MTV MAMAs, they should have known better

Uganda's Bebe Cool talks to a journalist

Last week, the MTV MAMAs were the talk, down in Durban.
Lots of stars coming together, the bling, showing off and selfies - these boys almost overshadowed the ongoing Durban International Film Festival.
Then we got to the event it’s self – I can’t be sure if people elsewhere watched the Red Carpet moments but in my view this was the worst done Red Carpet in the history of such events, they crammed the poor thing with all sorts of South African actors, Radio presenters, bloggers – who maybe celebrities down there but are completely useless to an event targeted at celebrating the one African sound.

 

Nomuzi Mabena

For some reason, they had chosen the Black-ish star Anthony Anderson to host the show, he’s an amazing comedian but for an African award show, dude was out of context most of the times – why is that they’ve never trusted Africans to handle this?
Considering the fact that he’s script was all pre-written and more than once struggled with it, especially with the name pronounciations, isn’t this the right time MTV gave African comedians or show hosts like IK, Mich Egwang, Gaetano Kaggwa, Trevor Noah, Kabelo Ngakane or Nomuzi Mabena a chance?
We have the kind and quality of talent to carry such a show.

And MTV should have known better that at the moment, we have African artistes with songs bigger than Ne Yo's Let me love you or Coming with you. Unless you’re bringing King Kunta himself or Chris Brown and Tyga to perform Ayo or Post to be with Jhene Aiko and others, you’re simply wasting our time.
Bringing an American act should never be a wasted effort and thus MTV had to bring an artiste whose music on that stage was going to be louder than AKA, Burna Boy, D-Res and Stonebuoy’s All eyes on me or Davido and Uhuru’s The Sound.

Davido plays with the proportion

But then we had a Ne Yo who was only there to remind us of how cool it would have been if he had performed at the MAMAs way back in 2009 and Jhene Aiko doing the same song she performed at the BET Awards a year and a month back.

Then the very slim list of their nomination list, it literally left many African artistes in the cold – seriously for a continent where Afrobeat, reggae and high-life are highly enjoyed, it was surprising to see that only Hip Hop and Pop genres were celebrated.

Casper Nyovest with his beau Boity Thulo

Leaving reggae artistes like Stonebouy, World Music artistes like Asa and Afrobeat artistes like Wizkid to compete for the same video and collaboration awards – It not trivial to think that if someone is trying to start an award show, they should have to understand the dynamics of the industry; the genres, dynamics and know the knowledgeable people.

East Africa's golden boy Diamond Platinumz

What MTV Base did however, was give Africa a huge stage, copy and paste a few categories from their parent award show and they were done. If they felt like categories for all African music genres were many, then they should have left Hip hop and pop out since they are not that celebrated in this part of the world after all.
But only recognizing those two made other genre artistes feel empty and useless, and for a TV that has organized such award shows for years, MTV would have known better.