Introduction

Former Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe’s legacy is a mixture of confronting imperialism and neo-colonialism, and at the same time violating the human rights of his own people, including presiding over a genocide between 1983–87. Mugabe has also been regarded as an enemy of the media, Civil Society Organisation (CSOs) and the clergy (church) which he characterised as serving an imperial agenda in postcolonial Zimbabwe. The media, CSOs and the church are generally seen in this view as comprising civil society, that is the space outside of government and business (Graham, 2001; Hearn, 2001; Makumbe, 1998). In Zimbabwe, civil society organisations – such as the Media Institute in Southern Africa (MISA), the Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe (VMCZ), and the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZHLR) – that are engaged in defending the media and fighting for a broader space for media in Zimbabwe have been characterised as being in the service of Western imperialism by the country’s leadership. This is despite the fact that these organisations see themselves as engaged in genuine media activism meant to open up the democratic space for media operations in the country. However, what can be regarded as an epistemological struggle between media activists in Zimbabwe and the ruling elites is also precisely the question of what media freedom, and by extension media activism, actually consists of within the historical context of the country.

This paper seeks to offer a critique of different ideas of media freedom and media activism in Zimbabwe. Taking up the challenge to rethink the deployment of theory and methods in African media scholarship, I start by theorising what a decolonial idea of media activism in Zimbabwe today would look like (Mutsvairo, 2018; Moyo and Mutsvairo, 2018, Chasi and Rodny-Gumede, 2018; Chiumbu, 2016). I then make a historical case based on the competing visions of the normative expectations of Zimbabwean media performance, to illustrate what media freedom has meant in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. I do this by discussing various case studies when the ideological conflict between the country’s leaders and the media activists and journalists has surfaced and played out in public. In the third section, I analyse interviews with selected key informants among political leaders, leaders in media organisations and a select number of journalists. In these interviews, the focus is on competing visions of media freedom and media activism.

Towards a decolonial idea of press freedom and media activism in Zimbabwe today

Following Wynter (2003) and Fanon (1963), Maldonado-Torres (2017 and 2007) notes that what limits hegemonic liberal and neoliberal visions of human freedom and liberation is that they are built on conceptions of subjectivity rooted in coloniality. Illustrating this thesis, in the context of human rights discourse, he points out that the idea of the human, as a universal subject or figure, is itself riddled with and limited by coloniality. In the West, the human appears as a figure separated from the divine through a secular-line and through racialised constructs where an ‘onto-Manichean colonial line’ separates the human and the barbarian (Maldonado-Torres, 2017: 117). In postcolonial countries, like Zimbabwe, to talk of press freedom as a human right outside ‘a decolonization of the concept of the human’ is to fall into the vampirism of coloniality (Maldonaldo-Torres, 2017: 117; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013: 11).

This essay brings together postcolonial and decolonial theories whilst thinking through the problematic of press freedom and media activism in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Decolonial theorists argue, and insist, that decoloniality is not postcolonialism (Maldonaldo-Torres, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). However, this essay locates its argument in the point of convergence between the two as anti-colonial theoretical postures (Bhambra, 2014; Asher, 2017). Hall defines the postcolonial as the conjectural moment ‘in which both the crisis of the uncompleted struggle for “decolonisation” and the crisis of the “post-independence” state are deeply inscribed’ (Hall, 1996: 224). While emphasising that coloniality is different from colonialism, Maldonaldo-Torres defines it as ‘long standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ (2007: 243). Ndlovu-Gatsheni refers to coloniality as ‘a leitmotif of global imperial designs […] the invisible vampirism of technologies of imperialism and colonial matrices of power that continue to exist in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies of modern subjects in Africa and the entire global South’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013: 11). The way Hall (1996) thinks about the endurance of colonialism in the postcolonial moment is not different from the emphasis that Maldonaldo-Torres (2007) and Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) ascribe to coloniality as something born out of colonialism and modernity.

Press freedom in Zimbabwe, as in most postcolonial states, is still thought of in the liberal sense. White, firmly locates journalists at the centre of press freedom, referring to press freedom as ‘editorial and journalistic freedom’ that allows the media to fulfil the normative expectation of setting ‘the agenda for debating the national development goals’ (2011: 221). Reference to ‘national development goals’ exposes his liberal locus of enunciation. He notes that there should be the assumption that the media have the editorial capacity and leadership to set the agenda, and that, as part of the civil society, they have ‘the vision,’ ‘the will’ and ‘the unity’ to push for these developmental goals (White, 2011: 221). This conceptualisation of the media and media freedom, and what it can do, is based on liberal normative expectations of the media. These liberal normative expectations of the media include the watchdog role, the informational role, and the entertainment role, amongst others. What is assumed and taken for granted is that the media operate in a ‘free market’ where there is no connection between it (the media) and politics, and there is minimal government intervention in the market, in general, and in the media, specifically. The liberal tradition in Africa has been characterised by an emphasis on the private ownership of media relying heavily on advertisements and sales (Heath, 1997: 30). In Zimbabwe, even where the print media are owned by the government, they still operate and compete in the (free) market for sales and for advertising.

According to Raeijmaekers and Maeseele, the liberal model, ‘conceives society as a complex of competing groups and interests, in which power is fragmented and widely diffused’ (2015: 1044). In this imagined liberal democratic context, ‘the main goals of media are checking on the government and informing and representing the people’ (Raeijmaekers and Maeseele, 2015: 1044). According to Curran and Seaton, in the liberal perspective, it is argued that the freedom to publish in the context of a free market allows for a diversity of viewpoints making the press a representative institution (Curran and Seaton, 2009: 326). This view is limited in that it focuses only on the government as a possible threat to press freedom and ignores two points. First, it ignores those times when the government becomes the enabler and supporter of the media for the benefit of the wider spectrum of society. At independence in 1980, Zimbabwe faced the challenge that the media were privately owned by foreign (South African) white-owned and controlled- companies. Ronning and Kupe note that during the colonial period ‘newspapers and broadcasting mainly served the needs of the colonial administrators’ such that these news organisations ‘together with other colonial social and cultural institutions, constituted a colonial public sphere’ (2000: 138). The colonial public sphere catered for a narrow section of the Zimbabwean population. The Zimbabwean government had to create the Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust (ZMMT) in January 1981 to buy shares of the South African Argus Company within a newspaper group that dominated print media space in the country. This was ostensibly to ensure that the media served a broader section of society. Ronning and Kupe posit that ZMMT was not only intended to serve as a platform to change ownership and editorial staffing at the newspaper but to ensure that the public print media not only served white interests but the ‘interests of the broad section of Zimbabwean society’ (2000: 139). Trapped in the debate of whether to nationalise the media group or to keep it private, the government faced the challenge on ‘how to decolonize the foreign-owned media while maintaining some national stake in them without the direct intervention of the state’ (Ronning and Kupe, 2000: 139). With hindsight, what has happened with ‘Zimpapers’, must not obscure the challenges faced in the early years of independence concerning the media, and how government efforts in 1981 were targeted at enlarging the ‘public sphere’ to encompass the majority black population.

Second, the view that freedom to publish in the context of a free market allows for a diversity of viewpoints making the press a representative institution is a view that ignores those times when the market – that is businesses and other commercial interests – become a threat to media freedom. This can happen in many ways. For example, in Zimbabwe, the mobile giant Econet was in 2015 involved in a fracas that sought to silence NewsDay. The situation at the time of Zimbabwe’s independence, as described in the previous section, also demonstrates that the market does not necessarily extend media access and freedom to embrace a diversity of opinions. In the years before 1980, the media in Rhodesia operated as part of a racist public sphere that occluded black views and opinions or never took them seriously. As Ronning and Kupe (2000) allude to, the feeling in the new government of the time was that, that should not continue into the independence years. The South African situation is exemplary here. The Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) hearings found that in the pre-1994 period, the media in South Africa colluded with the apartheid system (TRC Report, 1998). A 1999 inquiry into racism in the media by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) concluded that the media in the country, ‘reflect a persistent pattern of racist expressions, […], persistent racist stereotypes, racial insensitivity’ and that South African media ‘can be characterised as racist institutions’ (SAHRC, 2000: 89). This raised a lot of debate in academic circles with some academics arguing that the research was flawed (Berger, 2001; Tomaselli, 2000). However, these academics also pointed out that the shortcomings of the SAHRC research did not mean that the media in South Africa were not racist. Some scholars went further to point out how the media in South Africa have actively deployed elaborate discursive strategies to deny its racism (Durrheim, Quayle, Whitehead and Kriel, 2005; Wasserman, 2010). It is the perpetuation of this history of a racially exclusive ‘public sphere’ in the setup of the media industry as mostly white and privately owned that has underpinned calls for media transformation in the country (Tomaselli, 2000; Berger, 2001; Boloka and Krabil, 2000). The Zimbabwean government foresaw this and wanted to pre-empt it. To appreciate how the liberal understanding of media freedom is insufficient for a postcolonial country like Zimbabwe, we need to embrace a decolonial approach (Mutsvairo, 2018; Moyo and Mutsvairo, 2018, Chasi and Rodny-Gumede, 2018; Chiumbu, 2016). To imagine a decolonial press freedom is to think beyond the current liberal rooted conceptions of media freedom. This entails, first, challenging the blind universalism and Eurocentrism of liberal theory including the notion of the public sphere. Second, it is to displace the market and put people at the centre of the equation.

Challenging the blind universalism of Eurocentric theory, Allen (2016) focuses on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the later thinkers it inspired including Jurgen Habermas whose concept of the public sphere has become hegemonic in Eurocentric ideas of press freedom. What has been pointed out as the challenge to this brand of critical theory is its silence on colonialism and race and how these are co-constitutive with modernity (Allen, 2016; Ciccariello-Maher, 2016). Although Baum admits that, set against its lofty goals of human emancipation, critical theory fails to acknowledge the history of colonialism, he still believes that in its critique of antisemitism, the Frankfurt School Critical Theory offers analytical resources ‘with respect to confronting racism and colonialism’ (2015: 420). In response, Ciccariello-Maher (2016) notes that the failures of the Frankfurt school are writ in its Eurocentrism that makes it blind to the fact that the holocaust, was a colonial horror, coming back home. Here Ciccariello-Maher, draws our attention to Aime Cesaire’s observation that, in the holocaust, European modernity faced the horror it created in colonisation as ‘colonial methods and concepts returned suddenly and unexpectedly to European soil’ (2016: 133). Allen (2016)’s tactic of decolonising theory involves the double play of refusal and inheriting. It is a refusal ‘to remain faithful to its core doctrines or central figures’ and inheriting it, that is, taking it up ‘while simultaneously radically transforming it’ (Allen, 2016: xiii). Allen also notes that, contrary to its stated aims to pursue emancipation, critical theory fails to engage ‘substantively with one of the most influential branches of critical theory, in the broader sense of that term, to have emerged in recent decades— postcolonial studies and theory’ (2016: xiv). According to Allen, the failure for critical theory to engage with post- and decolonial theories, is located in the way it grounds normativity (Allen, 2016: xiv). Normativity is seen as either lying in ideas of historical progress or centred on a foundationalist conception of practical reason (Allen, 2016: xiv). This becomes problematic ‘given the deep connections between ideas of historical progress and development and normative foundationalism and the theory and practice of Eurocentric imperialism’ (Allen, 2016: xv). In the Global South academy, western critical theory, then appears as entangled in the colonial project. As has been argued above, to argue, in the liberal sense, that freedom to publish in the context of a free market allows for a diversity of viewpoints making the press a representative institution is to ignore colonial history and to ignore the ravages of the ‘market’ in the postcolony.

In that challenging this centering of the market is to problematize the individualism of Eurocentric conceptions of public life, displacing the market is thus linked to the point previously argued. Displacing the market, as some kind of public sphere, entails not thinking about the journalist, or media workers, as Leviathan figures but as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals. To Gramsci, organic intellectuals, are located within the socio-economic structure of their society (Gramsci, 1971). He argues that:

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.

Nothing sets these intellectuals apart from their society or community. The journalist, as an organic intellectual, would be expected to be located within his community. A decolonial conceptualisation of press freedom, requires us to think in the Nguni sense: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (I am because of other people). It is this realisation of interconnectedness and the acceptance by journalists and political leaders alike that their fate is tied to the fate of the broader society that should encourage a new media politics.

Struggles over press freedom: A brief history

In this section, I proffer some examples that illustrate the historical struggle around press freedom in Zimbabwe. The cases that I discuss here include the work of veteran journalist and editor Geoff Nyarota, the struggle around the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), President Mugabe’s rhetoric against the media and the civil society, and the White city bombing in 2018 where some journalists were injured. In that it seems like an extraneous incident, the use of the case of the White City bombing needs to be explained here. Journalists work mostly in public spaces and public events. The White City bombing is studied here as the beginning of some examples of the semi-militarisation of politics in Zimbabwe whereby former soldiers became active party political players, and soldiers have been let loose from the barracks to deal with the public as later exemplified in two protests (August 2018 and January 2019). The White City bombing is considered as the beginning of the changing nature of the space within which journalists in Zimbabwe can now operate since November 2017. After the White City bombing, there have been live shootings of members of the public as happened in August 2018 after protests around election results in Harare. It happened again in January 2019. In retrospect, once the soldiers had marched out of barracks in November 2017, seized power on behalf of a civilian leader, the military had effectively showed their face again in Zimbabwean politics. The bomb at the White City rally, the live ammunition in the streets of Harare in August 2018 and in January 2019 are therefore not aberrant events but centrally situated in the discursive field of Zimbabwean politics post-November 2017. As journalists are always at the front at public events such as rallies and protests, they are always the most unsafe of attendees. Violence might not have been aimed at them, but in this type of context journalists always suffer as collateral damage. In situations of war and violence, violence is not aimed at journalists, but, because of the nature of their work, it is important to consider the threat of any war or violence to journalists. These are some of the few cases that illustrate the evolving media context and the struggle for press freedom in Zimbabwe.

Competing visions of media freedom

In speaking to journalists, politicians and media activists, it is clear that most of them think of or conceptualise press freedom within the normative liberal frame. It is easy to see how the normative liberal idea of press freedom has come to be hegemonic. Zimbabwe inherited its media, the industry itself and with it its media culture, from Rhodesia. As with business, politics, education, and other facets of public life, Zimbabwe, like an obedient colony, still follows the liberal British heritage bequeathed to it at independence in 1980. As shall be seen in the discussions of the interviews that follow, the ideological implications of holding on to a liberal version of press freedom is that most journalists, activists and politicians refuse to engage with a counter-narrative that calls for responsibility from media practitioners, especially when it comes from political leaders on the left like Robert Mugabe, despite his prevarications at times. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015) discusses the challenges of making sense of the politics of a leader like Mugabe, who stands up to the West with his leftist pan-African rhetoric, but doles out violence for his own citizens. The point raised here is that beyond the personalities of the leaders and the journalists, debates around press freedom in Zimbabwe are ideological and contested. Liberal notions of press freedom are upheld as the common-sense, yet they are as equally ideological as the leftist pan-Africanism of Mugabe. At the end of the day, what must be emphasised is the desirability of press freedom in Zimbabwe – what form it takes is what can always be debated.

Before discussing the interviews, I must give a short explanation of the methodology. In-depth interviews were undertaken as an old way of gathering systematic qualitative data that is literally an inter-view, that is, an exchange of views between the researcher and the researched (Kvale, 2007: 5). They are meant to gain more information on the views and understandings of people that are being researched. In this paper, I wanted to understand journalists, politicians and activists’ understandings of media freedom. As pointed in the previous paragraph, media freedom among journalists is still largely thought of in the discourse of liberal politics. In selecting the interviewees, the researcher used a combination of purposive and snowball sampling. Journalists were approached as interviewees based on their work and their visibility as media practitioners in different spaces of the media. Some of the journalists were approached on the advice of some of the interviewees. The goal was not to achieve tribal or regional balancing, rather the balancing out in terms of gender and differences in a variety of types of media in the country. Some of the journalists worked for big newspaper companies that are regarded as mainstream. However, others worked for what can be regarded as alternative media organisations whose work is mainly based online. Most of the female journalists interviewed work in such alternative spaces. Faith Ndlovu, who works for the voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe (VMCZ) is based in Harare. There was an option to interview her or her boss, Mr Loughty Dube. Considering issues of gender, I decided on her. Dr. Mphathisi Ndlovu, interviewed here as a key informant, is an academic, researching and teaching at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Bulawayo, and has been researching and publishing on Zimbabwean media for many years now. Tapfuma Machakaire is a journalist who has worked for a long time in Bulawayo, but would not consider himself as a Matabeleland person. In fact, he views himself as a Zimbabwean journalist; his self-understanding is that he is a national reporter and he refuses to be tribalised or regionalised. In that the journalists, media activists and politicians that I interviewed work within the context of Zimbabwean nationalism, I believe their views and opinions are valid in a national context. Considering that journalism, as a public good, is thought of in national terms in Zimbabwe, I believe their opinions and views are reputable as a source of knowledge on Zimbabwean journalism. In terms of ethical issues, I had to clear with all the interviewees the use of their names and in terms of what they had said they needed for protection. All of them were comfortable being identified with their views. However, one interviewee, for professional reasons, requested that they should not be identified with a certain opinion or observation that they had made. I respected that request.

Conclusion

On one hand, the serious points raised by the ruling elite in Africa, specifically in Zimbabwe, that some CSOs, including the private media are used by Western countries to undermine the countries that they lead, has been undermined by their own excesses against their people. On the other hand, media activism around freedom of expression and the right to report without hindrance, has been limited by its ideological underpinnings that overrely on Western liberal normative values, exposing them to an easy dismissal as lapdogs of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Importantly, this struggle between political leaders, most of whom have nationalist backgrounds, and media activists and journalists who want unfettered freedom of expression is primarily an ideological struggle concerning the normative conceptualisation of the role of the media in these relatively young nations. This essay argues for a decolonial imperative to challenge the Eurocentrism of the ideas of progress in liberal theoretical resources – such as the concept of the public sphere – that for a long time have been deployed in thinking about press freedom in postcolonial Africa. Tied to this, it is equally important to challenge the centrality of the market in thinking about press freedom and replace its emphasis on the journalist as an individual with the idea of the people as a bloc, and as a subject of media freedom and freedom of expression. This could close down the ideological battles between the ruling elite and the media. This is because likewise as politicians ideally serve the people, a media that serves the people, and not markets, would be beyond reproach.

Competing Interests

The research was conducted as part of PhD studies funded by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and the Canon Collins Trust.