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C h a P t e r 6 Language as a Form of Social Change: Public Debate in Local Languages In many countries, media in a common language play a primary role in the creation of a “national” identity. Unfortunately, in multilingual countries they also promote one language at the expense of others and thus favor the speakers of the national language at the expense of those who do not speak it fluently. In Zimbabwe, the English language has served this purpose since English speakers arrived in Southern Rhodesia. Its use in the cinematic arts and other media continues to support the interests of highly educated elites and those in power and to disadvantage those who don’t know it well. At least fifteen other Zimbabwean languages as well as hybrid codes are used in everyday talk, but these seldom find their way onto film and TV screens. What if all the country’s languages were used in the cinematic arts, if rural and urban viewers had equal access to film and television , if the power of language to unite as well as to divide were acknowledged? If such a scenario seems far-fetched, consider South Africa, which has attempted such a democratic approach with eleven official languages.1 Any discussion of how ordinary people construct Zimbabwean identities must take the languages they use into consideration. Many of Zimbabwe’s filmmakers and cultural critics are concerned about the perceived erosion of “indigenous” cultures by the dominance of imported cinematic texts. Surprisingly, the related dominance of English-language media has gone largely ignored. In contrast to Shona, Ndebele, and other Zimbabwean languages, English can be described using the very adjectives that frequently stand in for foreign in Zimbabwean discourse: multicultural, colonial, European, white, imported, international, and urban. In all these ways it is associated with the “foreign ” elements that the ruling party criticizes, and yet it continues to be used as the language of education, political discourse, and the media. English allows communication across ethnic groups and avoids ethnic favoritism , but its use also misrepresents linguistic realities and restricts access to information . While depicted as enabling the inclusion of every group in the nation, its use in fact creates exclusion of the majority. In other words, language is part of the problem in Zimbabwe. Viewers’ attitudes toward local language programming vary, but many favor increased use of their mother tongues in cinematic texts. Among the genres of television that do use Shona and Ndebele, “factual” programming is dominant. But “factual” programs like the news do not fulfill the informational needs of the majority because they tend to be monolingual, 144 Zimbabwe’s CinematiC arts monologic, and edited to avoid controversy. In the first major exception to such patterns, a live talk show called Talk to the Nation that aired in May 2001, the threat of a local language public sphere to the authoritarian state becomes clear. The program represented a form of what Norman Fairclough calls “intervention involving language”—both language choice and a transformation of discourse patterns. Because “language change [is] a form of social change,” such changes present a challenge to the status quo.2 Ignoring the Realities of a Hybrid Nation: A History of English Dominance Relatively few Zimbabweans had high proficiency levels in English at the time of independence. Its use as the sole official language and one of three national languages has been legitimated as both providing national unity among diverse ethnic groups and giving the nation access to modernity and development. This national language ideology dovetails with a cultural ideology that dichotomizes the “modern” and the “traditional,” so that English is seen as modern while Shona and Ndebele are traditional, and the minority languages are rarely even registered. African languages other than English are used extensively on the radio, an older and less expensive medium that reaches large audiences in rural areas, but very little on television or in films, newer and more expensive media that are more accessible in urban areas. These patterns of media use both reflect and contribute to binary discourse about urban/rural and modern/traditional identities. One might assume that the large percentage of English programming is due to the correspondingly large percentage of foreign programming, but this is not entirely the case. Even if one only examines locally made programming, one still finds a much larger percentage of English than the other national languages, as table 6.1 illustrates. Not only do languages other than English deserve greater representation...

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