Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity by Katrina Daly Thompson (review)

Katrina Daly Thompson has made a fine contribution to scholarship on African cinema, offering a much needed broad study of Zimbabwean screen culture that complements historical studies like James Burns’s Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press, 2002) and briefer studies of postcolonial Zimbabwean media by Sarah Chiumbu, Winston Mano, Kedmon Hungwe, James Zaffiro, and Giuliana Lund, among others. The book will be of interest to Africanists and scholars of cinema alike, appealing particularly to those interested in media policy (including broadcasting), language policy, literature, and postindependence Zimbabwean cultural history. Thompson takes a broad-based approach to screen media, and her engagement with processes of culture and power presents the category of “cinematic arts” as encompassing a range of media and viewing experiences relevant to the everyday lives of Zimbabweans from a variety of backgrounds. In addition to Zimbabwean film, Thompson examines broadcast television, local media policy, spectatorship, and the reception of media produced outside Zimbabwe. The introduction and first chapter address cultural identity, discourse, and representation; the following three chapters give an overview of local production and viewing cultures; and the final chapters address policy issues through an analysis of media regulation and the status of local languages in public culture. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this volume is Thompson’s attention to how film stimulates discourse, or what she terms “talk and texts about the cinematic arts” in independent Zimbabwe (1). The book’s film-ography, which covers films from 1980 to 2011, will be an invaluable tool for further research.

Focusing on discourse, Thompson highlights linguistic and class diversity rather than a monolithic national audience and thus also challenges sharp distinctions between local and foreign media. Her discussion is enriched by extensive interviews with rural audiences as well as high- and low-density urban audiences from multiple linguistic communities, and while much of her data is drawn from Shona-speaking viewers in Harare and regional growth points, she aptly notes the need for attention to other vernacular languages in both the development of new media productions and in studies of audiences. Thompson’s book is strongly influenced by the political context of her fieldwork, conducted in 2001 just months after the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) of 2000 was passed (and supplemented by a follow-up visit in 2010). She seems to favor media privatization in the interests of free democratic expression and hence is highly critical of the impact of the BSA on Zimbabwe’s media landscape. The final chapter features a meticulous close textual analysis of the BSA. Throughout the book, she displays a keen historical awareness, situating media and audiences within a legacy of colonial and early independence media policy as well as a larger political and economic context. Her prose is free of jargon and elegantly translates key concepts from her primary field, applied linguistics, for a broader media studies audience.

Thompson argues that what constitutes the local is not fixed or self-evident, and that a range of imported cultural artifacts no longer seem foreign in Zimbabwe. Similarly, films and television programs made elsewhere become local through discourse and consumption. The book traces a history of the indigenization of media production, and considers how racial, linguistic, and other tensions have complicated knowledge transfer in this process. Television programming is covered with fascinating details about the ZBC’s approach to news and local dramas, and ongoing efforts to increase locally made content are traced through discussions of popular shows like Mai Chisamba’s Shona-language cultural advice series. On the subject of locally produced feature films, the book offers a comprehensive account of the contributions of several white Zimbabweans as well as the British director of Flame (1996), Ingrid Sinclair, and John and Louise Riber, the U.S. team behind Yellow Card (dir. John Riber, 2000), Neria (dir. Goodwin Mawuru, 1993...