Vol 29, No sed-1 (2010)

In the context of the Zimbabwe crisis of the early 2000s, both popular and academic accounts
frequently discussed Zimbabweans as passive victims of their government, hereby suggesting
that the extensive efforts of the state to create a ‘patriotic’ citizenry through the cultural project of
the Third Chimurenga were largely successful. This article argues that the absence of physical
protests in the streets should not be equated with an absence of resistance. By adopting a narrow
focus on the forms of resistance associated with dramatic revolutions and grand rebellions,
journalists and scholars neglected the everyday forms of resistance - such as popular humour and
rumour - by means of which Zimbabweans sought to challenge the state. These nascent forms of
resistance could have been drawn upon in a more sustained way by the political opposition and
civil society in order to provoke political change.

This paper explores some issues of the contested Zimbabwean 2008 Presidential Election as
it was represented in one-frame political cartoons published in a selection of Internet news
sites in the Zimbabwean diaspora. It argues that the cartoons may constitute the contours of
alternative communicative spaces, in which the cartoonists present arguments about the ongoing
Zimbabwean crisis. The cartoons may be able to present, in a visual form, issues and processes
that are not so easily covered in verbal journalism. The cartoons thus constitute elements of
journalistic practice in their own right.

This article examines the use of blogs to mediate the experiences of citizens during a violent
election in Zimbabwe. It focuses specifically on how people disseminated and shared information
about their tribulations under a regime that used coercive measures in the face of its crumbling
hegemonic edifice. The article frames these practices within theories of alternative media and
citizen journalism and argues that digitisation has occasioned new counter-hegemonic spaces
and new forms of journalism that are deinstitutionalised and deprofessionalised, and whose
radicalism is reflected in both form and content. I argue that this radicalism in part articulates a
postmodern philosophy and style as seen in its rejection of the elaborate codes and conventions
of mainstream journalism. The Internet is seen as certainly enhancing the people’s right to
communicate, but only to a limited extent because of access disparities, on the one hand, and its
appropriation by liberal social movements whose configuration is elitist, on the other. I conclude
by arguing that the alternative media in Zimbabwe, as reflected by Kubatana’s bloggers, lack the
capacity to envision alternative social and political orders outside the neo-liberal framework. This,
I contend, is partly because of the political economy of both blogging as a social practice and
alternative media as subaltern spaces. Just as the bloggers are embedded to Kubatana’s virtual
space to self-publish, Kubatana is likewise embedded to a neo-liberal discourse that is traceable
to its funding and financing systems.

New forms of online citizen journalism have refreshed political communication in Africa. New
information technologies are providing readers with previously unavailable opportunities to
comment and produce their own news and information that is able to influence political processes.
However, all is not rosy about Africa’s new citizen journalism. While it has produced reliable and
quality information that African democracies require, it has also produced vigilante journalism - a
vindictive and revengeful form of gathering and disseminating news and information. Vigilante
journalism is similar to the necklacing that was common in South African in the 1980s. The article
discusses how, at the height of the Zimbabwe crisis (2007-2008), the news website, ZimDaily, led
a vigilante campaign to publicly name and have perceived relatives and children of Zimbabwean
ruling party officials deported from ‘Western’ countries. The idea was to help resolve the political
and economic crises in Zimbabwe. The editors refused to question the ethics and morality of
the exercise. Thus, encouraged by the website’s editors, Zimbabwean users of the website took
the law in their own hands and published addresses, telephone numbers and other personal
information about anyone thought to be related to those in government in Zimbabwe. This blurred
the boundaries between citizen and vigilante journalism. The resultant vigilante journalism by
groups seeking instant justice was in a way similar to the necklacing, even though this was in a
virtual sense. It is clear that the emerging new media spaces in Africa function like double-edged
swords able to either build or destroy democracy.

While Zimbabwe’s first two post-independence elections in 1980 and 1985 were generally
considered to be a credible expression of the will of the people, subsequent elections in that
country were largely contested, with allegations of rigging, gerrymandering, vote-buying and
coercion, among several other irregularities. With a media landscape that is largely dominated
by state ownership and control, the total reporting on elections in Zimbabwe has always been
openly biased in favour of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU PF party, resulting in a huge
loss of credibility for both the electoral system and the state-owned media themselves. However,
the advent of new communications technologies, such as the Internet and mobile phones, has
ushered in a new era of political communication where citizens actively participate both in the
election campaign and the monitoring processes. This paper looks at the contribution of the
innovations in political communication that have come with these new media, focusing particularly
on the uses of mobile phones (in particular the SMS or short message service) during Zimbabwe’s
contested 2008 election. More specifically, it explores the ways in which ordinary Zimbabweans
appropriated the SMS as a tool for monitoring that election. Further, it discusses the implications
of these new technologies for the conduct of elections in Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the African
continent, and for democracy in general. What is clear is that these new forms of communication
are fast eroding the monopoly of incumbent politicians over the communications landscape,
undercutting the liberation discourse that has had a stranglehold on election processes, and
signalling the possibility of more open political spaces where divergent views can coexist.