Press Silence in Postcolonial Zimbabwe

News Whiteouts, Journalism and Power

Zvenyika Eckson Mugari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000036978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book focuses on news silence in Zimbabwe, taking as a point of departure the (in)famous blank spaces (whiteouts) which newspapers published to protest official censorship policy imposed by the Rhodesian government from the mid-1960s to the end of that decade.

Based on archived news content, the author investigates the cause(s) of the disappearance of blank spaces in Zimbabwe's newspapers and establishes whether and how the blank spaces may have been continued by stealth and proposes a model of doing journalism where news is inclusive, just and less productive of blank spaces. The author explores the broader ramifications of news silences, tacit or covert on society's sense of the world and their place in it. It questions whether and how news media continued with the practice of epistemic deletions and continue to draw on the colonial archive for conceptual maps with which to define and interpret contemporary postcolonial realities and challenges in Zimbabwe.

This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and academics researching the press in contemporary Africa, critical media analysis, media and society studies, and news as discourse.

1 Colonial foundations of press silence in Zimbabwe

Introduction

Zimbabwe’s colonial encounter with Europeans and her insertion into the modern global geo-political order happened to her towards the end of the nineteenth century by proxy (it can be argued) mediated by South Africa. This is not to understate an earlier history of contact between indigenous inhabitants of the territory we now call Zimbabwe with European traders of Portuguese extraction who visited the Mwenemutapa capital from their established seaports along the Mozambican coast. That earlier historical encounter, about which much has already been documented in Zimbabwe’s historiography (Randles 1979), has its legitimate place as a chapter in the history of Zimbabwe. The subject of the early pre-colonial period, however, falls outside the scope of this study. The concern here is with the news and how the press invokes news values to account for and institutionalise epistemic exclusion and silencing of alternative ways of knowing and in the process aid and abate wittingly or otherwise the maintenance and repair of systems of domination in society. This chapter provides a brief outline of the historical link between the press and the governing authority from when the first newspaper was published in Zimbabwe to the present. It also traces how the dual parentage of government and the press in modern-day Zimbabwe to South Africa.

The historical origin of newspaper production in and about occurrences in the land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi rivers is intricately linked to the founding of this territory as a British colony in 1890, with the first newspaper under the title Mashonaland Herald and Zambesian Times being published on 27 June 1891 (Gale, 1962), only a year after Cecil John Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC) had taken occupation of the territory. The publishers of this newspaper were The Argus Printing & Publishing Company Ltd., a subsidiary of the Argus Company of South Africa based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, a newspaper conglomerate with very strong links with Rhodes’ BSAC. In fact, historical record has it that the Argus Company came to set up in Salisbury on invitation by Rhodes. It is therefore instructive to note that right from its inception the press was viewed as an important if not indispensable part of the colonial enterprise. The façade of separation between those who owned and produced the press and those who ran the colonial establishment politically was kept in place and maintained throughout the colonial period on the tacit assumption that this arrangement guaranteed and safeguarded the press’s editorial autonomy, so critical for the credibility and believability of its news offerings. The BSAC and the Cape Argus had many points of intersection historically and economically as they expanded their operations across the Limpopo into new-found territory. The coincidence of mind and economic interests was clearly encapsulated in the editorial charter of all newspaper publications of the Rhodesia Printing and Publishing Company, as the Argus’ Rhodesian subsidiary company was known. In those early years of company rule, the line of separation between the press and the BSAC was indeed thin and blurred, evidenced by the fact that The Rhodesia Herald conflated its role as an impartial chronicler of events and being the colonial authority’s mouthpiece as it saw no contradiction in printing the British South Africa Company Government Gazette, as a supplement to The Rhodesia Herald. It also did not find participation in and benefiting from Rhodes’ largesse, by way of allocations of large tracts of prime land expropriated from Africans, problematic and compromising of its watchdog role.

In the beginning was communication

The coming of the Pioneer Column in 1890 did not mark the beginning of communication in Zimbabwe even among the small number of white settlers who soon dispersed in all directions from Fort Salisbury, much less so, for the African population who lived in all of the country. People were communicating. It would be to make a huge claim to assume that the way of life of the nascent multi-racial community altered in any significant way with the publication of the first newspaper to be published in Zimbabwe under the name The Mashonaland Herald and Zambezian Times by William Ernest Fairbridge, agent of the South African Argus Newspapers company, in Salisbury on 27 June 1891 (Gale, 1962). The celebration of this event has continued to distract from any serious scholarly attempt to engage with the study of communication generally, especially of the larger population of Zimbabwe who have continued to live their lives untouched by the press, those who live outside of the media circuits. The erroneous assumption that those without a press have no means of communication among themselves, partly explains why the very well organised Mashona rebellion of 1896–1897 caught the white settler community in the then Rhodesia flatfooted. Surprisingly, there has been no serious attempt made to systematically study the organisation of an intricate system of communication that was behind that uprising mediated by human agents. No system of modern technicised exchange of information could match it in potency. This is not to romanticise the oral-based communication over other more modern technology based forms of communication. It, too, had its own flaws. For example, it is doubtful that hierarchically organised as it was around spirit mediums as the messengers of Mwari ¹ could have been immune to abuse by those who wielded almost unchecked power over the form and content of that message in a way that produced silencing of its own.

The other weakness derived from its reliance on human oral messaging, where the original messages were prone to being altered in the telling as the signal fires lit on top of kopjes and chain-letter messages of the Mwari cult passed from village to village. Once the human agents (the masvikiros) ‘spirit mediums’, with Mkwati at the command centre from whence Mwari spoke the word at the sacred shrine of Mabweadziva in Matonjeni, it had to be relayed through the spirit mediums of Kaguvi, the Mhondoro of central Mashonaland and other regional spirit mediums or Mhondoros such as Nehanda Nyakasikana of Mazoe and Goronga of Lomagundi areas (Ranger, 1967). Once this network of trusted spirit mediums who formed its central nervous system were taken out, the communication system that had sustained the revolt withered away, and so ended the first Chimurenga. Post-facto reconstruction of a coherent account of how the guerrilla messaging techniques behind the Shona rebellion worked is near impossible from the colonial news archive. This is partly due to histriography’s focus on individual personalities and its valorisation of the written record and documentary evidence.

That history is often involved in the production of the past in the service of the present hegemon and that it interprets that past in terms of the dominant thought patterns and prejudices of the time is evident in the debate that ensued between Beach and Ranger over the historical significance of the First Chimurenga in the history of Zimbabwe. Beach, writing from a colonial locus of articulation, premises his whole counter-Rangerian thesis on the inferiority of the African, more specifically the Shona whose capacity to organise was held in question. From that point of departure, he then goes on to argue that innocent, scattered and without a unitary state as the Shona were, they could not have been in a position to muster the organisational capacity to spearhead a centralised system of war planning and execution necessary in an uprising against white settlers. His account, however, becomes self-contradictory on many points when it makes the acknowledgement of how war spoils were discovered at the mediums of Kaguvi and Nehanda’s strongholds, a detail which should have suggested to any observer that the two must have played key roles as coordinators who had authority over how the war spoils were to be distributed. As a good historian of empire, Beach finds no contradiction in terms, in that the colonial administration in its wisdom particularly targeted chief Mashayan’ombe and that even after killing him would neither rest nor declare that the war was over, until they had arrested, tried and executed the spirit mediums Charwe (Nehanda) and Gumboreshumba (Kaguvi) and the fact that the uprising was declared to have ended after that (Ranger, 1967; Beach, 1979; Beach, 1998).

Historiography, like other objectivist knowledge systems such as mainstream journalism, is simply unconscious of the limitations imposed by its own methods in that the evidence (documentary and oral evidence obtained from trial records and accounts of interested eye witnesses) on which it bases its inductive and deductive reasoning to explain who was and who was not responsible for what during the uprising cannot wash. But what history is silent about or leaves unsaid may be far more important in promoting certain myths rather than others in a manner that sustains and stabilises hegemonic structures of oppression and unequal power relations. What even complicated matters was the incapacity of the English jurisprudence to ascertain beyond reasonable doubt who it was they had on trial, the medium Charwe or the Nehanda Spirit that possessed her, since it is also recorded that Charwe during her trial would appear to go into and out of a trance and behave in the most unpredictable manner. ‘The Nehanda medium, however, began to dance, to laugh and to talk so that the warders were obliged to tie her hands and watch her continually’ (Ranger, 1967: 309). Even more complicated would be how to decide if at the time of issuing the order to kill Native Commissioner Pollard, indeed the order came from Charwe the person or from Nehanda the Spirit, speaking through Charwe, which was actually most likely to have been the case, given the authority and force the message had on those who carried out the order. The decidability of this case becomes even trickier if one factored the religious system of the indigenous people centred on the belief of an almighty god ‘Mwari to whom respect is due’ (Wilson and Reynolds, 1972: 32). It needed to be acknowledged that the African god did not have a written word nor was there a mediating technology. God communicated directly with the people through a network of human priests and priestesses or spirit mediums present in every region and inter-generationally. In this case the spirit mediums who issued the orders and those who carried them out were not the authors of the messages, they were only vessels through which the divine will had to be operationalised. Such an argument is raised by Beach in a post-facto defence of the innocence of Charwe, the Nehanda spirit medium who was tried, convicted with the murder of Pollard and sentenced to death by public execution. The pillar of his argument though is to dismiss the notion that the Shona could have had any significant influence on the uprising implied in Ranger’s thesis. According to him only the Ndebele could have had such organisational capacity. While he accuses others of allowing themselves to be influenced by popular opinion about a Shona-instigated revolt in Mashonaland, he is blind to the influence of widely shared racist prejudices against the Shona according to which the Shona were viewed as a childlike ‘race’ in need of white protection against the more warlike Matebele. A typical Shona according to white legend was an easy-going fellow with no mind of his own and prone to manipulation (see the story of the Tangwena resistance to forced removal in Chapter 4 of the book). ‘The African is above all a merry fellow who loves life and laughter. His laughter shakes his whole body and takes possession of all his senses. He loves to chatter with his fellows and the noisier the gathering, the happier he is’ (Wilson and Reynolds, 1972: 32).

The racist stereotypes of a contended African so prevalent in the colonial press were responsible for the perfect surprise and the devastation that marked the beginning of the Mashonaland uprising. The press silence about growing discontent among the Africans with some of the more oppressive policies of the colonial (mal)administration had lulled white settlers with a false sense of security. It had also blinded them to true capabilities of African organisation, internal coherence and communication, which the apparent fragmentation of Shona chiefdoms belied. That there existed a system and a network of effective communication connecting dispersed Shona communities could be inferred from the simultaneity and seeming spontaneity of killings of white people in different regions under different chiefly jurisdictions across most parts of Mashonaland in June 1896. The communication strategy also involved acts of sabotage and disabling of the enemy’s communication systems by targeting for destruction telegraphic posts, the killing of telegraphic operators and cutting of the lines of telegraph. The Alice Mine battle in Mazoe was an illustrative case of a pervading consciousness, on both sides, of the effectivity of undercutting lines of communications as a war strategy.

Here was a system of communication whose strength lay in a dispersed network of dedicated messenger/mediums who left no written record of how they operated or of the content of the messages they relayed. It was due to the arrogance of white ignorance that The Rhodesia Herald’s reporters were caught unawares when the Mashonaland uprising erupted on 16 June 1896 and inflicted many casualties among the settler community. The Rhodesian press silence on how the proverbial shoe of colonial subjugation was pinching on the African foot was probably responsible for the Herald’s tangential reporting on 17 June 1896 when the colony was literally burning. Gale recorded the disgraceful failure of the Rhodesian press in the following terms:

The unpreparedness of the (white) people of Mashonaland for the Mashona rising when it broke out with the devastating suddenness on June 16, 1896, is indicated by the issue of the Rhodesia Herald published the following day. Lonely prospectors and miners had been murdered, the Norton family, who farmed on the banks of the Hunyani river … had been frightfully butchered, the flame of rebellion was racing from kraal to kraal, but there is not a hint of this in the issue of June 17. (Gale, 1962: 27)

The newspaper’s editorial orientation prioritised news by and about the white settler community, blunting and blinding its capacity to gauge the growing resentment among the black subject population. Even in the subsequent editions of The Herald, beginning with its 24 June 1896 edition, the paper true to its editorial charter interprets the events since the previous week in terms of white fears and opinions of the evolving crisis which the paper describes as the ‘Mashonaland uprising’ and later as the ‘rebellion’. The crisis remained top of The Rhodesia Herald’s news agenda throughout the remainder of 1896 up to the end of 1897 with the capture, trial and execution of Nehanda and Kagubi as the main instigators of the uprising.

The organisational build-up among Africans that culminated in the tragic ‘surprise killings’ of many white people in different parts of Mashonaland beginning on the evening of 15 June 1896 was missed by The Herald. Some historians later questioned the basis for describing political events and developments in Mashonaland, beginning June 1896 as a rebellion, dismissing it as a view largely based on white fear and prejudice and not on any substantively expressed understanding of the developments by Africans responsible for instigating the events (Dawson, 2011). Beach is highly sceptical of the veracity of the Shona rebellion narrative which white colonial newspapers ran and which historians such as Terrence Ranger engage with in their writing. Such a historical narrative was premised on the assumption of the existence of a highly organised and united Shona society prior to the uprising. ‘The Shona … however, had enjoyed no such political unity since the 1840s, or, it seems, before then. How, then, had they achieved such a feat of political organization by June 1896?’ opines Beach (1979: 398).

Figure 1.1 The Rhodesia Herald reports ‘The Mashona Rising’ 24 June 1896. The killed listing was decidedly white. Reprinted by permission. National Archives of Zimbabwe.

However, as soon as it became established fact that the Mashonaland uprising was in full swing, we are told, ‘the Herald adopted a highly responsible attitude and showed an understanding of the difficulties facing the authorities … When the Natal Volunteers and the Imperial forces arrived, the paper sent a special correspondent with them on their punitive sorties and his reports were published in full’ (Gale, 1962: 49). In fact, during the whole campaign to put down the rebellion, the colonial press establishment viewed its function as one of not only to give the news but also to keep morale alive among the settler community in the face of adversity. ‘The newspapers’ war correspondents (embeds) played their part as defenders and thus came under military discipline in addition to being newspaper correspondents’ (Gale, 1962: 47).

The colonial press did not take its lessons then, nor had it learnt any lessons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Colonial foundations of press silence in Zimbabwe
• 2. Colonial press and intersecting loci of silencing
• 3. News whiteouts under UDI and after
• 4. News silence on forced removals in colonial Rhodesia
• 5. The Daily News and ‘telling the land story like it is’
• 6. The Herald and patriotic news on the land issue
• 7. Operation Restore (colonial) Order
• 8. ‘Operation Restore Legacy’ in post-Mugabe era
• 9. Do-it-yourself (DIY) news and the emancipatory promise
• Index