Monday afternoon I probably started rubbing my hands The rise of the Murdoch dynasty to look ahead. The three-part BBC series has been online on NPO Plus for some time, but I hadn’t seen it yet and it will now be broadcast on television on Monday evenings. Of course I watched succession in the back of my mind, the HBO series about media magnate Logan Roy who rules over his empire and his children by sowing division.
Media boss Rupert Murdoch’s favorite child is the firstborn of his second marriage, and the only wife of the three, Elisabeth. She started her career in the 1990s as boss of the British television station BskyB, alongside the tabloids (The Sun, News of the world) and quality newspapers (The Times, The Wall Street Journal) was her father’s most important and profitable business. She is most like him, says Murdoch himself. Her brother Lachlan is charming, her brother James smart, others say, but she is both. She is now one of the most important British media bosses.
With Murdoch and Elisabeth still in mind I looked at Girls girls girls, a documentary series on NTR about ‘bicultural’ women who were also portrayed in a series 25 years ago. It was about their aspirations as a young woman, their obstacles as a woman of color. Program maker Soulaima El Khaldi was 19 when she saw that original series and recognized herself in the women. For her series, she went to visit some of them. That is how she came to Amma Asante, who aspired to a career in politics at the age of 25. She succeeded. First she became a city councilor in Amsterdam, then a member of parliament for the PvdA. She has since left politics and is also a member of Bij1 and chair of the Media Authority.
Amma Asante is the daughter of a factory worker and a chambermaid. Her father was also in the documentary with her 25 years ago. He then said that his daughter was doing fine, but could do better. Had to be better. In the current series, he says that his daughter will later agree that he was right then, with the high demands he made of her. Amma Asante says, diplomatically, that she doesn’t blame him. Because she knows by now that her parents’ hard work, sacrifices and parenting discipline are the foundation of her success.
‘I was unique’
We now see Asante on the hockey field cheering on her teenage daughter. You think: everything worked out, it went well for her, she can give her daughters the youth she herself wanted. Until she says that her daughters will probably have a harder time than she does. “I was unique. Nice, a black woman. Look, we have one too.” But her daughters, they are and feel Dutch, but Dutch eyes often see it differently. “My eldest daughter was told to go to her own country. To Ghana? That’s not her country. My child does not have his own country, so everything has failed. If she doesn’t feel at home here, who does?”
Asante’s words resonate in what rapper ICE conveys in his series Super lions. The Moroccan football fairy tale. The national team of Morocco caused a sensation at the World Cup in Qatar at the end of 2022. ICE is looking for four players who played for Morocco: Hakim Ziyech, Zakaria Aboukhlal, Noussair Mazraoui and Sofyan Amrabat. “These football players come from the Netherlands, they had the same upbringing, the same childhood as me. We had to be Dutch, but we remained Moroccans.” The footballers exchanged their homeland for the motherland where they were not born. “When they won, they were Dutch.” But that was no longer necessary. All European Moroccans experienced that feeling of pride and triumph, says ICE. “If you weren’t Moroccan, you would have wanted to be one by now.”