How To Survive A Dictator With Munya Chawawa - North Korea. Image: Channel 4
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Munya Chawawa grew up in Zimbabwe. Political and economic crises in the country, led at the time by Robert Mugabe, forced his family to move to the UK when he was 11. Since then, great dictators have fascinated Chawawa, who is one of the biggest names in British comedy at the moment. He built up a massive following on social media by satirically skewering life in the time of Covid and beyond in short, sharp parody videos.
In 2022, Chawawa made How to Survive a Dictator for Channel 4, where he tried to make sense of the situation that he had left behind in Zimbabwe decades earlier. The documentary was critically acclaimed and he’s just released a follow-up. This time, he focuses on North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un.
Munya Chawawa travels to meet Kim Jong Un’s school chums and North Korean defectors, joining one man, Mr Jong, who fills plastic bottles full of rice and USBs containing James Bond films and episodes of Friends, as he throws them in a river in the hope they’ll wash up on the North Korean side to give a glimpse of life outside the regime.
All the darkness is delivered by Chawawa with the kind of funny, biting content you’ll find on his social media channels. He tells Big Issue that the most disturbing elements of his films exist much closer to home and warns of signs that a dictatorship is brewing in the west.
Big Issue: Do you think Kim Jong Un is listening in to our conversation?
Munya Chawawa: I have a feeling that Kim Jong Un has slightly bigger fish to fry than the 5ft7 Zimbabwean doing parodies of him. That’s what I tell myself to get to sleep every night.
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Your documentary is about North Korea, but you don’t go to North Korea.
One of the first decisions we made was not to go, because of how highly controlled those trips are. Your filming equipment is disassembled to check for spy gear, you go to the same hotel, you go to the statues of Kim Jong Un’s dad and granddad and you bow and you lay your flowers. You are not allowed to interact with any locals. In South Korea, you meet people who have defected. The opinions are unfiltered. You hear about the nastier side of the dictatorship, free from the grasp of brainwashing. Chuck that in with sketches and songs – those are the things we did to try and make people care. If I need to give you a history lesson about Kim Jong Un, instead of showing you loads of infographics, I’ll do The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme tune as a parody. It’s something I’m thinking about very carefully. Why would we use sketches and songs about something that for many people is very harrowing? Laughter is the greatest communicator. If you can get people to laugh, you can get people to care.
What stood out about the North Koreans you met?
I was really surprised by the bravery of Mr Jong, who had endured labour camps and torture and had escaped. But rather than trying to distance himself as far as possible from those experiences, [he] was then like, ‘No, no, I’m going to bring the dictatorship down by throwing these bottles of rice with episodes of Friends on a USB.’ In his mind, he’s deadly serious about those being the thing that could blow the operation wide open. It was also interesting meeting someone who wants to go back [some defectors leave for medical procedures and have trouble returning]. Class divide is very real wherever you go. If you happen to draw the right cards in the game of life, then North Korea probably is quite a cushty experience.
We see plenty of North Korean propaganda like the mass parades, but is that so different from an episode of Friends which might make you believe that it’s affordable to live in New York and everyone is beautiful and funny? That’s not how life really is in the west, not for me anyway.
Propaganda in North Korea is more about suggesting that there is no such thing as choice. You hear from defectors about a lack of singular nouns – ‘me’, ‘I, ‘you’ – it’s ‘us’, ‘we’, you’re one homogeneous mass of the regime. In the west, you can watch Friends, but you can also find a programme about how crap New York is or what it’s like to be in a group of friends and to be gay, what it’s like to be in a group of friends and to be Black. In fact, our problem in the west is an over-saturation. We talk about choice paralysis. There is no choice paralysis in North Korea, there’s just a choice: what is the thing I can do that reflects Kim Jong Un and this dictatorship in the most glorious light?
You say that you wanted to make this documentary because of apocalypse anxiety. Do you feel more or less anxious having now made it?
Do I still feel worried about the end of the world? We met an expert, Andrei Lankov, and it was interesting seeing the bluntness with which he said – there is no impending nuclear attack, because if one nuke gets fired, all nukes get fired across the world. And ultimately, the one thing people in power love is being alive and rich. What gave me sort of a new, not anxiety, more sense of shame, because across both documentaries has been this idea that the west really is the big bad wolf.
In the case of Zimbabwe, the country was colonised, the land was taken from Black people and given to white people. Then the government, I think it was a Conservative government initially, went, ‘OK guys, we’re sorry we messed up there. We will redistribute the land. Just give us a couple of years.’ Cool. The UK government switches from Conservative to Labour, and Labour say, ‘Look, we never promised that. Sort the land out by yourself.’ That’s when the white farmers were being evicted, that’s when the world went, ‘Zimbabwe, you’re evil, you can’t do that.’ And it began a downward spiral because of the west tinkering.
Nothing brings people behind an authoritarian leader like a good enemy, and the west can often play the part a bit too well.
Similarly, in North Korea, the audacity of the west to say, put down your nuclear weapons and it will all be all right. We hear Andrei Lankov talk about the fact that when [Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi did that, that was the end of him, his regime, his everything. Increasingly I find that the unofficial dictatorship over the entire world, metaphorically, is the west.
Next month things might get a little more official if Trump is re-elected. Is he the next subject for a How to Survive a Dictator documentary?
Oh, 100%, I do see the inklings of a dictatorship within what Trump’s doing. We laugh at the Kim dynasty, because with Kim Jong Un’s dad there were rumours saying the first time he played golf, he scored 11 holes in one. He was the inventor of the hamburger. He knew how to drive as a toddler. He never needed to urinate or defecate. And you go, these people, how can they be so stupid to believe such a thing? But then Trump will blatantly lie about everything and convince swathes of people to look at facts and objective data and go, this is totally fabricated by a lying propaganda machine we call the media. There’s not even a right and a wrong or a true and false anymore and that is absolutely the signal that a dictatorship is brewing. You’re essentially trying to do what they do in 1984, which is to say two plus two is five. That’s Trump’s whole campaign.
Munya Chawawa went to South Korea to meet defectors from the North. Image: Channel 4
Is that why your documentaries are important, because if people – especially young people – don’t take notice, we’re in trouble?
If I go onto TikTok after something like the presidential debate, my timeline is filled with young people doing breakdowns and analysis. Young people are engaged. Social media lights up after these debates, so that makes me very hopeful. Because what you won’t get in a place like North Korea or Zimbabwe is a politician doing something despicable and then people going online and going, ‘Hey guys, I have a feeling that that wasn’t true.’ That’s something they can’t do, but we are totally able to. I’m always encouraging people to use your democratic right, even if it is just making a TikTok video.
How to Survive a Dictator: North Korea is available to watch on All4.
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