Africa, 24/7 on U.S. cable TV

Los Angeles : If ever a place labored under a set of stereotypes, it is Africa.

Whether perceived as a place of barbarous political extremes or merely as a stunning setting

for tracking wildlife, the vast continent has long tended to be reduced by many Westerners to a list of clichés.

But with the debut this year of the Africa Channel on cable television in the United States , a group of entrepreneurs seasoned in the intricacies of African culture and history hope to change that.

“We're personally invested in really transforming the way people think about Africa ,” said Jacob Arback, a former vice president at DirecTV-International and a co-founder of the new venture, almost three years in the making. “This is a passion product.”

Arback and his colleagues say they have secured the rights to 1,200 hours of programs: soap operas, movies and reality, travel, music and variety shows that have already been broadcast on television in various African countries, primarily South Africa. Some shows, including a daily current-events program, “Africa Today,” will be produced specially for the 24-hour channel.

“When this channel goes on the air, Africa will no longer be known as the Dark Continent,” said another of the channel's founders, James Makawa, a Zimbabwean who worked for NBC News as a correspondent in New York and Chicago and in 2000 helped start up the African Broadcast Network, a pan-African network of television, stations with affiliates in 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

We're not saying there are not negative things,” said Makawa, whose family fled to the United States in 1977, during the Rhodesian war. Despite the predominant images of genocide, famine and disease in some African nations, he said, interest in Africa remains enormous.

“Historically, if there had not been interest in the place, the colonial powers would not have plundered it or built the empires that they did,” Makawa said. “Modern-day Africans say it's different now. They want to be heard and they want to participate in the global economy, but they can't participate if people don't know who they are.”

Makawa, Arback and the third Africa Channel founder, Richard Hammer, a former executive with Columbia Pictures Television, say they are close to striking agreements with cable systems in the United states to make space for their programs, and are aiming for a debut in July.

Their efforts have been helped by the efforts of Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who is now chairman of the channel's board, and by several of the 16 investors, who include two NBA players Dikembe Mutombo of the New York Knicks and Theo Ratliff of the Portland Trailblazers.

“What we get from Africa is only the bad news: Darfur , Rwanda ,” said Young, who spoke by phone from the Turks and Caicos Islands . “The cable news channels in the United States tell the same story over and over, but there are so many exciting things going on.”

Young visited Rwanda , where he said a new constitution dictates that a percentage of candidates who lose elections be seated anyway in Parliament, where 30 percent of the members are women. In Nigeria , he said, doctors practicing traditional medicine were “getting very interesting results in AIDS treatment.”

Such stories, he said, will “grab people's curiosity” on the Africa Channel, which he and his colleagues stressed would not be aimed solely at the African–American market but at the type of viewers who are already watching A & E and the History, Discovery, Travel and National Geographic channels.

Marketing and promotion will be limited by cost, Young said, “We're counting on the grapevine to popularize this channel,” he said.

The New York Times