need to finish the water for myself in the hope to finally quench my thirst. Take this battle to WASCO, kids!