Elsevier

World Development

Volume 32, Issue 10, October 2004, Pages 1767-1783
World Development

Peasant Demonstrators, Violent Invaders: Representations of Land in the Zimbabwean Press

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2004.06.003Get rights and content

Summary

The tense political environment of the late 1990s, in which the Zimbabwean government was confronted with a more vocal civil society and a new political party, set the stage for the introduction of a new private newspaper The Daily News. For the first time a serious challenge was posed to the long-standing monopoly of the government-controlled daily newspaper The Herald. This article compares and analyzes how these two daily newspapers have represented the land reform program and the land occupations in Zimbabwe which gained momentum in early 2000. It argues that media representations of the land question in the run-up to the June 2000 parliamentary elections came to parallel the polarized political environment, thereby missing chances for a serious and more subtle debate on the land issue in the Zimbabwean media.

Introduction

In February 2000, Zimbabweans rejected a referendum on a draft for a new constitution which included a controversial clause that would allow the government to compulsorily acquire land from large-scale commercial farmers without paying for the land itself but only for improvements made on the land.1 Subsequent to this rejection, numerous commercial farms were occupied. Although there had been previous waves of occupations on large-scale commercial farms, those taking place in early 2000 were much more widespread and better organized.2 Despite the rejection of the referendum, a constitutional amendment on compulsory acquisition of land by the government was pushed through Parliament in April 2000. The state-supported daily newspaper The Herald described this event as follows:

Zimbabwe yesterday took a giant leap towards correcting the historical imbalances in land ownership when Parliament passed a Bill which gives Government the power to compulsorily acquire land for resettlement without paying compensation. (…)

The MPs [who voted in favor of the law], who included Vice-Presidents Muzenda and Msika immediately broke into the liberation war song “Zimbabwe Ndeyeropa” [Zimbabwe’s independence was won through bloodshed] soon after the Bill was passed as British High Commission officials trooped out of the Speaker’s Gallery. (…)

Some MPs could not contain their joy and swayed to the rhythm of the song, while others clapped and banged benches in ecstasy.3

The Herald constructed the amendment as an historical occasion concluding the “struggle for land” in Zimbabwe which had started during the first uprising against the British in the late 19th century [“First Chimurenga”] and had continued during the liberation war in the 1970s [“Second Chimurenga”]. It described the amendment as a means to overcome past impediments to land reform, giving rise to a “Third Chimurenga,” thereby suggesting that legal restrictions had been the main reason for the previously limited extent of resettlement.

Mocking “celebrations” in Parliament later in the year, cartoonist Tony Namate commented upon what had happened in a cartoon (Figure 1) that was published in the private newspaper The Daily News. The cartoon showed the celebrating MPs dancing to the tune of “ZANU ndeyeropa” which Namate literally translated as ZANU—which is Zimbabwe’s ruling party—is “bloody.” Through this cartoon, Namate was anticipating the violence that would be a likely accompaniment of the strategies to remain in power.

This example serves to show how the state and private media in different ways interpreted the new developments concerning the land issue as they took place in 2000. Reports on land came to occupy a central place in the local and international media which increasingly led to concern among government representatives. In the run-up to the June 2000 parliamentary elections, The Herald quoted President Mugabe as criticizing media reportage of violence related to the farm occupations: “Those whites who died were shown like small gods on BBC, CNN and other foreign news agencies but no black was shown. Were there no blacks who died?”4

The same paper also cited the secretary of the Women’s League of the ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) Thenjiwe Lesabe as defending the importance of land: “Why do you think we called ourselves children of the soil during the 1950s and 1960s? It is now really sad to see our own black journalists joining foreigners in saying land is not important. It shows they are confused and echoing foreign ideas.”5

The Herald, which declared its full support to the ruling party ZANU-PF in an editorial, joined in government criticism of local and international media reports:6

Instead of sponsoring commercial farmers’ resistance to land redistribution the Western media and their governments should encourage the immediate surrender of some of the farms.7

The land reclamations are not Communist-oriented or a disrespect for the rule of law as what the Western-inspired media contends.8

The deaths of a policeman and two farmers and the injuries to some war veterans and farmers are regrettable developments, which should not have been allowed to happen. There was, however, nothing like the chaos that many Press reports inside and outside the country were suggesting. (…) The truth is that, contrary to sensational reports and wishful doom-prophecies, things are NOT falling apart. The centre is compact and holding strongly.9

It blamed the Western media and local private media for exaggerating accounts of violence.

At the same time, ZANU-PF interestingly drew upon representations of the land question, as they appeared in the electronic or print media, in its parliamentary election campaign advertisements. A few days before the June 2000 parliamentary elections, the private newspaper The Daily News carried a ZANU-PF advert which included a still image of a CNN news program that had shown white farmers signing donation cheques to ZANU-PF’s main contestant in the elections, the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).10 The last sentence of the advertisement read: “You have seen who his masters are. Vote wisely. Zimbabwe will never be a colony again.” Through this extract, ZANU-PF aimed to communicate that the opposition party MDC was dominated by white farmer interests and that voting for them would be a compromise to Zimbabwean autonomy. Whereas on many occasions government representatives criticized the media for being “biased” toward whites and foreigners, the ruling party did not hesitate to recognize the “truth” of the same representations if they could be used to justify ZANU-PF’s main election campaign issues: radical land reform and national sovereignty.

As the March 2002 presidential elections approached, the government increasingly began to use the state-funded media in its attempts to win the hearts and minds of Zimbabweans for its “fast-track land reform” program which was officially announced after the 2000 parliamentary elections. A variety of jingles and video clips including “Chave Chimurenga” [it is now war] and “Rambai Makashinga” [continue to persevere] were repeatedly broadcast on state television and radio to convey positive messages about farming life. These examples demonstrate how media representations of the land question became increasingly important and contested in the Zimbabwean public sphere.

This article discusses the way in which two Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald and The Daily News, represented issues of land in the period between the rejection of the referendum in February 2000 and the parliamentary elections in June 2000. Three main themes are presented: representations of the land reform and resettlement program, portrayals of farmers and farm workers and reporting on the causes of the farm occupations.

Section snippets

Selection and silence: news as a construction of reality

As Fowler (1991) explains, all news is socially constructed. The events that a certain newspaper reports do not reflect the significance of those events but rather reveal the selection criteria of a newspaper. Newspapers decide which events they regard as important enough to report. A large number of events are not even referred to. Events are not newsworthy in themselves but only become “news” when they are selected for inclusion in news reports. News is not simply that which happens but that

The Zimbabwean press in context of a changing society

At independence in 1980, the new government undertook a restructuring of the print media. The dominant national newspaper chain was still controlled by its South African parent, the Argus Media Group. In order to transfer control into the hands of Zimbabweans, the government created the Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust (ZMMT) in January 1981 (Saunders, 1999). The ZMMT was to take control of Zimbabwe Newspapers (1980) Limited (Zimpapers) and the national news agency, Zimbabwe Inter-African News Agency

Representations of the land reform and resettlement program

The pace of Zimbabwe’s land reform program has generally been criticized as having been too slow. Potts (2000) argues that this point is often made with reference to the fact that the government announced in 1982 that it was planning to resettle 162,000 households in only five years and the government signally failed to achieve this target. The target figure, however, was never realistic but was used mainly for political reasons. Potts argues the later target set by the government of 15,000

Agents and victims: representations of farmers and farm workers

After independence, white commercial farmers were influential neither in the ruling party nor in Parliament. They took little active interest in participating in national politics. Rutherford (2001) argues that white commercial farms in Zimbabwe have been organized on the basis of the principle of “domestic government.” Both the colonial and the independent government were not extremely concerned with the plight of farm workers but saw them as the responsibility of the farmer. Farmers did not

Spontaneous or organized? Reporting on the causes of the farm occupations

Farm occupations have been part of Zimbabwe’s pre- and post-independence history (Alexander, 1994; Chitiyo, 2000; Marongwe, 2001; Moyo, 2000, Moyo, 2001). Various land tenure categories have been occupied: white-owned, state-owned and communal land. Immediately after independence, occupation of abandoned commercial farms and vacant state land often resulted into formal resettlement of communities. From the mid-1980s onward, landless peasants also began to occupy and use land that belonged to

Conclusions: the past, the present and the future

With clearly separate agendas, two Zimbabwean daily newspapers, the government-controlled The Herald and the privately-funded The Daily News, have drawn upon different means to represent issues of land. Through use of specific vocabulary, pictures, choice of particular headlines, omission or inclusion of information and attribution of agency to certain actors, they produced a construction of the events in Zimbabwe that served to satisfy their interests in an increasingly polarized political

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