“Translating Genocide”: MTV Goes to Africa

Looks like MTV beat Nicholas Kristof to the punch. Sunday at 11 a.m. ET it debuts Translating Genocide, a documentary featuring three college students who, after being denied entrance to Darfur, travel to Chad to report on regional violence and human rights abuses. In a review in today’s New York Times, Ned Martel writes that the program “can’t be accused of an encyclopedic understanding of the crisis, nor does it instill a this-could-happen-to-you fear. But genuine emotions are captured on tape as respectful visitors empathize with traumatized refugees. ‘The world really is kind of small,’ one of the students says, mid-epiphany about mutual tastes in music.”

In the end, Martel echoes some of the sentiments we had when reviewing MTV’s similarly-minded “Trippin” with Cameron Diaz. “Her lessons about sustainable development were similarly soft-pedaled, and in both shows, indigenous hosts burst into song as an uplifting coda to geopolitical bummers,” Martel writes. “Still, like college, such programming is an admirable start, challenging channel-flippers to consider the more immediate problems of less-privileged youths.”

Photograph from the mtvU photo journal of Georgetown University’s Nate Wright, one of the three students to make the journey to Chad.

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