First Look:
Watch Episodes of
‘Love Games’,
a Weekly TV Series
About Love & Relationships
Among Five Zambian Women
When watching local TV in Zambia it is rife with Mexican and Filipino (seriously) telenovas. There is the odd spattering of locally produced TV that doesn’t really resonate and bores you to death, on top of its bad sound and dodgy picture quality.
My love for all things TV made me ask, is this really the best we can do? Must we always turn to DStv for programming we can enjoy? Absolutely not!
I run a company with my siblings that wants to provide quality products that not only entertain but aid in social development. Enter Love Games. In Zambia we have a national HIV prevalence rate of 14%, while we do have a generalised epidemic, trends show that it’s in the more urban environments where HIV is concentrated, and rising among richer older men, and younger educated women.
When approached to do a drama series about how women find themselves at risk for HIV, and with a fairly decent budget to boot, we jumped at the opportunity. It was an opportunity to show Zambia, or Lusaka specifically, as the vibrant, upwardly mobile and diverse city it is, and we could showcase up and coming talent, through music and acting. But it was also an opportunity to talk about some hard truths and hold a mirror up to ourselves, especially as women, as to how we as individuals enable the spread of HIV.
Five women lead the cast of Love Games, each one of them with a story of their own that highlights different relationship profiles in Zambia, including a wife, single, in a relationship, engaged, and the most well known profile of the ‘bandit’.
But it wasn’t just about the leading men, it’s about the men in their lives too. And some of them are real douche bags! Borrowing from real life stories means people could relate to these people’s situations, they’re not just fictional characters, they are people we know, situations we’ve been in ourselves – they are our stories. Tapping into urban culture was also important – how can you do a story on women, relationships, sex, and HIV, without referencing a bandit? (A bandit is a slang term for a woman who’ll do anything to get ahead, she’s manipulative and cunning, she’s the good-time chick – but not a ‘hoe – at least that was as close to a definition I could get – unless you know a bandit in Zambia, it’s hard to explain her!)
The day Love Games premiered on TV we pushed social media hard. The aim was to reach the people who watch DStv, to get them to tune back to local TV to watch Love Games. The response was amazing. I’m pretty sure Love Games was trending in Zambia!
Even now as the show airs – on TV with a simultaneous stream online, the chatter on twitter is amazing – people citing lines, and scenarios that resonate – including the most popular ‘bandit talk’.
What is still to be seen is whether it makes viewers reflect on their own relationships and take less risks to reduce the spread of HIV. The premier episode brought on the question why we use condoms if in a committed relationship.