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Abstract

The Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games was broadcast for the first time on free to air (FTA) television across 49 territories in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article charts the story of this historic development and marks the first study to explore Paralympic broadcast production beyond the cultural specificities of Global North/Western-centric media practices, infrastructure availability and disability discourses. Drawing on an integrated qualitative dataset, including interviews with key individuals from the International Paralympic Committee, TV Media Sport (the broadcast partner) and one national Sub-Saharan broadcaster (Malawi Broadcasting Corporation), this article documents the challenges, logic and politics behind the Sub-Saharan African Paralympic broadcast. In so doing, we consider the extent to which these articulated with epistemic differences, underlying neocolonial sentiments and (mis-)understandings of the geopolitical contours and disability politics of the Sub-Saharan African region. We consider the important role national Paralympic broadcasters may play in the sustainable development of the broadcasts across this region, particularly in relation to its pedagogical value for harnessing progressive localised disability politics, disability activism, and social justice.

Keywords

Paralympics Sport Media Broadcasting Qualitative Sub-Saharan Africa Production Disability

Introduction

Research on Paralympic broadcast production is relatively scarce and has focused exclusively on the United Kingdom’s (UK) Paralympic broadcaster – Channel 4 (see Pullen et al., 2019; Jackson-Brown, 2020). Although these studies have provided important scholarly insights around the rationale for Paralympic production, editorial practices, and the various political, technological and economic conditions that impinge on the production process, they are predicated on a single UK broadcaster and the cultural specificities and history of Paralympic broadcast as it articulates with Global North/Western-centric media practices, infrastructure availability and disability discourses.

In 2021, the Tokyo Paralympic Games was broadcast for the first time on free to air (FTA) television across 49 territories in Sub-Saharan Africa. This historic moment in the global development of Paralympic broadcasting provides for an important scholarly intervention that can extend understandings of Paralympic production outside of the UK/Global North context. Drawing on an integrated dataset, including interviews with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) (that led on the negotiation of Paralympic broadcast rights), TV Media Sport (TVMS) (broadcast partner contracted for content production and distribution) and one national Sub-Saharan broadcaster (Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)), this article charts the story of the Sub-Saharan African Paralympic broadcast from its development through to production and broadcast. In so doing, we begin to highlight some of the challenges the IPC and TVMS faced in the development and distribution of the broadcast package and the extent to which these articulated with epistemic differences, underlying neocolonial sentiments and (mis-)understandings of the geopolitical contours and disability politics of the Sub-Saharan African region. We document the efforts of one national broadcaster – Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) – to rework the Paralympic package in ways that captured the national imagination and positioned understandings of disability and Paralympic sport at the intersection of the local and global; cultural and political; personal and public. To that end, we consider the important role national Paralympic broadcasters may play in the sustainable development of the broadcasts across this region, particularly in relation to its pedagogical value for harnessing progressive localised disability politics, disability activism and social justice.

Paralympic media and broadcast

In the last decade, the Paralympic Games has attracted a growing global audience share, lucrative partnerships with global brands, and increasing competition in broadcast rights deals (International Paralympic Committee [IPC], 2020; Legg, 2020). With its commercial evolution, investments have been made in the quality and quantity of Paralympic coverage across free to air (FTA) TV, digital outputs, and print news/journalism (Kolotouchkina et al., 2021; Legg, 2020; see also Statista, 2022). There now exists a burgeoning field of scholarship that has paid close attention to aspects of Paralympic mediation (see Noske-Turner et al., 2022; Kolotouchkina et al., 2021; McGillivray et al., 2021; Santos et al., 2021, 2022; Silva and Howe, 2012) particularly in critique of Paralympic media content (Kolotouchkina et al., 2021; McGillivray et al., 2021; Meléndez-Labrador, 2022), marketing and promotional material (Silva and Howe, 2012) and journalistic production (Santos et al., 2021).

Yet despite these important advances, investment in free to air (FTA) broadcast coverage of the Paralympic Games has largely been confined to high to middle income countries and regions in the global North¹ (e.g. UK, Europe, Cananda, Australia) (albeit not exclusively) (Noske-Turner et al., 2022). The Tokyo 2020 Paralympics marked the first Games in which several new FTA broadcast partnerships were established across regions in the Global South – notably Asia, South and Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa (IPC, 2021). This marked a historic moment in Paralympic broadcast history. It facilitated the expansion of Paralympic broadcast across new media markets and, aligning with the International Paralympic Committee’s (IPC) social mission of using Paralympic sport to promote disability equality and inclusion, reached new audiences in areas of the world with some of the highest rates of disability and disability related stigma (Noske-Turner et al., 2022; Novak, 2014).

The Sub-Saharan African broadcast partnership is of particular interest to this article. To elucidate here, in the lead up to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, the IPC (responsible for negotiating Paralympic media rights) contracted TV Media Sport (TVMS) – a media company based in France with experience of sport broadcast production and distribution across the African continent – as the broadcast partner to produce, edit and distribute a daily Paralympic highlights package (approximately 50 minutes in duration) to 49 FTA national Sub-Saharan African broadcasters during the Tokyo Games (from 24th August to 5th September 2021).

The Sub-Saharan African broadcast partnership provides a unique opportunity to build on knowledge on Paralympic production, extending beyond practices of a single UK broadcaster – Channel 4 (see Pullen et al., 2019; Jackson-Brown, 2020). Indeed, whilst this embryonic body of work has provided important scholarly insights into the industry leaders in Paralympic broadcasting), research on Paralympic broadcast production continues to be limited to the cultural relevance of the UK broadcasting/media environment as it articulates with Western-centric disability (mediated) discourse and representational histories (see e.g. Pullen et al., 2019). As such, there is considerable scholarly value in exploring Paralympic production from a different cultural perspective – one centred on/in a region of the Global South with a distinct media/broadcast ecology, nascent history of Paralympic sport coverage, and cultural (disability) sporting discourses.

Sport broadcast and disability media in Sub-Saharan Africa

Although the Paralympic Games has been absent from Sub-Saharan African FTA broadcast schedules, coverage of major international sporting events such as the Olympics and World Cup football is commonplace (see Akindes, 2014, 2018; Smith, 2016). Across this region, media liberalisation alongside social and political democratization and advances in television technology (e.g. satellite broadcast) have provided the opening for transnational television broadcast and new global media flows of international sporting events (Chalaby, 2005; Rowe, 2011). Indeed, transnational commercial broadcasters such as Supersport, TV5, Canal + Horizons and TV Media Sport (TVMS) now dominate the sport broadcasting market providing several broadcast feeds of sport content to Anglophone (English-speaking), Francophone (French speaking) and Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) African countries across the continent (Akindes, 2014, 2018).

The local FTA broadcast ecology however is somewhat more fragmented and limited to peri-urban geographical areas (Chalaby, 2005). Despite liberalisation and the pluralisation of media systems across the region, several African states retained direct control of FTA public broadcasters leaving them largely under resourced, highly regulated and aligned with incumbent ruling governments (Bourgault, 1995; Cagé, 2015; Fiedler and Frère, 2016; Kalyango, 2021; Kupe, 2013). For the most part, neither FTA public broadcasters nor local commercial broadcasters can compete with the commercial power, resource and infrastructure of the transnationals and tend to be limited to coverage of local sport events/leagues (Akindes, 2014, 2018).

Given this context, scholars have often described the organisation of television sport broadcasting in Sub-Saharan Africa as sutured by flows of ‘global neo-cultural and economic imperialism’ (Rowe, 2011: 90) or what Akindas (2018), building on McPhail (2010), has posited as ‘electronic colonisation’. Indeed, with Akindas (2018), transnational sport broadcasters – many of which are operated by European media networks – have benefitted from the globalization of major sporting events, broadcast rights models (flowing in/from the Global North) and the cultural and economic vestiges of colonial imperialism which have enabled subsequent technological and financial control of major sport event coverage across the region (Chiweshe, 2019; Onwumechili and Oloruntola, 2014). According to Akindas (2018), the dominance of the transnationals in the sport media market has done little to benefit the cultural and economic independence of the local broadcast ecology and their power to leverage sport coverage – as a formative space of public pedagogy, development agendas, and (decolonial) national imaginings (Falcous, 2007; Scherer and Rowe, 2013) – in support of collective local culture (Akindas, 2018). As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that this form of ‘electronic colonisation’ has been linked to processes of global coloniality – or the neocolonial² – somewhat nourishing the unequal economic, material and ideological-cultural relations that structure forms of (asymmetrical) domination (see also Moyo, 2020; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2014).

This contextual backdrop has implications for the politics of production, not least in terms of what Paralympic content/narratives were foreground, by whom, and via what cultural-epistemological resources. This is particularly pertinent when considering the nascent history of Paralympic sport coverage and wider disability media content across this region coupled with the cultural specificities of disability representation. Indeed, with respect to the latter, there are important nuances in the way disability is constructed and represented in Sub-Saharan Africa when compared with, for example, Northern Europe – differences propagated by colonial histories and attendant modalities of ableism, geopolitical factors, and local cultural imaginaries (Grech and Soldatic, 2015). Disability scholarship from the region has highlighted how the representations of disability in formal media across Sub-Saharan Africa is often articulated through discourses of dependence; public shame; witchcraft or misfortune that stem from traditional religious and cultural beliefs and colonial and missionary practices of charity and medical segregation (see e.g. Chataika, 2013; Zoanni, 2022). As such, media constructions of disability in Sub-Saharan Africa are propagated by a culturally specific assemblage comparably different to, for instance, the UK context where scholars have pointed to the ubiquity of inspirational narratives of disability overcoming (often referred to as the supercrip) (see Grue, 2021; McGillivray et al., 2021; Silva and Howe, 2012). This is important in the context of the Paralympic broadcast and wider production politics, for, as Falcous (2007: 375) reminds us, mediated sport ‘provides those embodied, highly visible—frequently via mediation—symbolic oppositions that can be potent within identity politics, particularly as they relate to the decolonizing nation’. In this sense, and borrowing from Falcous (2007), Paralympic coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to construct new ‘enactments of national (disability) imaginings—postcolonial and otherwise’ with implications for disability pedagogies across the region.

Methodology

In this article we draw on an integrated qualitative dataset that brings together interviews with key stakeholders involved in the development, production and distribution of the Sub-Saharan African Paralympic broadcast. This includes interviews with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Broadcasting and Commercial Partnership team; TV Media Sport (TVMS) (contracted by IPC to lead on content production and distribution) and one national Sub-Saharan broadcaster (Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) – one of the 49 national African broadcasters contracted by TVMS to broadcast the Paralympic package).

The number of interviewees across the three organisations was relatively small (n = 10) yet purposeful and reflective of the selective group working on the ‘Tokyo Project’ (as it came to be known) across all three organisations. These interviews form the backbone of the analysis herein. However, additional sources of data gathered as part of the larger research project were of import (including broadcast reports, content analysis of the Sub-Saharan African Paralympic broadcasts, and ethnographic field work in Malawi during the broadcasting of the Paralympics). The diversity of data sources is useful when interviewing a select group of individuals in unique positions within formal organisations where small sample sizes (due to access) and the privileging of powerful voices (and thus particular vantage points) has been identified as a methodological challenge (see Harvey, 2011; Mikecz, 2012). It also enabled a degree of data resource triangulation during analysis (see Natow, 2020).

The interviews were conducted by the authors between April - September 2022 with various follow up discussions as data analysis progressed (including with additional data sources). The interview questions were tailored depending on the various organisational roles the interviewees held but broadly focused on the logics, cultural practices, processes, and decision making (including challenges and assumptions) across moments of cultural production. To adhere to research ethics, all names and job titles have been removed and/or pseudonymised. Interview data was analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis approach, outlined by Braun and Clarke (2019). Themes – or rather the ‘creative and interpretive stories about the data produced at the intersection of the researcher’s theoretical assumptions, their analytic resources and skill, and the data themselves’ (Braun and Clarke, 2019: 594) – were informed by our critical cultural approach, theoretical literatures, data sources and ongoing contextual dialogue with interviewees throughout the research process. Drawing on our reflexive engagement with the data, in the following sections we have attempted to reconstruct the story of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic broadcast from its inception through to broadcast.

From North to South: Expanding the Paralympic broadcast market

The IPC’s broadcasting and commercial partnership team have been an important driving force in the global development of Paralympic broadcast coverage. Since 2012, the IPC have adopted a proactive approach in their broadcast rights strategy which has facilitated the sustainable growth of the ‘Paralympic product’ across new – predominantly Global North – territories. As described by one senior member of the IPC broadcasting team:

Before 2012 the local organising committees [host city organising committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games] had the responsibility to produce the international broadcasters and the right to sell the broadcasting rights. We considered this not very beneficial because it was not possible to take a more long-term view on certain rights, so if someone was interested in the summer and winter games as a bundle, that was not possible, and over cycles, so for example two summer games and two winter games. On the other hand, we didn’t want to take the responsibility to be financially responsible for the production. . . we created a new scheme where we became an agent for the organising committee to sell the rights and with that taking more of a long-term view.

In their position as ‘agent’, the IPC had carved out a unique organisational space in the media rights market. Acting as an agent, the IPC were able to exert greater oversight and autonomy over broadcasting contracts thereby enabling a more sustainable approach to broadcast rights deals and commercial investment in the Paralympic product. This strategy has, in part, facilitated the growth and development of Paralympic programming across some regions – for instance, in the context of the UK broadcaster and industry leader, Channel 4 – and notably by broadcasters with a strong Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) remit (see Jackson-Brown, 2020).

Yet whilst this strategy gave the IPC greater agency in targeting new markets and broadcasters, competition (and subsequent investment) remained largely confined to areas of the Global North. Indeed, as one IPC interviewee explained:

We need to look at markets in clusters. . . Europe is a good example, for the next cycle, because we did a tender process in which Eurovision and Infront were bidding against each other, which was sign of healthy competition, and so this is where we want to get to push the boundaries in terms of coverage and from a commercial perspective.

Indeed, although the IPC had made progress across some South American markets (e.g. Brazil) following the 2016 Paralympic Games (see Meléndez-Labrador, 2022; Santos et al., 2022), somewhat benefiting from Rio de Janeiro as the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games host city, there was little interest in media coverage of the Paralympic Games across Sub-Saharan Africa:

We had zero interest coming from African broadcasters. There were conversations but in the end nothing. So, there was this massive block where audiences had no access, but you had a growing number of Para athletes coming from the region (IPC)

Whilst entry into the Sub-Saharan African market was thus deemed important to grow the audience share and cover the increasing number of African Paralympic athletes competing at the Games, there was also a recognition of the role Paralympic coverage could play across this region in tackling the stigma toward disability. As one IPC representative claimed: If you take the IPC moto seriously, to use para sport to create a more inclusive society, then benefits in that area of the world are obvious, because of the stigma attached to disability.

For the IPC, the ‘zero interest coming from African broadcasters’ meant that entry into the Sub-Saharan African market would have to be premised, at least initially, on free access³ in conjunction with a broadcast partner familiar with the cultural landscape and various political, technological, and economic conditions of the broadcast environment to effectively produce and distribute the broadcasts across the region. TV Media Sport⁴ (TVMS), an international sport broadcaster with experience in broadcast production and distribution of major sporting events across Africa, was perhaps an obvious choice of broadcast partner. The role of TVMS, then, according to one member of the IPC broadcast team, was to use their expertise to ‘nationalise the content. . .to construct and distribute a package suitable for the African audience’. This meant including additional multilateral content that spoke to the ‘African audience’; that constructed a Paralympic programme that positioned disability within the ‘national imaginary’ (Falcous, 2007); a programme that ‘looks and feels more likes its coming from Africa’ (IPC) via images of African Paralympic athletes and Paralympic narratives that mobilised, and challenged, local knowledge(s) and understandings of disability.

In one sense, the framing of ‘nationalising the content’ to ‘Africa’ reflects an all-too-common Western position, rooted in colonial histories, that flattens the scale and diversity of the continent of Africa to a single story (Bunce et al., 2016), reminiscent of the suggestion in Wainaina’s (2005) much cited satirical essay to ‘treat Africa as if it were one country’ (para. 3). In another sense, the IPC’s vision for localised broadcasts implies a tendency towards the decolonial, particularly if we are to follow Falcous’s (2007: 374) position that constructions of sporting national imaginaries are ‘a critical feature of decolonization’ with the potential to (re-)situate cultural Indigenous knowledges, challenge totalizing western discourses, and (re-)position marginalised subjectivites. Yet, and as we expand on below, engaging new audiences in Paralympic sporting imaginaries in a region with plural and often violent disability epistemologies and localised articulations had never been attempted and thus required, at the very least, a qualitative shift in thinking around both the apparatus and politics of production and disability representation.

Developing the Sub-Saharan African Paralympic broadcasts

It is important to recognise the role of TVMS as a leading live sport event distributor across the Sub-Saharan African region. Despite having no prior experience in Paralympic production, TVMS had worked with FTA national broadcasters and commercial broadcasters across the region on various other major sporting events and was thus recognised by the IPC (and broadcasters across Sub-Saharan Africa) as a ‘reliable distributor’.

For TVMS, the Tokyo project offered a unique opportunity to do something new – to give their portfolio of programming ‘higher value’. As one TVMS interviewee explained:

We’ve been providing a lot of global events through Africa all those years, for us, Paralympics is something different. . .it was an opportunity for us to do something different, something new, something more value, something bigger, I would say. We did the Olympics, we did the Euro’s, we did the World Athletics three times, the Commonwealth Games, the African Games, the FIFA world cup, but the Paralympics added an ethical value to our programmes. It was a huge undertaking, and we are pleased we managed to put out the programme every day. . . because this kind of thing had not been tried before.

The perception by media organisations of the Paralympic Games as a valuable or ‘ethical’ sport programme given its pedagogical power as a vehicle for disability inclusion has been highlighted elsewhere (see Pullen et al., 2019). It was, however, this philosophy that (in part) influenced the type of broadcasters TVMS approached to discuss the Tokyo project.

We felt that state broadcasters would be quite relevant because of their obligation to show different types of programmes. We use commercial broadcasters for football, but such programmes, like the Paralympics, are more difficult [to promote] (TVMS)

Indeed, whilst TVMS had ‘relationships already in place with [a range of] broadcasters’, state broadcasters were thus considered as the most strategic, or ‘easier to convince’, because of their ‘obligation to show different types of programmes’ (in other words, a form of public service remit), free-to-air distribution model and ‘sizable market share’. As such, for TVMS, national (mostly state owned) FTA broadcasters would provide the greatest level of access and reach to audiences; a view similarly shared by the IPC.

On the surface this strategy appears logical and yet it is somewhat sutured by a eurocentrism, particularly in relation to the geopolitical and sociocultural contours of the Sub-Saharan African broadcast ecology. Indeed, the assumption that ‘state broadcasters would be quite relevant because of their obligation to show different types of programmes’ reflects a significant oversight in relation to the oft hyper partisan nature (and subsequent public distrust) of many Sub-Saharan media systems (Kalyango, 2021; Kupe, 2013). Unlike across the UK and Europe – where both the IPC and TVMS are located – public (formerly state) FTA broadcasters are largely controlled by the state, resource constrained (Mare et al., 2019), and with limited autonomy over types of programming. This means that, for many FTA broadcasters across the region, the idea of PSB remits, as Raboy (1996: 78) claims, are a “distant ideal, not a working reality” (see also Bourgault, 1995; Fiedler and Frère, 2016).

Furthermore, factors such as infrastructure availability, electricity capacity, structural poverty and population geography mean that TV ownership is not widely prevalent across Sub-Saharan Africa and typically restricted to predominantly white-collar professionals in city and peri-urban areas, and to elites in rural areas (see Akindas, 2018; Chalaby, 2005; Noske-Turner et al., 2022). In Malawi, for instance, approximately 12% of households have access to a TV, and in rural areas where the majority of people live, that percentage decreases to 5.4% (MACRA, 2020). As such, access and reach of coverage are thus determined less by FTA broadcast distribution models than by broader socio-cultural and structural factors. Indeed, although TVMS estimated the audience reach of the broadcast across Malawi to be around 200,000 based on the market share of MBC, average household size and the number of households with TV access, accurate viewership figures are not available, and it is likely that this figure is much lower.

The Paralympic programme TVMS produced consisted of 13× 52-minute highlights packages in which TVMS attempted to supplement and localise where possible via additional content (e.g. interviews with athletes, supplementary video content etc). As one TVMS interviewee explained:

We produced the highlights, which were 52 minutes per day. I was in charge of the content that went in, I oversaw the journalist and what they did in the day, I decided to run orders for those programmes, and I was in liaison with film crews on site to be able to get additional content to add to the 52 minute highlights that were sent per day by the OBS. I also hired the English commentators, I believe [name] did the French and Portuguese commentators, and I made sure I liaised between them and the technical staff at the studios we were working.

The use of colonial languages in the broadcast commentary is important here. The decision to produce the broadcasts in English, French and Portuguese was likely a pragmatic choice influenced by a myriad of factors such as organisational capacity, infrastructure availability, financial constraints, and distribution models. It is also important to recognise the extent to which the diversity of Indigenous languages and their use inside a given postcolonial state is complex. Indeed, colonial languages often function as a lingua franca in regions where the exists a diversity of sub-ethnic linguistic groups and where language is deeply connected to ethnic identities, power struggles and conflict (Chimhundu, 1992; Muzondidya & Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2007). Yet, the reproduction of colonial languages is itself problematic and often misrecognises the importance of Indigenous languages for cultural expression, identity and local epistemologies.

Indeed, for us, it presents an inconsistency when read with and against the intention to position new Paralympic imaginaries within the local. As Grosfoguel (2007) reminds us, the ‘locus of enunciation’ is geopolitically and historically important insofar that it legitimates a particular ecology of knowledge that is always limited to the political positionality of the enunciator. In other words, the cultural embodiment of the editorial team (as predominantly European) is important here. Not least because it has implications for the epistemological resources in which the editorial team drew on to inform decisions about what pedagogical content should be included in the broadcast that would effectively challenge stigmatising disability narratives. Indeed, the extract below is particularly instructive here:

We were looking for good quotes, stuff that was interesting to listen too, and it just so happened that the interviews that came in spread that gambit. I wouldn’t say I deliberately went looking for it [stories of disability] but I picked up on the stuff that I thought was relevant and interesting. I tried, wherever I could, put my western understanding aside and went after what the good stories were and what my editorial judgment was telling me. . . We wanted to show that these athletes were not vulnerable and disabled, they are people who are living their lives, obviously they are vulnerable and disabled, but that wasn’t what we were trying to show. . .there was one disabled athlete who said its time for disabled people to come out of the home, to go beyond their families, and that was quite powerful stuff.

Despite having little experience in Paralympic broadcast and the complexities of Paralympic media representation it appears that laudable efforts were made to include content that challenged stigmatising practices. In capturing ‘powerful’ quotes such as ‘it’s time for disabled people to come out of the home, to go beyond their families’, TVMS attempted to counter ideas of disability vulnerability and isolation. This discourse is indeed prevalent across the region (see, e.g. Chataika, 2013; Zoanni, 2022) and manifests a form of stigma associated with fatalistic beliefs of ‘disability as inability’, unable to contribute to communal living, and associated with disturbances to cultural, economic, spiritual and social order (see Akambadi et al., 2023 for further discussion of audience attitudes and responses to Paralympic content in Malawi).

Yet, there is an extent to which ‘powerful’ quotes fail to grasp the gravity and complexity of stories of disability within wider cultural contexts, epistemological violence, and discursive and material localities of both stigma and solidarity. Indeed, as scholars Chataika (2013), Zoanni (2022) and others remind us, in contradistinction to Western-centric individualism – the ideological premise for Western narratives of disability overcoming or ‘supercrip’ – in Sub Saharan Africa, ‘[disability] experience is often shared among family and community members’ (Haang’andu, 2018: 1298). Instances of ‘locking’, ‘hiding’ or otherwise keeping people with disabilities is a real but complex phenomenon, making the home a site of both exclusion, shame, violence and security for disabled people (Grech, 2013), and stories addressing this both highly relevant and highly sensitive.

Whilst it would be remiss not to recognise and somewhat commend TVMS’s intention toward representing para-athletes as just ‘people who are living their lives’ there is an extent to which doing so leads to disability realities becoming disassociated from wider meaningful geo-social-political frameworks that locate, restory – and thus pedagogically challenge – the complexity of disability stigma as it intersects with cultural epistemologies and local imaginaries. Indeed, for Haang’andu (2018: 1309) centring a pedagogically productive ‘disability epistemic’ requires thinking beyond individualistic narratives (typical of Western disability representations e.g. supercrip) that appeals ‘to the pre-existing communitarian sense of solidarity, family care, and social cohesion’.

That said, it is important to recognise that TVMS were challenged with the quantity of African content available via the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS) feed which limited the repertoire of images and attendant narrative resources available to effectively localise the Paralympic broadcasts in any culturally meaningful way. This was, in part, due to the relatively fewer athletes participating and medalling from the Sub-Saharan African region – indicative of structural inequities in disability sport resource across this region (see Novak, 2014) – and thus less visibility in standard Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS) feeds. As one TVMS interviewee explained:

The biggest challenge was finding images we could use to illustrate the athletes we were targeting for the clients we had – basically the Africans. A lot of the time, we found that because they didn’t get through the early rounds, we didn’t get a lot of images. I sent my requests in [to OBS] each day on who we were interested in, I had to scale that down to 1 or 2 per session, and we still didn’t always get what we were looking for. We were a little limited from that point of view.

Indeed, if we are to follow Hall’s (1992: 239) claim that meanings of the nation as they are (re)constructed and reworked ‘are contained in the stories told about it’, it is perhaps unsurprising that TVMS, despite their efforts, failed to create an effective nationalised programme. Yet (and as we see below) in a cultural context with a nascent history of Paralympic broadcast and culturally specific disability discourses, it is perhaps not simply the stories told about a nation, but, rather, who is telling the stories on behalf of the nation that carries with it the pedagogical power in shaping new cultural Paralympic imaginaries that challenge disability stigma.

Local voices, local stories: Indigenization of the Paralympic broadcasts

Despite the challenges TVMS faced in content production, the Tokyo project was perceived as an organisational success: ‘it was a huge undertaking, and we are pleased we managed to put out the programme every day, even if we were working it out as we went, because this kind of thing had not been tried before’ (TVMS). That said, it was clear that a handful of national broadcasters experienced technical difficulties in accessing the highlights package via satellite and/or download despite TVMS stating that ‘[we] made sure there were different ways for distribution, like satellites and streaming’ (TVMS). Indeed, as one production staff member from the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) explained, the videos sent by TVMS were large (and in HD) and required the availability of a certain level of technological infrastructure to be easily accessed.

The programs [were not] compatible with our equipment, the equipment that we are using for downloading the programs. . . you see most media outlets in Malawi they cannot be affording to download a 75 GB programme on there. It will mean that they would need a lot of money to do that.

Clearly then, there was a degree of technological oversight by TVMS in relation to the varying needs and infrastructure availability/limitations of some national broadcasters across this region. This had implications for broadcast scheduling – as, in the case of MBC, solutions to download the Paralympic packages that could not be recorded via satellite were sought – and particularly so for broadcasters who were supplementing the package with additional local programming.

Indeed, of the 49 national broadcasters that received the Paralympics highlights package from TVMS, there were a select few that engaged in further localised production through supplementary content provided by journalists on site at the Paralympic Games. These were typically the larger and better resourced broadcasters, such as KBC Kenya, who had capacity to send representatives to Tokyo during the Games⁵. Of interest here, however, is the form of local production MBC provided which included voiceover/commentary of the Paralympic highlights package in the Indigenous language – Chichewa. Led by two established reporters – one who specialised in sports producing, presenting and commentary, and the other a visually impaired reporter and presenter specialising in disability radio programming – the voiceovers enabled a different mode of mediation; one that drew from local-cultural repertoires of enunciation (Grosfoguel, 2007) via ‘particularised’ expressions (Falcous, 2007), local idioms, phrases and ‘words that, you know, young people can relate with so easily’ (MBC) that positioned the content within a different, culturally meaningful, linguistic framework. Indeed, as one of the journalists involved in the translation explained: ‘I have not studied French, so [I’ll] be just using imagination on what was this commentator talking about’. This extended to using local idioms and phrases and connecting sporting events to local places. For example, in their commentary of a Paralympic swimming event, the reporters describe ‘this person is swimming backwards nicely. . . this one should be from the lake, the way she swims. . . there at M’baluku (Mangochi district) in the southern part of Lake Malawi’.

Importantly, within the process of (re-)imagination, the reporters spoke to a particular disability politic that harnessed the conjunctural relations and intersection of global-local, social-political, personal and public in interesting ways. For instance, at several points, both reporters emphasised the lack of disability support in Malawi (by Government) by drawing attention to the progress made by ‘our friends in other countries who are way ahead’. Indeed, the extract below taken from the commentary captures this politic:

Don’t you believe now, having seen this?! . . . You know for wheelchairs, for many of us wheelchairs are just for mobility, but you can see what is happening in our friends’ countries. Wheelchairs are useful, giving an opportunity to people. . . other people are really benefitting with the same wheelchair. . . Today this is going to be a big lesson to the government and also those responsible for sports that, if given a chance, people with a disability can place a country in development.

The addition of the local Indigenous-language voiceover meant that Paralympics highlight package became a qualitatively different mediated form when compared with the localisation that TVMS attempted. In many ways, it is largely unsurprising that there were key differences in ‘editorial judgment’ (to use TVMS’s phrase) between TVMS and the local reporters given the shift in the ‘locus of enunciation’ (Grosfoguel, 2007). One such editorial judgement is the extent and mode in which a disability politic is centred throughout the content. Indeed, as highlighted above, whilst TVMS aimed to promote narratives that positioned athletes as ‘people who are living their lives’, the local reporters engaged here with a somewhat more persuasive and personalised narrative centred on ‘playing an activist part inside the commentary while at the same time also giving us analytical humour on how the games were proceeding’.

What is clear, however, is that ‘playing the activist part’ using Indigenous language cultivated a powerful pedagogical space for, with Hooks (1994: 171) ‘alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies’ in relation to Paralympic disability narratives located within meaningful, albeit specific, geo-social-political frameworks and local imaginaries. Indeed, writ large in the local commentary is the cultivation of an image of the Paralympic nation for ideological recognition in relation to other nations via frameworks of local culture, local realities, and everyday places (see Roche, 2000). In this sense, it is perhaps illustrative of a Paralympic postcolonial imagining where, with Ritzer (2004), disability discourses from nowhere (western) are reworked somewhere to create a powerful space for social (disability) change. Indeed, and put more frankly by one of the MBC reporters:

I think this was like a launch pad, so I think we have taken off, and I would love to do it more and more. And they help impact the society so that come the Paris journey we have as many representatives as possible. . . Immediately after the Tokyo tournament the Malawi National Council of Sports have built quite a good number of equipment that we never had. And I think all the equipment is there.

Conclusion

The broadcasting of the Tokyo Paralympic Games on free to air (FTA) television across 49 territories in Sub-Saharan Africa marked a historic moment in the global development of Paralympic broadcasting. This article has attempted to chart the story of this development from the perspective of the key organisations involved: The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) (responsible for negotiating Paralympic broadcast rights), TV Media Sport (TVMS) (contracted by IPC as the broadcast partner to produce and distribute the broadcasts) and one national Sub-Saharan broadcaster (Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)). In doing so, we contribute to a lacuna of scholarly work on the politics of Paralympic broadcast production (Pullen et al., 2019) whilst offering new insights here as it articulates with southern geo-social-political frameworks and technological/economic conditions.

We document how the IPC’s motivations behind the expansion of Paralympic broadcast across the Sub-Saharan African region was driven by the organisations social mission of driving transformative disability social change through sport and achieving global Paralympic coverage, despite the ‘zero interest’ in the Paralympic Games from broadcasters across the Sub Sharan African region. TVMS, with experience in live sport event distribution across the region, was an ideal choice of broadcast partner and facilitated the distribution of the Paralympic highlights package across 49 National broadcasters. Whilst laudable efforts were made by TVMS to produce a localised programme, the epistimiological-cultural resources the team drew on to make editorial judgements on/about what disability stories should be foreground, and how, was sutured by a form of electronic colonialism (Akindas, 2018) that failed to centre local Paralympic stories within any meaningful and culturally relevant (disability) episteme. Certainly, the localisation of Paralympic content by local actors, as was done by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), had significant pedagogical value in reworking/restorying Paralympic content that drew on local-cultural understandings and expressions and connected with local places, spaces and politics.

Whilst it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that localised sport content delivered by local actors speaks to audiences in specific and important ways, our article begins to highlight the pressing importance of localisation in relation to Paralympic broadcast in areas of the world with a nascent history of Paralympic sport coverage (and thus audience following) in conjunction with culturally specific forms. The important work done by two local sport reporters on indigenising, reimagining and reworking the content shaped the broadcast in powerful ways; certainly, in ways that could not be achieved by TVMS despite laudable efforts to do so. Whilst there is a complexity to indigenising content through local language, for Paralympic broadcast to capture specific audiences and drive meaningful social change across such regions, there requires a degree of autonomy over cultural expression and representation by local actors who can harness local knowledge and cultural resources to enhance the broadcast and speak to the global-local, social-political, personal and public in pedagogically persuasive ways. Indeed, whilst we are cautious not to imply that localisation of Paralympic coverage across Sub-Saharan Africa (or be it other regions in the Global South) is a panacea for progressive and transformative social change in relation to disability rights (see Noske-Turner et al., 2022), our conjecture is that simply broadcasting the Paralympics with limited localised narrative intervention fails to recognise the affective role of language in the ontoformative capacity of representation in social change processes (see Connell, 2011).

Perhaps the key tension for the IPC is the extent to which pursuing global broadcast coverage across new markets and regions via the approach documented in this article is achieved at the expense of more localised, targeted and pedagogically impactful coverage. Whilst global broadcast coverage – and with it the impressive (albeit erroneous) numbers of global viewers – have significant commercial value, there is a need for a more strategic approach to broadcast across regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa if the transformational capacities of Paralympic broadcast are to be fully realised.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Para Sport Against Stigma is a four-year project (2020–2024) that is delivered by Loughborough University London, in partnership with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and University of Malawi. Para Sport Against Stigma is part of AT2030, a programme funded by UK Aid and led by the Global Disability Innovation Hub.

ORCID iD

Emma Pullen

Notes

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Paralympic Broadcasting in Sub-Saharan Africa: Production Politics and the Reimagined Postcolonial