Slight improvement in media climate

HARARE – Zimbabwe weighed in at 123rd position in the latest press freedom index published this week by Reporters Without Borders, showing a slight improvement from last year despite the media environment in the country remaining rather dicey for journalists.

According to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, Zimbabwe moved 13 places from last year’s 136th position out of 175 countries, thanks to a partial opening up of the media space following the licensing of new private newspapers since May.

This year’s index included 178 countries.

“Zimbabwe has again made some slow progress, as it did last year. The return of independent dailies is a step forward for public access to information but the situation is still very fragile,” the media freedom watchdog said in the 2010 World Press Freedom Index.

Zimbabwe’s media environment has progressively improved since President Robert Mugabe agreed to share power with former opposition leader – now Prime Minister – Morgan Tsvangirai in 2008.

The country was ranked 151st out of 173 countries prior to the formation of a coalition by Mugabe and Tsvangirai last year.

The coalition government has implemented some of the media reforms agreed in the power-sharing agreement between Mugabe and Tsvangirai although it has avoided instituting far-reaching measures that would drastically open up the country’s media space.

The reforms instituted so far included the establishment of the Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) and the licensing of at least nine private newspapers to compete with the state-run titles that have dominated the country’s media landscape since 2003.

But reforms to open up Zimbabwe’s media are likely to take much longer due to reluctance by Mugabe’s allies to allow press freedom.

More than a year after the coalition government was formed, the government broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) still dominates the country’s media.

The Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe has refused to license private television or radio stations, forcing several radio stations to broadcast into Zimbabwe from Europe or United States.

It however allowed the ZBC to launch a second television channel in May underlining its dominance of the airwaves.

Pressure groups also continue called for the repeal of the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) and other laws that restrict media freedom, blasting the government’s piecemeal approach to addressing media concerns.

AIPPA requires journalists and media houses to register with the government and also criminalises the publication of "falsehoods".

It has been used to harass the independent media, with scores of journalists arrested for operating without government accreditation and at least four private newspapers shut down since 2003.

The arrests have continued as late as this month when a Kwekwe journalist Flata Kavinga was detained for covering a demonstration by Catholic parishoners who were protesting against their priest in the Midlands town.

He was released a day later to allow him to obtain proof of his ZMC accreditation.
-Zimonline

Marechera, a new post-nationalist writer

Such was the complexity of Dambudzo Marechera’s work that he defies easy categorisation. Most African writers can be comfortably classified as first generation, second generation and so on, based on their thematic focus, the time when they wrote their most important works or even the time when they were born. Born in 1952, Marechera would ordinarily have fitted into the second generation, with the Ben Okris and the Meja Mwangis, until one comes to the little problem of his thematic concerns.

House of Hunger is of course about Zimbabwe, the house in the title, and yet it is not about the ‘nation’ in the style of the nationalists like Chinua Achebe or even Wole Soyinka. It is first and foremost about the individuals in the nation, how poverty, lack of freedom and other existential factors distort their lives. There isn’t that sometimes-obligatory nostalgia for the traditional. In fact, the past is often confronted with derision: “Where are the bloody heroes?” he asks over and over. But then one is confronted with the most nationalist of themes in a poem like “Pledging My Soul”:

Shall I not kneel to kiss the grains of your sand
to rise naked before you – a bowl of incense?
and the smoke of my nakedness shall be
an offering to you
pledging my soul.

If an author is mostly placed by how much he keeps returning to a particular theme, the idea of exile would perhaps explain Marechera more than any other. This is important if one considers the fact that he did not only write about exile as a conceit or abstract symbol, but because he was an exile in London for about nine years. Though this separation inspired poems of longing like “Pledging My Soul”, where home and the past are idealised in a mother/lover imagery, it also solidified his focus on the individual, confirming him as a post-nationalist writer, perhaps the first truly post-nationalist African writer.

- Source: Helon Habila writing for The Africa Report