adminThe newspaper and the global information war
Last week’s inaugural portion of this series cross-examining the occupations of the press offered a clear articulation of how newspapers we read every day are drivers of higher and lower politics within the hierarchies of globalisation and contested national identities. Waking up to this reality of information imperialism makes Cain Mathema’s book Newspapers in Zimbabwe a relevant debate guide on how we are not only subjected to a global political-economy war as it was when the plunderers from the Western hemisphere set their foot in Africa. In fact, we are experiencing a type of war which has been concealed from the second eye and thus making it difficult to make function the third eye. This is the war of information.
Today, just like yesterday, coloniality is perpetuated through public information consumption.
We are daily participants of this war as long as we access news from whatsoever source. The underscoring reason being that all news is an expression of the ideas of the superstructure disseminating all the contents we find “informing” and shaping polarities of how we interpret the world, our being and that of others. Through the press, consent on prejudices, global myths, truths and identity imaginations is manufactured (Chomsky 1992).
This comes against a background of Africa’s ontological deprivation and dismemberment in the ruthless hands of hard imperialism. Today, soft-power is used to express the evolution to being modern (civilised). Imperial soft power selectively omits that the celebrated modernity defined in Eurocentric terms is a result of the erstwhile unmodern methods which were used to place the West at the centre of global modernity and its measureless arrogation of “thought-control”.
The fight against the alternative thinking provided by nationalist movements in post-colonial Africa has given birth to the centrality of an escalated anti-nationalist paradigm. This can be better explained as the contested state of ideological capitalism and the press has been a significant asset in that regard. This explains why every African country is flocked by the so-called private media which in most instances survives on denigrating and delegitimising all governments who belong to the redemptive nationalist trajectory. One of the consistent critics of this column, Raymond Sango buttressed this view in his response to last week’s article noting that:
“ . . . mass media is a propaganda tool for articulating and defending the interests of powerful social, economic and political forces. Ownership and control of media determines the editorial policy. The Zippers group is representing powerful state interests. The so-called independent media is representing the interests of international white capital. The concentration of media ownership; Zimpapers — Alpha media (Trevor Ncube) entails that the media is but a contest between radical nationalism and neocolonialism/neoliberalism. Coloniality is everyday reinforced by the Daily News and Newsday which unapologetically defend colonialism, racism, inequality and hiding that through rhetorical tinges of democracy and human rights — good governance discourses.”
The above observation by Raymond Sango substantiates that Zimbabwe like any other African country is not immune from war information set by global hierarchies of containing the “third-world”. This is the reason why State papers will be guided by the values which redeemed this land from the hands of imperialism now resurfacing as emblems of globalisation. As such, our struggle for liberation — the Chimurenga is no longer an imagined account of the creation of a political legitimacy usable narrative by Zanu-PF for remembering the nation.
The Chimurenga now represents a domestic expression of the values of pan-Africanism and the total redemptive outcry of the progenies of African freedom — home and abroad. This position can only be defended by a press system which is conscious of the evil past and present political mischief of those who made our forefathers and mothers to declare the Chimurenga. Today, the Chimurenga is an ultimate expression of an endless continuity to keep the forces of this soil’s past oppression under lock and key. This is because, the cradle of this country’s sovereignty has its epistemic premise on the permanent African revolution against imperialism and colonialism. Therefore, the mandate of the State press is to safeguard this value of our national redemption and instinct of continuity in affirming the notion of being Zimbabwean.
Babethi kayibulawe
On the 17th of this month Africans in America, members of the December 12 Movement declared that “Mugabe is Right” right at the face of the United Nations’ General Assembly. This is justified by the December 12 Movement’s knowledge of how the Chimurenga as a revolutionary tool-kit constructs the leitmotif of Zimbabwe’s delink from imperialism. The Chimurenga has gone beyond expressing the yearn for Zimbabwe’s freedom from residues of colonialism. It is now a symbol of brotherhood among all Africans in the bondage of Western domination. This could not be possible without our State press in the middle of Western-sponsored media polarisation of Zimbabwe. It is the daily prints of Chronicle and The Herald, the weekly prints of Sunday News and The Sunday Mail which have continued to popularise the Chimurenga. This has worked well in mobilising power consolidation for the ruling party Zanu-PF.
This is the honest truth which we do not need to hide because on the opposite extreme the so-called “private-media” tirelessly works to mobilise support for the opposition and its ideological interests of undermining the Chimurenga. The undying force of this country’s liberation enforced through the daily patriotic news reads is an epitome of that which originated as African liberation novelty centred on harnessing an anti-colonial historical path of continued resistance to imperialism. The ideology of the Chimurenga is being rehabilitated by the country’s public press. By so doing, state media has sustained an information order which consolidates the aspirations of a positive historically guided sense of national identity and belonging.
Unpacking the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO)
Mathema (2000) confines the architecture of his study to the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) perspective. The NWICO school of thought is a “new” perspective on the principle of “free flow of information”. The notion of newness in this order serves as a call for a battle with the “old” ways of promoting single-sided perspectives of global hegemony. The call for the free flow of information has its milieu in the historic changes in world politics that took place in the 1960s. Numerous colonies gained independence from the colonial metropoles.
The wave of “third-world” liberation came with demands for recognition of the “liberated” countries’ national autonomy, not only in political terms, but economically and socially, as well. The undercurrents of this liberation path contained demands often harmonised with those of the Eastern bloc. At the same time, the newly liberated countries were in dire need of development assistance from the industrialised countries. “Development”, the process of evolution toward a modern society, occupied center stage.
Scholars and development experts assigned mass communications a fundamental role in the development process. In the Cold War era the newly self-governing republics of the third world were of calculated significance to both East and West.
Development aid was an important factor for “winning the hearts and minds” of emerging nations. New patron-client relationships emerged; old, established ones evolved. The successes achieved by the oil-producing countries in OPEC in the 1970s reinforced the position of the “third world” as a bartering partner (albeit rising fuel prices had serious impacts on some developing countries). In succeeding years, the third world made its voice heard in international fora as never before, expressing programs for extensive reform.
A collage of demands that would result in a New International Economic Order was put on the agenda; demands for reform of existing patterns of news and information flows — in short: a new international information order — were soon to follow. But a new international information order, in the sense its authors intended, was not to be. After some brief years of debate, the issue disappeared from international agendas.
However, this has not changed the justifications of the NWICO as a decolonial projection of the “third-world”. This is because there is a valid need for “third-world” ideas to find equal lodgment in global debates as is the case for the West and its hegemony.
As a result the NWCIO remains a relevant framework for liberating the newspaper in Africa.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network — LAN.
Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected]
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter