The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
Masculinities of the press
This article offers a conclusive submission of this series whose pertinent intention was to debrief the secreted existentiality of patronage politics in the press. This perspective goes against the expected claim of the press’ impartiality in its information dissemination function. Of course, the reading for this analysis is Ambassador Cain Mathema’s book, Newspapers in Zimbabwe published in 2000. The “state of nature” — realism over idealism is central in the manufacturing of any subject matter that seeks to speak to the human mind and its surrounding environment namely, politics and the means of production.
Realism manifests as a corner stone of our daily lives’ realities and power struggles. As a result, the press is a medium for expressing the contested terrain of political interests. …The newsroom is an ideological interplanetary zone for capturing and consolidating power. Therefore, the “means to inform” determine the capacity to capture and consolidate power for all entities of any given superstructure.
The very same newsroom also serves as a space for making, unmaking, imagining and reimagining filial propensities of national belonging. The same contestations of power are ubiquitous in the international media fora which form the global public discourse. This is the major reason why when America, France and the Brits are hurt we are made to feel the pain on their behalf.
Our dirge for Paris
This is the reason why the November 2015 Paris attacks attracted vast media attention across the globe. It even attracted the undeserved empathy of Africans including those countries which are anthropological sites of unimaginable French atrocities to mankind. After the November attacks, the world was called to share the Paris’ melancholy. Some Facebookers used the French flag filter application as they used it to laminate their user profile pictures to express their personal solidarity with France. Surprisingly, the attention given to the Paris attacks exceeds that which has been given to more terror volatile spaces in the world especially in Africa.
Simply because one of the giants of global hegemony was hurt the whole of planet earth was not supposed to be at ease. This experience compatible with the biblical word “… strike the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered”. This substantiates how other media forms like Facebook which have assumed the function of the press are crucial points of analysing the global “information war”. As it stands, this war is characterised by the dominance of particular information flows at the subjectivity “other” information.
Therefore, it is mythological to assert that the press can be neutral at any point. There is bound to be a side taken by any media house. This is the major reason for the rampant cases of split patriotic consciousness in various countries the continent and the world at large. As a consequence, the main objective of the series was to prescribe how the quest for free thought plurality in Africa can be achieved. The previous articles were a response to the rigid information flow which is an outgrowth of the imperialist agenda to keep Africa polarised at the expense of anti-African narratives.
This emerges against a background of concealed embargoes of press liberty in any part of the world. As highlighted in the previous article, we are living in an era where information should be accessed in a manner that does not undermine the sovereignty of states. Issues of global hegemony must not inform the agenda setting of the already marginalised “zones of none-being” produced by hierarchies of coloniality. On the contrary, the realty witnessed in the battle ground for self-determination within the third world is that soft-imperialism has remained at the centre of global politics. The various forms of the media have served as merchants of peddling Western supremacy and its shameless subjectivist notions of the “Third-World”.
Western prejudice which is an aorta of the diverse neo-colonial projects in Africa continues to extend its mischievous fortune prospects by using the media to shape public discourse at national level. Through the media denigrating nationalist movements has been successful through fake methodologies of promoting good governance, democracy and human rights.
Enter Professor Dingilizwe Zvavanhu
The above account explains how much we are involuntary made to fight the cause of the oppressor because of their ideological capital. The “means of knowing” misguide us to think according to the terms set by their soft-imperialism. As such, one good pan-Africanist thinker and a friend, Professor Dingilizwe Zvavanhu cautiously analysed the use and abuses of national flags in the interest of realism:
It is no surprise that after the use of the French flag to forge comradeship with Paris, Zimbabwe witnessed a social-media touted regime-change campaign dubbed #ThisFlag. The #ThisFlag manthra led by the now self-exiled Pastor Mawarire became the source of public mayhem which propelled the infamous Shutdown Zimbabwe campaign. As such, Professor Jonathan Moyo alongside other Zimbabwean patriots used twitter to challenge the denigration of the Zimbabwean flag with the hashtag “Our Flag”.
This indicates that our African national flags are used as mediums to denigrate our leaders, yet on the other hand flags of colonialists are used to dignify the regimes of Europe. It’s sad because our people don’t realise that.
The above observation by Prof Zvavanhu indicates how much social media is increasingly becoming a contemporary conveyer-belt of news. Prof Jonathan Moyo’s twitter page has become a space for debating issues of national importance.
Unlike the conventional means of information dissemination, there is no censorship in social media. In social media spaces ideas compete for relevance; even the most ignorant of opinions are peddled through social media as it has become an alternative for the newspaper. The Shutdown Zimbabwe campaign gained its momentum through social-media though the gained momentum could not translate to any successful outcome to oust the ruling Zanu-PF. However, this has not deterred social-media proponents of regime change from unleashing scathing attacks on the ruling and the person of His Excellency, President Robert Mugabe.
Talk about the UZ escapade
On Thursday, the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) hosted its 2016 graduation ceremony which saw 3 661 graduates receiving their degrees from the esteemed institution. In an attempt to mess up the objective of the day, Former Zimbabwe National Students’ Union (Zinasu) president Tonderai Dombo attempted to stir a protest. He hovered a deliberately provocative placard in the guise of directly peacefully demanding jobs from His Excellence and UZ’s chancellor, President Robert Mugabe.
According to social media sources, Dombo stood on his chair facing President Mugabe and raised a poster worded:
“Graduates today, marovha mangwana (loafers tomorrow), tipei mabasa (give us jobs).”
It’s quite obvious that Dombo’s supposedly “peaceful” way of lodging a concern was strategically set to disrupt the President’s official dispatch of the graduates by the President for national service. Soon after executing his mischief, the social-media was awash with publicity of the matter. Private media also followed the trend set by social media to misrepresent issues. The NewsDay and Daily News made it appear as if the whole university had joined Dombo in his unsuccessful mayhem campaign during the recently held UZ graduation ceremony. This explains how social media content in a fast technologically evolving world needs to be embraced and cautiously given the mindfulness it deserves as a fresh mode of news transmission.
I am sure Dombo did not expect that the other students were going to ignore his plot to disrupt the proceedings of the graduation ceremony. This follows a recent trend of the opposition metanarrative which prides itself in Mawarire’s hired crowd which thronged his trial. Mawarire tried doing the same in the United States where he claimed to have attracted a lot of following through Facebook before his self-imposed exile. However, realism struck his face as there were no hired and bused crowds as was back home during his trial. Instead, his attempt to humiliate the President during the United Nations (UN) General Assembly flopped as the remnant of his supporters were outnumbered by the “Mugabe Is Right” American Zanu-PF supporters.
An oracle from Petina Gappah
A few days back, Petina Gappah who is a prolific Zimbabwean writer whose work has been classified as anti-establishment announced her literary epistemic turn on her Facebook timeline:
My first book came out in one of the big years of the Zimbabwe crisis, 2008-2009. I became the go-to person on the Zimbabwe crisis. Who did not ask me for comment? I know it caused a lot of resentment among many Zim writers and commentators, who were asking, just who is this Janey come lately who is given all these opportunities? And yes, I took every opportunity afforded to me because, not only was I then an opinion writer for the Zimbabwe Times, I was also angry that the only voices before me in in the international media had been Peter Godwin and Alexandra Fuller. Perfectly nice people, and I like both of them very much, especially Bo Fuller, but come on. Zimbabwe is bigger than a couple of voices.
Petina’s post further indicated that much of Zimbabwe’s representation in the media has been meant to promote polarisation.
She further stated that her rise to the occasion to speak about Zimbabwe was influenced by the dominance of White commentators in giving polarised opinions about Zimbabwe and she declared to never return to that path: I am not doing that stuff again. Not in a million years. It becomes a trap, you see, and you become this representative writer which is the last thing
I have ever wanted. I can do that analytical critical stuff standing on my head. I can write an article a day, each one different.
But it is the imaginative stuff that gives me the most joy. I did not realise then that I was writing for a Western audience completely incapable of accepting nuance, completely incapable of separating the critical stuff from the imaginative stuff.
The fresh position taken by Petina Gappah indicates the absolute end of the opposition dispensation and how the narratives of belonging are beginning to take a new sharp as most Zimbabwean thinkers are gaining more consciousness about the new political direction of the country:
I am not doing that stuff anymore, My books, I decided last year, will rise and fall on the strength of my gifts as a writer. They would not be propped up by the fall of my country. I refuse to exist in the world only as a citizen of Mugabe’s country. My world is bigger than that. Mugabe is not my world …
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network — LAN.
Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected]
