Promoting Local Culture to Repress Dissent · Researcher and Author
A government that wanted to silence its critics started paying them instead.
In 2000, President Robert Mugabe appointed a former political science professor named Jonathan Moyo as Zimbabwe's Minister of Information. What Moyo did next is not what the standard account of authoritarian media control would predict. He did not simply censor. He funded.
Moyo turned the state's television and radio monopoly into a platform for local artists. He produced cultural galas that toured new musicians around the country with the state providing room, board, and a salary. His ministry helped record, market, and distribute twenty new albums. It put ZW$2 billion into filmmakers and scriptwriters. It mandated that between 75 and 100 percent of broadcast content be made in Zimbabwe. For a generation of young artists who had never imagined supporting themselves through their work, the prospects changed overnight.
And in 2001, a grant went to the video production studio at the Amakhosi Arts Academy in Bulawayo — whose founder, Cont Mhlanga, had spent two decades attacking the regime from the stage.
The jingle campaign
The largest single expenditure was music.
This is the paradox the thesis sets out to resolve. By most measures Moyo was the most democratizing information minister in Zimbabwe's history — he put more citizens on air, in more of their own languages, making more of their own work, than any predecessor. He was also the most repressive.
The resolution is not that the democratization was fake. It is that the manner and context of it turned a liberating act into a repressive one. Greater participation created new and enforceable norms of patriotism. Once the state had given artists a stage, it had also given itself a register of who was on it, what they said, and what they owed.
The camera that now featured young Zimbabweans also scrutinized them.
Cont Mhlanga, who took the money and never stopped criticizing the government, put the mechanism more plainly.
Moyo realized that to take control of the media he had to give something too.
Cont Mhlanga · Founder, Amakhosi Arts Academy
What the country looked like
I arrived in Harare on 4 July 2005, into the aftermath of Operation Murambatsvina — Drive Out the Trash. Army and police brigades had marched unannounced into urban communities and torn down homes, giving inhabitants an hour's warning. With winter approaching, 550,000 people out of a population of 12 million had lost their housing. They were moved to guarded camps and held inside while police patrolled the perimeter.
On my third day, several Zimbabwean reporters invited me to come with them into a displaced persons camp. Few outside eyes had seen one. We drove in together in an old Red Cross van. Then I watched state television and radio describe the people in those camps as trash.
30 December 2005
I was pulled off the plane after boarding.
I had spent two weeks in the country and collected more than forty hours of footage. A flight attendant put a hand on my shoulder and told me there were men waiting. There were five of them, in faded suits. They took three unlabelled VHS tapes and described them as stolen.
“Shut that thing off or you'll be sorry. Don't touch it again. You're in my world now.”
I was held for five days and charged with espionage for carrying a video camera. I was questioned repeatedly, by many different people, over many days — which I understood only later to be the technique rather than the inefficiency. It is designed to produce an irrational uncertainty in a prisoner about what is known, and by whom.
“No one will know you're here, and no one will know if not.”
The thesis was written the following spring. The footage was never edited.
Why it still matters
Two years earlier I had been in Mussoorie, India, running an arts education project built on the conviction that giving people their own forms of expression is a route to agency. In Zimbabwe I watched a state reach the same conclusion and use it in the opposite direction — funding song, film, and theatre in order to define the terms on which citizens could speak.
Everything I have built since assumes both of these things are true at once. A room where people encounter one another is not automatically good. It depends entirely on how it is designed, who convened it, and what they want.
- The thesis
- Promoting Local Culture to Repress Dissent: The Strategy of Zimbabwe's Information Ministry Under Jonathan Moyo (2000–2004)
Harvard College, 2006 — submitted jointly to the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. - Method
- Fieldwork in Harare and Bulawayo across two trips in 2005, interviews with artists, journalists, and ministry staff, analysis of the jingle campaign, and more than forty hours of video. Sources include the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe and interviews with Cont Mhlanga and Geoffrey Nyarota.
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