Global Television Formats in Africa: Localizing Idol

During the last decade, popular television formats have been replicated across the globe for local or regional consumption as program imports, adaptations, clones or imitations, raising questions on the possible ramifications of such cultural inflows. For Africa the international program flow and the influence of Western media content has been a contentious issue for decades, underlying the cultural imperialism thesis of the 1970s and 1980s, and the centre– periphery paradigms which conceptualized the series of dependency relationships. In African media research concepts like cultural colonialism, media imperialism, neocolonialism, Americanization, homogenization, have been used to denote the unequal flow and influence of Western media products in Africa. Within the framework of media globalization some scholars have even propounded a scenario of the emergency of a global culture mediated by the dominant Western media. The central issues in African media discussions have mainly revolved around the flow of finished media programs and their perceived detriment to local cultures and identities. What is missing in the African research literature is the attention to television formats, a phenomenon described by Keane et al. (2002) as a vehicle for localization, since what is imported is not the content itself, but a recipe for creating a local version. Global reality format shows thus create a new picture.