Configuration of Kenya’s Children’s Television Drama
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Date
2014
Authors
Mugubi, J.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
American Research Institute for Policy Development
Abstract
Children’s film is an artistic genre in its own right with its distinctive character and
utility in the society. Machachari is a local television drama that is centred on children.
This episodic film, while revolving around slum children and their hustles and survival
jaunts in the hard-edged lives of their surroundings, juxtaposes the ghetto children with
their well-to-do friends. Just one year since this sitcom was first aired on a Kenyan
Television station, Machachari recently won three awards: it was voted “Kenya’s
Teenagers’ TV drama Soap of choice”. The TV drama also won “New Show Award” and
one of the characters won the “Male Actor Award”. In the Kalasha awards held in
September 2011, the equivalent of a Kenyan Oscar, one of the child characters, Baha,
won the best actor award. In cognizance of the popularity of this sitcom and in
appreciation of its palpable foregrounding of child characters, this study interrogates
this very popular sitcom with a view to establishing whether the presentation of the child
character with regard to behaviour patterns and theme conforms to true childhood as
affirmed by three psychological theorists: cognitively, as prescribed by Jean Piaget;
emotionally as outlined by Erik Erikson and lastly, whether the child characters’ conduct
is the product of interactive influences, both congenital and experiential as delineated by
Robert Sears. Discourse analysis is also employed to determine the communicative
import of the utterances of the child characters while appraising their plausibility in
illuminating particularities of children’s mental processes and personalities within their
milieu.
Description
DOI: 10.15640/ijmpa
Keywords
Citation
International Journal of Music and Performing Arts Vol. 2, No. 1; 2014