In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h a P t e r 5 Power, Citizenship, and Local Content: A Critical Reading of the Broadcasting Services Act The interests which a discourse serves may be very far from those which it appears, at first sight, to represent. —Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory There is a history of common stereotypes used in Zimbabwean discourse, which are, in complex ways, sometimes reinforced and sometimes subverted in Zimbabwean media. Viewers play an active role in selecting which stereotypes will and will not have power in their own identities. These discourses have tremendous power, so much so that the government transformed them into legislation, the 2001 Broadcasting Services Act. The BBC’s recommendations that Zimbabwe privatize the ZBC went unheeded. For over thirty years, broadcasting in Zimbabwe has been organized as a state monopoly governed by the 1973 Broadcasting Act inherited from Rhodesia. A challenge to this monopoly came for the first time from private radio broadcasters in 2000, leading to the BSA. The act had two main goals: to restrict the possibility of real liberalization and to mandate local content. Unfortunately, the public conversations about the act among culture workers focused almost entirely on the latter. Their conversations revealed nuanced approaches to national culture and the concept of “the local,” but they ignored the immediate effects of the act for the state’s control of information. The state-owned media encouraged a focus on the local content component of the act in order to deflect attention from its restrictive effects, which were to distribute local propaganda and to limit foreign news, thereby restricting Zimbabwe’s public image to one produced by the state. The discourse examined in this chapter includes the text of the 2001 Broadcasting Services Act, newspaper editorial commentary, and the opinions of culture workers. My goal is not to exhaustively describe the act but to focus on those features within it that appear to be what critical discourse analyst Thomas Huckin calls “textual manipulations serving non-democratic purposes.”1 The act’s legal technicality serves a purpose, ostensibly establishing the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe as a beneficent institution with liberal democratic goals, while giving unrestricted powers to the president to control 122 Zimbabwe’s CinematiC arts Zimbabweans’ access to information. The BSA operates on at least three levels of discourse: it specifies how discursive power—the ability to circulate information via broadcasting—is to be limited by the state; it specifies how power should be distributed among agents of the state; and it sets up particular positions for its readers. As legislation, the text has practical effects on people’s lives, both framing their experience of “foreign” and “local” cultures and restricting their access to information. No Room for “Nutties”: A History of Control Zimbabwe announced its commitment to deregulating broadcasting in 1995 in response to both external and internal pressures to liberalize. External pressures included increased liberalization of broadcasting in Europe, the 1991 Declaration of Windhoek on press freedom and media pluralism in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, the establishment of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), and the 1992 SADC Declaration Treaty and Protocol, which advocated governmental support for increased popular participation in democracy. Internal pressures included those of local unions and NGOs, such as the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists and the Zimbabwe branch of MISA. The unlikelihood of achieving true deregulation was revealed that same year when Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said, “You don’t know what a nonstate radio station might broadcast,” constructing independent media as dangerous to the state and using that claim to justify state control of information.2 In 1998, the Ministry of Information introduced a draft communications bill, aimed at establishing a body to regulate and ostensibly license private broadcasters as well as telecommunication and postal service providers. However, many commentators saw the bill as the state’s attempt not to liberalize broadcasting but to consolidate its control of it. The bill led to ongoing confrontations between government and private newspapers, cell phone providers, and Internet service providers for the next two years. Eventually it was reworked into the Postal and Telecommunication Bill, passed into a law that focused on cell phones rather than broadcasting.3 The government continued to send mixed messages about its commitment to liberalization. State spokesmen made, on the one hand, verbal commitments to broadcasting reform and, on the other, paranoid claims about the role of “foreign ” media in undermining Zimbabwe. For example, Chen Chimutengwende, then minister of information...

Share