R E - R E A D E R - Biro Beograd

The foundation of SLUM-TV
SLUM-TV wants to documents the lives of
the people in the slum and to re-evaluate
these lives through the camera. A camera
always attracts attention. Our partners
from the slum film and document the life
in Mathare. The small movies are then
shown in public places in Mathare, like a
newsreel. In Mathare, there exist a variety
of self-established cinemas. Mostly American
and African films and European football
is shown there. Analogous to weekly
news-shows in the early age of television
our partners want to show their contributions
in these cinemas, and maybe to
charge a small entree fee in order to finance
videotapes and other material. Copies
of the videos are sent to Vienna. We will
also try to distribute them under “Creative
Commons” licenses. That means non-profit
orientated community TV’s could use material
for free, but has to name authors. All
other users would have to pay. From the
proceeds the manufacturers in the slums
benefit again.
Technical infrastructure + Workshop
Our next goal is to purchase two videocameras,
a computer and a video-projector,
and to donate the technical infrastructure
to our partners (Fred Otieno, Julius
Mwelu und Sam Hopkins). A two-weeksworkshop
shall follow in order to teach the
editing and cutting of digital video.
Digital archive and European partners
The results of the Workshops will be presented
in Vienna, and also streamed in
the internet. From April 2007 on we will
develop a digital video-data base which
will be organised as a network of local
contributors; i.e. users from Mathare can
upload their videofiles, and organise their
own archive to control and build it. The
transfer of the video-documents will be
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handled through normal snail mail. As these
goals are still a perspective for the future
this process might take a few years to work
out.
Our local partners and their local context
In Mathare Julius Mwelu and Fred Otieno
are active in the MYSA Organisation (Mathare
Youth Sport Association). MYSA is an
outstanding organisation in Mathare that
has been active for more than 20 years. Its
major task is to organise and offer a multiplicity
of activities. The most successful
project is football, with approx. 1200 soccer
teams a quarter of which are woman teams.
With soccer the whole MYSA Project started,
and meanwhile many players managed to
be nominated and to play for the Kenyan
National Soccer Team. Besides the fact that
young people get an opportunity for sports
and many people from Mathare can make
a living out of the professionally organised
Soccer Team some players were even sold
to the French Premiere League lately; retired
players work as coaches and are responsible
for the youth’s teams. There are many other
positive side effects as sports also serves
as one of the best Aids preventions. And
the successful participation of the women’s
soccer team at the World Championship
in Norway where they ranked third raised
their prestige within Mathare. It made the
young women prouder and as they are well
trained, men’s behaviour towards them
changed significantly. This year a team from
the MYSA-project won the Street-Soccer-
WM in Berlin. Since a few years the agenda
of the MYSA office has been extended to
include also art, dance, theatre and music
sections. Similar projects are going to be set
up in Botswana, Tanzania and other African
countries which makes it a very appropriate
partner for the SLUM-TV project.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Attribution 2.5