Tsha Tsha: A Facilitator's Guide to Series One

Tsha Tsha is a Xhosa language entertainment education drama series commissioned in 2001 by the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The series was developed and produced by the Centre for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation (CADRE) and Curious Pictures, with additional support from the Health Communication Partnership based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs. It has been broadcast on SABC 1 since April 2003.

Tsha Tsha takes place in the fictional town of Lubusi, a small rural town in the Eastern Cape. The drama explores young people’s lives as they make their transition to adulthood, developing self-efficacy and humanity at individual and community levels. It explores many of the challenges facing young people in South Africa today and aims to enhance their capacity to reflect on problems, to engage in developing solutions, and to become active agents in crafting the circumstances of their own lives.

This guide forms part of a strategy to broaden the use of the Tsha Tsha television series beyond the broadcast environment. It supports the use of Tsha Tsha in contexts where the visual material is used to facilitate discussion, debate, reflection and learning. It aims to provide facilitators with information about how to structure and facilitate discussion sessions with people who have watched single or multiple episodes of Tsha Tsha, or excerpts from individual episodes. The guide is developed within the framework of a participatory approach.