When he was 11, Munya Chawawa and his family fled Robert Mugabe’s tyrannical regime in Zimbabwe and settled in Norfolk. That story was told in the comedian-actor-rapper’s 2022 documentary How to Survive a Dictator. It mixed satirical sketches into a series of interviews with Mugabe’s family members and victims; a former friend who finally dissociated himself from the dictator after Mugabe oversaw the massacre of 20,000 civilians; and even one of Mugabe’s most feared henchmen.
Against the odds, the format worked. Could it do so again without the personal element anchoring and protecting the presenter against accusations of flippancy or insensitivity? How to Survive a Dictator: North Korea answers the question largely in the affirmative.
This time, Chawawa interviews those affected by the extraordinary authoritarian rule of Kim Jong-un, whose unexpected succession to the despotic throne when his father, Kim Jong-il, died in 2011 dashed people’s hopes that the regime’s repressive hold would start to lift. Instead, if anything, it has become more brutal, more secretive and – as Kim’s fondness for nuclear weapons and the testing thereof apparently grows – more dangerous.
Chawawa takes us on a swift jog-trot through a simplified version of the origin story – the second world war and the division of Korean spoils between the Soviet Union, which took the top half of the country and installed Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, to run the place, and the US, which took the bottom and established a slightly more comfortable way of life. North Korea began a war of reunification that is technically still going on. The Kim dynasty’s totalitarianism has only increased in the intervening years.
The rest of the programme is more choppy, sometimes overly so. It juggles questions about Kim’s mental state and his character, about how much of a threat the country’s nuclear capabilities truly present, about how brainwashed the citizens of the hermit kingdom are, about whether the stranglehold of the supreme leader’s propaganda can be broken, and much more.
The viewer is left to assemble their own answers from a plethora of interviews with experts including academics and the former North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK, Thae Yong-ho (denounced as “human scum” by his native country, but not saying much here that would further endanger him). There are also quirky but essentially irrelevant “gets”, like the reminiscences of a man who was briefly a classmate of the prepubescent Kim at school in Switzerland.
To these are added several testimonies from defectors who have fled to South Korea, often after surviving the vicious punishments handed out to dissidents under the north’s pitiless regime. Mr Jong was put in a prison camp after being accused of espionage. Twenty years on, he still has nightmares: about the 16-hour days of hard labour, followed by two hours of “re-education”; about his fellow prisoners, “who didn’t look like humans” because they were so horribly starved.
The television presenter Yuna Jung defected in 2006 after seeing a South Korean soap opera and becoming alive to the constraints under which she lived. Her father was tortured and her mother sent to a camp for her actions. Another woman talks of being taken to a detention centre and spending “the next 28 years in hell”.
It is not the satirical sketches and raps with which the personal accounts are interleaved that jar – they punch up and find the right marks – but the lack of proper weight given to the evidence amassed. At one point, Chawawa says there is “plenty of conflicting information” about life in North Korea. Is there? Really? He speaks to a woman who wants to go home to her family after receiving medical treatment in the south that is unavailable in the north; he says a swathe of older defectors want to return. But he also notes that they are affected by the poverty and stigma that defectors endure. Does this count as evidence that things are better in the north – or just that the longing for home can survive almost any rational argument?
Nevertheless, Chawawa is a witty, engaging presenter. Assuming that the point of commissioning someone of his talents with a predominantly young online following is to create an energetic, accessible documentary about a deeply serious problem that would not preach to an already-converted choir, the job has been done very well indeed.
• How to Survive a Dictator: North Korea is available on Channel 4
