Abstract
Toward the end of March 2010, the Zimbabwean Media Commission (ZMC) announced that it would issue licenses to private newspapers; by July the street-corner vendors had a large variety to sell.1 Thus was fulfilled a promise of Zimbabwe’s Government of National Unity (GNU), which in February 2009 allowed the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to rule alongside the Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T) and the smaller Movement for Democratic Change-Mutambara (MDC-M) rather than accept defeat in the 2008 elections, judged invalid by most observers due to improper counting and excessive violence. Appointed in December 2009, the ZMC’s mandate included registering mass media operations (for which many applicants had been waiting), promoting and enforcing good media ethics, ensuring wide and equitable access to information, and establishing a media council comprised of civil society representatives ranging from journalists to youth.
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Notes
See also Richard Saunders, “Zimbabwe: Liberation Nationalism, Old and Born Again,” Africa Files (August 2010): 6; and his “Geologies of Power: Blood Diamonds, Security Politics and Zimbabwe’s Troubled Transition,” in Legacies of Liberation: Postcolonial Struggles for a Democratic Southern Africa, eds. Marlea Clarke and Carolyn Bassett (Toronto and Johannesburg: Fernwood and HSRC Press, forthcoming), for similar thoughts vis-à-vis the exploitation of diamonds.
Until October 2005, the MDC was one party. Then a group within the MDC split and by early 2006 formed the MDC-M under Arthur Mutambara’s leadership. Mutambara was deputy prime minister in the GNU, having gained ten seats in the 2008 elections and thus the balance of power. Technically, the party led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is the MDC-T, but in this chapter “MDC” and “MDC-T” will refer to the party led by Zimbabwe’s prime minister, while “MDC-M” will refer to the “splinter” group. For details, see Brian Raftopoulos, “Reflections on Opposition Politics in Zimbabwe: The Politics of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC),” in Reflections on Democratic Politics in Zimbabwe, eds. Brian Raftopoulos and Karin Alexander (Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2006), 6–28.
Susan Booysen, “The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Zimbabwe, March and June 2008,” Electoral Studies 28, no. 1 (2009): 150–154
Susan Booysen, EISA Election Observer Mission Report No. 28: Observer Mission Report: Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe Harmonized Elections of 29 March 2008, Presidential, Parliamentary and Local Government Elections with Postscript on the Presidential Run-off of 27 June 2008 and the Multi-party Agreement of 15 September 2008, Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, Richmond, 2008.
Southern African Liaison Office (SALO), “Country Focus: South Africa’s Relations with Zimbabwe,” Johannesburg, 2009, http://cage.dcis.gov.za/documents/pdf/SALO_Country_Focus_Paper-Zimbabwe_FULL.pdf.
For one small example, the 2002 presidential elections had so few urban polling booths that voters had to queue for days to mark their ballot; even after the voting period was extended by a day, many missed their chance at electoral democracy. See Patrick Bond and David Moore, “Zimbabwe: Elections, Despondency and Civil Society’s Responsibility,” Pambazuka, April 7, 2005.
Paul Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). One wonders how seriously this cavalier economist should be taken. On page thirty-nine he spells the name of South Africa’s last president incorrectly, illustrating that for many economists, names don’t really alter the nature of the data. As always.
Alex de Waal’s Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa(London: James Currey, 1997)
Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflicts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk, eds., From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) has returned by stealth. Less democracy is approved as long as benevolent foreigners are behind the interventions
Interviews with anonymous sources close to the counters and watchers; see also Stephen Chan, “Zimbabwe’s Tense Countdown,” New Statesman, April 3, 2008; and “Exit Mugabe,” Prospect Magazine, 145, April 2008.
R. W. Johnson, South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 366.
Stephanie Nolen, “Mugabe Loses Control of Harare Legislature,” The Globe and Mail, April 2, 2008.
David Moore, “Make Mugabe an Offer He can’t refuse,” The Globe and Mail, April 9, 2008.
Douglas Rogers, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe(Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2009) cover the elections, with a Manicaland focus, as well as other reportage.
Shari Eppel, “‘Gukurahundi’ The Need for Truth and Reparation,” in Zimbabwe: Injustice and political reconciliation, eds. Brian Raftopoulos and Tyrone Savage (Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2005).
Peta Thornycroft, “Zimbabwe: Ndira Body Found,” Association of Concerned African Scholars Bulletin: Special Issue on Zimbabwean Election 79 (Winter 2008): 46–8.
See SALO, “A Decade of Diplomacy,” in “Country Focus,” 1–17. Alastair Sparks, “At Home and Abroad: It’s Time Zuma Stood Up for Tsvangirai,” Business Day, October 27, 2009, argues that by January 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai was reluctant to continue on the path to the inclusive government, but was led to believe that imminent South African president Jacob Zuma would be tougher on Mugabe, due in part to his assumed strong relationship with the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SOCATU) and the SA Communist Party, which during the Mbeki era expressed strong disapproval of the ZANU-PF. Zuma’s inaction at a key SADC meeting in Kinshasa in mid-September 2009 suggests, though, that either South African diplomats were outmaneuvered by their elders, or simply did not care enough.
Japhet Ncube, “Kabila Rescues Mugabe,” City Press, September 13, 2009, 10
Geoffrey Nyarota, Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman (Cape Town: Zebra, 2006).
Stephanie Nolen, “Independent Radio a Lifeline for Zimbabwe’s Opposition,” The Globe and Mail, March 26, 2005.
Government of Zimbabwe, “Article XIX: Freedom of Expression and Communication,” Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment No. 19, Harare, 2008.
Amendment 19 could have added that independent radio stations and newspapers in Zimbabwe had been bombed in the early 2000s, but the document is notable for its decorum. See Peta Thornycroft, “Bomb Destroys Studio of Zimbabwe Independent Radio Station,” Voice of America, August 29, 2002.
Media Monitoring Project, Weekly Media Update 2009–41, Harare: October 12–18, 2009.
Bill Corcoran, “Zimbabwean Police Raid MDC House,” Irish Times, October 23, 2009.
Violet Gonda, “Hot Seat: ZANU-PF Minister D. Mutasa and MDC’s Gordon Moyo,” SW Radio Africa, October 23, 2009.
Chris Chinaka, “Tsvangirai under Pressure to End Cabinet Boycott,” Swissinfo.ch, October 30, 2009.
Bill Corcoron, “Zimbabwe Rivals Agree Some Details on Powersharing,”Irish Times, March 20, 2010, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0320/1224266708380pdf.html; “Zuma Breaks Zim Deadlock,” Times Live, March 21, 2010, http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/article365911.ece?service=print; and Gertrude Gumede, “Zimbabwe’s Reluctant Election Drama,” Zimbabwe Telegraph, March 20, 2010, http://www.zimtelegraph.com/?p=6505, all accessed March 23, 2010.
Gertrude Gumede, “Zimbabwe’s Reluctant Election Drama,” Zimbabwe Telegraph, March 20, 2010.
Nelson Banya, “Zimbabwe Commission to Licence Private Newspapers,” Reuters, March 19, 2010.
David Moore, “Now Onus is on SA to Deliver: Power-sharing Arrangement Makes Regional Sovereign Responsible for Building a Decent Dispensation,” Cape Times, February 3, 2009, 10. On one source of South Africa’s diplomacy vis-à-vis Zimbabwe.
David Moore, “A Decade of Disquieting Diplomacy: South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Ideology of the National Democratic Revolution, 1999–2009,” History Compass, 8, no. 8 (2010): 752–767.
David Smith, “ANC’s Julius Malema Lashes Out At ‘Misbehaving’ BBC Journalist,” The Guardian, April 8, 2010.
Solidarity Peace Trust, “What Options for Zimbabwe?” Johannesburg, March 31. 2010., http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/download/report-files/what_options_for_Zimbabwe.pdf.
Readers are warned that this writer is not a media expert. They are advised to read Richard Saunders, Zimbabwe: Politics, the Press and Hegemony (London: Merlin, forthcoming) for a comprehensive analysis of the political economy of the Zimbabwean media from its Rhodesian days to.
Tamuka Ngwenya, “Mahoso Bounces Back,” Zim Daily, October 1, 2009.
Caesar Zvayi, “We Welcome Self-Regulation: Mahoso,” The Herald, July 30, 2005.
Tangai Chipangura, “Zim Journos Celebrate Media Freedom,” City Press, December 22, 2009.
Tichaona Sibanda, “Zanu PF Apologist Smuggled Back Onto Media Commission: Indications that Major Changes Have Been Made to the Original Lists Sent to Mugabe in August,” SW Radio Africa, December 18, 2009.
Violet Gonda, “Journalists Take Journalist Union to Court,” SW Radio Africa, December 17, 2009.
Edwin Mlambo, “RBZ Schemes Structured to Loot State Coffers,” The Zimbabwe Telegraph, April 21, 2009.
Lebo Nkatazo, “Gono’s Adviser Linked to Wheat Bust,” Newzimbabwe.com, February 15, 2006.
Guthrie Munyuki, “Independent Journalists Have Been Excluded from ZUJ,” Journalism.co.za, December 10, 2009.
Miriam Madziwa, “Zimbabwean Women Forced to Give Sexual Favors to Survive,” Pambazuka, November 11, 2007.
Mutsvangwa was also a “graduate” of an ideological college, set up by a group of radicals in Zimbabwe’s war of liberation, that was eliminated by Robert Mugabe in early 1977 as he removed all suspected challengers on his way to power. As such, he is more aware than most of how the ZANU-PF treats difference of opinion.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 276.
Professor Moyo was once a liberal political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe. After scandal-ridden spells at the Ford Foundation and the University of the Witwatersrand, he was taken on in 1999 by the ZANU-PF as the media advisor for its constitutional reform campaign, followed by the post of election campaign director in the 2000 election (when he informed this writer in an interview that only “alienated urban intellectuals” did not support the ZANU-PF) and then information minister (during which time he penned “Nathaniel Manheru” columns in the Harare papers as well as “Mzala Joe’s” in Bulawayo). He was expelled from ZANU-PF for being too close to a party faction threatening Robert Mugabe’s choice as ZANU-PF vice president in late 2004. In October, 2009, while an independent MP, he rejoined the party. By April 2010 he had not gained a powerful position, however. More detail up to 2007 is found in David Moore, “‘Intellectuals’ Interpreting Zimbabwe’s Primitive Accumulation: Progress to Market Civilisation?” Safundi 8, no. 2 (2007): 201, 203–205.
Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project, Zimbabwe: Public Broadcasting in Africa Series (Johannesburg: Open Society Institute Network, 2009), 91–2.
Caesar Zvayi, “We Welcome Self-Regulation: Mahoso,” Interview with Mahoso, The Herald, July 30, 2005.
Tafataona P. Mahoso, “Africa Focus: Material Bases for Anglo-Saxon Demonisation of the African,” Sunday Mail, January 3, 2010.
David Moore, “Zimbabwe: Twists on the Tale of Primitive Accumulation,” in Globalizing Africa, ed. Malinda Smith (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003), 247–69.
Apparently Wafawarova has been under investigation for deportation by Australian immigration authorities since 2007. See Raymond Mhaka, “Pressure Mounts for Australia to Deport Reason Wafawarova,” Zimbabwemetro.com, September 4, 2008.
Muckraker, “Why is it that All the Losers are the Loudest?,” Zimbabwe Independent, November 26, 2009.
Reason Wafawarova, “Unity is the Best Enemy Repellent,” Zikker: International News Forum, online at http://zikkir.com/content/22727, accessed January 4, 2009.
Mabasa Sasa, “Zimbabwe: Are Fresh Elections Inevitable?” New African, December 2009, 44–5.
Reason Wafawarova, “Zimbabwe: Imperialism—Chief Enemy of Zim’s Revolution,” Herald, December 24, 2009.
James Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2009) is a novel in part attempting to explain why the left was enchanted with Mugabe for some time—and how disenchantment evolved.
For a fascinating memoir taking in these days, by a man intimately involved in the African nationalist movements in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, see Peter Mackay, We Have Tomorrow: Stirrings in Africa 1959–1967 (Wilby Hall: Michael Russell, 2008).
African Daily News Bulletin, September 18, 1956—this editorial was in response to a bus boycott organized by Harare’s City Youth League. It is cited in David Moore, “The Contradictory Construction of Hegemony in Zimbabwe: Politics, Ideology and Class in the Formation of a New African State” PhD, York University, Toronto, 1990. The author who coined the term “eggheads”.
“Eggheads Join the NDP,” in the Central African Examiner, 4, no. 2 (1960): 10–11. He was noting the long-awaited engagement of intellectuals such as Herbert Chitepo with the nationalist movement. However, Shamuyarira was holding his own political guns until later.
As Ian Hancock’s White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia: 1953–1958 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 27 notes, Shamuyarira “lasted longer in the multi-racial societies than many who became nationalists but … overcame this slow start and a later political indiscretion to take an important ministry under Robert Mugabe.” The indiscretion was to abandon the ZANU in 1971 to form a new party, the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI)—Along with, ironically, George Nyandoro and James Chikerema, two of the men he claimed to despise as “radicals” in 1956. Shamuyarira joined Mugabe’s faction during the Geneva conference in 1976, at which Robert Mugabe pulled together various strands of Zimbabwe’s intellectuals to form the basis of the ZANU-PF today, and has remained loyal to him ever since.
See the results of Timothy Scarnecchia’s careful archival sleuthing in his The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940–1964 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 135–8 and 128–33, wherein it is clear that people such as Herbert Chitepo and Ndabaningi Sithole were requesting assistance from Americans for their planned split from Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People Union (ZAPU), and that if they did not have direct support, they received help from “private American sources of funds” steered in their direction by officials such as the deputy assistant secretary for Africa of the State Department J. Wayne Fredericks (p. 128). See David Moore, “ZANU-PF and the Ghosts of Foreign Funding,” Review of African Political Economy 103 (2005): 156–62; and “Today’s ‘Imperialists’ were Those Who Nurtured Mugabe,” Sunday Independent, January 20, 2008, for evidence of support for Mugabe from elements of the British state.
On the mid-1970s, see, in particular, Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Text and Politics in Zimbabwe (Harare and Bloomington: Weaver and Indiana University Press, 2002); on Zipa.
David Moore, “Democracy, Violence and Identity in the Zimbabwean War of National Liberation: Reflections from the Realms of Dissent,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 29, no. 3 (1995): 375–402
“The Unnecessary Embarrassment,” Moto, November/December 1991, 4–5; and Donatus Bonde, “Student Politics—Sense and Nonsense,” Moto, December/November 1991, 5–6.
On South Africa’s disquieting diplomacy, in addition to SALO, “Country Focus: South Africa’s Relations,” see R. W. Johnson, South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 340–60, for a Western, or perhaps cynical liberal, view of South Africa’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Zimbabwe.
A more sympathetic view is Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007), 431–46.
As Zuma was approaching power, there was much hope in Zimbabwe and South Africa that he would take a tougher stance on Robert Mugabe. By October 2009, however, it appeared that such anticipation was misplaced. See Alastair Sparks, “At Home and Abroad: It’s Time Zuma Stood Up for Tsvangirai,” Business Day, October 27, 2009.
Cunningham Ngcukana, “Mbeki is On the Right Track,” City Press, May 11, 2008. Zimbabwe watchers in South Africa claim that Ngcukana “writes at Mbeki’s bidding.”
Mohau Pheko, “The West is Conspiring to Unseat that Valiant Warrior, Mugabe,” Sunday Times, May 11, 2008.
Tangai Chipangura, “Zim Journos Celebrate Media Freedom,” City Press, December 22, 2009.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Joseph Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
Michael Bratton, Annie Chikwana, and Tulani Sithole, “Propaganda and Public Opinion in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 23, no. 1 (2005): 77–108.
David Moore, “A Reply to ‘The Power of Propaganda: Public Opinion in Zimbabwe 2004,’” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 23, no. 1 (2005): 109–19.
Nathaniel Manheru, “Afrobarometer: Stubborn Facts versus Preferences,” Saturday Herald, August 21, 2004, 8.
John Hoffman, The Gramscian Challenge: Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), remains the best effort to interrogate Gramsci on the relation between consent and the coercive imperatives of the market and the state.
Ibid., 182; and Joseph Femia, “Gramsci, Machiavelli and International Relations,” Political Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2005): 343, adds, quoting the same page, hegemony “occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilisations.” Femia is critical of the overly enthusiastic application of Gramsci to the field of international political economy, noting that these passages are “isolated.” However, he somehow manages to equate the neo-Gramscians with Kantian advocates of easily applied universal notions of international human rights, which is pushing things a bit too far.
Bjorn Beckman, “The Liberation of Civil Society: Neo-Liberal Ideology and Political Theory,” Review of African Political Economy, no. 58 (1993).
R. W. Johnson, South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 305–12, attempts to use Gramsci’s ideas to discuss the ANC’s attempts to create hegemony in South Africa. The ANC and Johnson seem to share the mistaken belief that a party anchored in little but the state can gain hegemony. Thus, both are bound to fall on the reality of a “Bonapartist” situation of stalemated class relations, wherein, absent of full hegemony, Gramsci’s morbid symptoms are most likely to permeate society. If Zimbabwe’s fate is thus a chronicle of a death foretold, what is South Africa’s?
David Moore, “The Second Age of the Third World: From Primitive Accumulation to Public Goods?” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2004): 87–109.
David Moore, “Zimbabwe: Failing Better?” Association of Concerned African Scholars Bulletin: Special Issue on Zimbabwe II 80 (Winter 2008): 59–64.
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Moore, D. (2011). Zimbabwe’s Media: Between Party-State Politics and Press Freedom under Mugabe’s Rule. In: Besada, H. (eds) Zimbabwe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116436_4
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