Wendy Willems

Reinvoking the past in the present: changing identities and appropriations of Joshua Nkomo in post-colonial Zimbabwe

This article discusses the histories, narratives and representations that have been produced by and on former ZAPU leader and Vice-President of Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo. We focus on the multiple identities and subject positions that Nkomo came to inhabit in the way in which he was represented in ZANU-PFs discourse of the early 1980s; his self-representation in Nkomos 1984 autobiography Nkomo: the story of my life and subsequent appropriations of Nkomo by different political actors in the early 2000s. In line with Stuart Halls 1996 description, we consider identities not as essentialist and fixed categories but as positional, multiple, constantly evolving and constructed through difference. We argue that the changing identities of Nkomo served the purposes and interests of a variety of political actors, ranging from the ruling party ZANU-PF to the opposition MDC. Against the background of a mushrooming of popular historical narratives evidenced by both the publication and republishing of biographies, autobiographies and significant reports, and the serialisation and recirculation of these texts in newspapers and through websites, we also argue that the many uses and appropriations of Nkomo demonstrate the continued relevance of the past in the power struggles waged by different political actors in Zimbabwe.

Emerging communities, emerging media: the case of a Zimbabwean nurse in the British 'Big Brother' show

Abstract Research on media and diasporic communities has often either focused on representations of ethnic minorities in mainstream media or looked at the use of media by diasporic communities. By exclusively focusing on media coverage, the first approach has denied agency to how those represented in mainstream media interpret, accept or challenge representations of themselves. The second approach constructs its object of study as diasporic media and hereby neglects the way in which these interact with and respond to mainstream media. This article argues that a combination of these two approaches is fruitful as it allows for a more interactive and dynamic approach to mainstream and diasporic media which highlights the way in which one shapes the other. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of debates among diasporic Zimbabweans in Internet chatrooms about the participation of Zimbabwean nurse Makosi Musambasi in the British Big Brother 6 series broadcast on Channel Four in 2005.

Comic Strips and “the Crisis”: Postcolonial Laughter and Coping With Everyday Life in Zimbabwe

In African Studies, political cartoons and comic strips have frequently been analyzed in relation to concepts of power and resistance and considered as ways in which those subject to power challenge the rulers (Mason, 2002; Mbembe, 2001; Nyamnjoh, 2009). To a certain extent, these studies have reflected the wider debate on the role of humor in the relation between rulers and ruled in the postcolony. In media and cultural studies, scholars have analyzed comics primarily as ideological texts which offer a particular framing of reality. Drawing on the Zimbabwean comic strip Chikwama, which was published in the Zimbabwean privately owned newspaper The Daily News in the early 2000s, this article argues that postcolonial laughter does not always address those in power, but humor may also point fingers at those subject to power in an attempt to make readers cope with the tragic events unfolding around them. Laughter frequently adopts a self-reflexive mode through which those subject to power mock their own powerlessness and lack of agency in the face of a system that they perceive as immutable. Furthermore, the strip Chikwama also highlights how media discourse came to reflect the way in which politics slowly invaded the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, hereby reinforcing the importance of treating media texts as embedded in broader social discourses. The comic strip Chikwama did not only replicate the particular institutional ideology of The Daily News but also mirrored the way in which ordinary Zimbabweans negotiated the social and economic impact of the crisis on an everyday basis.

Theorizing Media as/and Civil Society in Africa

Existing research on media and civil society in Africa has often adopted a rather restrictive understanding of media (defined as formal, professionalized forms of mass media) and civil society (equated with nongovernmental organizations). Furthermore, studies have frequently understood media as one component of a larger civil society comprising of a range of actors including the church and nongovernmental organizations. This chapter examines alternative routes of theorizing how different forms of old and new, formal and popular, mainstream and alternative, and privately owned and state-owned media have promoted and/or constrained the growth of a variety of forms of civil society and activism in Africa. Drawing on critical debates in the field of “alternative media studies” and reflections on the usefulness of the concept of civil society in African Studies, this chapter argues that there is room for more in-depth interrogation of the symbiotic relation between media and civil society on the continent. Furthermore, by defining media in a broader sense, we are able to shed light on the range of genres and media forms that have helped to mediate the concerns of African civil society, including popular music, humor, and guerilla journalism. Lastly, adopting a historical and less prescriptive definition of civil society helps to gain insight into the broader spectrum of civic agency on the continent, and the role played by both old and new media in either constraining or promoting these expressions in both colonial and postcolonial Africa.

The ballot vote as embedded ritual: a radical critique of liberal-democratic approaches to media and elections in Africa

A significant part of scholarship on media in Africa has adopted the normative ideal of liberal democracy, which defines democracy primarily as electoral democracy. Media institutions, in this regard, are considered to play an important role in strengthening the democratic process and making government more accountable to its citizens. Media are seen as constituting a discursive space or Habermasian public sphere where issues of public concern can be deliberated. Audiences are treated as citizens engaged in public dialogue in and through the media. In this approach, a major task of modern mass media is to offer information in order to enable citizens to participate meaningfully in political life such as providing fair and ‘objective’ coverage on all major candidates in elections that would allow citizens to make a well-informed choice. This article critiques the tendency in work on media in Africa to equate democracy with a form of electoral democracy. First of all, the article advocates a more substantive definition of democracy which goes beyond merely the regular conduct of free and fair elections, a multi-party system, respect for human rights and press freedom. Adopting radical democracy as a normative ideal reveals the crucial role of media – beyond merely elections – in democratising power relations and correcting structural inequalities. Secondly, the article argues that liberal-democratic approaches to media and elections presuppose a universal meaning of elections, hereby ignoring the particular embedded meaning that elections obtain in the African context. Instead of treating media as the neutral arbiters of information on election candidates, I offer an alternative, critical research agenda that considers the engagement between media institutions and political actors as a symbiotic relationship that ultimately seeks to legitimise certain election candidates and condone election rituals as democratic events par excellence.

Audience Perceptions of Radio Stations and Journalists in the Great Lakes

African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume contributes to the broader project of provincializing and decolonizing audience and internet studies.For the past ten years, radio has been the focus of many media assistance projects in the African Great Lakes region, especially in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Burundi. In those post-conflict contexts, radio stations have been considered as crucial for peace building, reconstruction and reconciliation, at the national, as well as regional levels. But very little is known about how the local audiences relate to media, as audience polls are scarce and qualitative research often limited and biased. Only international NGOs (and not the media nor advertising industry) sometimes investigate media consumption in order to assess the impact of their programmes. In this chapter, we first interrogate the notion of the audience as viewed by the media assistance organizations and the assumptions underlying most of their potential ‘effects’ on peace building. Then, drawing from a research implemented in 2011-2012 in five cities of the region , we underline a few findings likely to draw a more complex profile of these post-conflict audiences. Looking at the popularity of some programmes and journalists, as well as at the reasons of their success, we show, on the one hand, how cross-national comparison can be useful for a better understanding of media practices in the region, and, on the other hand, how both national contexts and transnational developments mix to produce a diversity of local and permanently re-shaped media cultures