Reinvoking the past in the present: changing identities and appropriations of Joshua Nkomo in post-colonial Zimbabwe

This article discusses the histories, narratives and representations that have been produced by and on former ZAPU leader and Vice-President of Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo. We focus on the multiple identities and subject positions that Nkomo came to inhabit in the way in which he was represented in ZANU-PF’s discourse of the early 1980s; his self-representation in Nkomo’s 1984 autobiography Nkomo: the story of my life and subsequent appropriations of Nkomo by different political actors in the early 2000s. In line with Stuart Hall’s 1996 description, we consider identities not as essentialist and fixed categories but as positional, multiple, constantly evolving and constructed through difference. We argue that the changing identities of Nkomo served the purposes and interests of a variety of political actors, ranging from the ruling party ZANU-PF to the opposition MDC. Against the background of a mushrooming of popular historical narratives evidenced by both the publication and republishing of biographies, autobiographies and significant reports, and the serialisation and recirculation of these texts in newspapers and through websites, we also argue that the many uses and appropriations of Nkomo demonstrate the continued relevance of the past in the power struggles waged by different political actors in Zimbabwe

Beyond normative dewesternization: examining media culture from the vantage point of the Global South

This article examines five dominant conceptualizations of “the Global South” in the field of media and communication studies, and more specifically in the subfields of (1) comparative media studies, (2) international communication or global media studies, and (3) development communication. Engaging with the broader calls made by a number of scholars since the early 2000s to “dewesternize,” “decolonize,” or “internationalize” the field, I argue that the Global South continues to be theorized from the vantage point of the Global North. Instead of understanding the Global South on its own terms, scholarship frequently appreciates the role of media and communication only insofar as it emerges from, represents the negative imprint of, or features the active intervention of the Global North. Such accounts have failed to acknowledge the agency of the Global South in the production, consumption, and circulation of a much richer spectrum of media culture that is not a priori defined in opposition to or in conjunction with media from the Global North. In advocating for a shift from media systems to media cultures, I hope to contribute to an approach that practices media and communication studies from the Global South, grounded in the everyday life experiences of ordinary people but always situated against the background of crucial processes such as neoliberalization, which have not only had drastic implications for the division of labor between the state and market in the area of media and communication but have also produced radical changes in the lives of the majority of people living in the Global South

Beyond free basics: Facebook, data bundles and Zambia’ssocial media internet

In the final article of a series looking at the role of digital technology and social media in Zambia’s recent elections, LSE’s Wendy Willems argues that mobile data bundles are crucial to the growing power of social media platforms in Zambia, increasingly creating a ‘social media internet’. They also pose a number of political challenges to mobile operators and governments on the continent. While calling features on Facebook and WhatsApp threaten the revenue base of mobile operators, the political affordances of social media have resulted in a number of government shutdowns recently

Risky dialogues: the performative state and the nature of power in a postcolony

Arguments on the performative state often treat performance as a practice that the state forces upon its citizens in rather monologic fashion. However, this contradicts the fundamentally fluid nature of performance, always evolving, malleable and never fixed or static. Focusing on the state-sponsored televised music gala and the genre of ‘urban grooves’, which emerged in the context of a broader revival of cultural nationalism in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, I discuss the complex and ambivalent ways in which these spaces operated as platforms of co-optation and resistance. Performance, therefore, is an inherently risky practice that does not always prove reliable in furthering the status quo. While the state was able to discipline musicians to a certain extent, restraint was limited and musicians had the ability to shape events in their own way. The practice of performance did not only present risks to those in power, but also offered opportunities to the state to solidify its affiliation with musicians, and to frame them as natural allies or supporters of the state. Ultimately, this proves that a dialogic understanding of power and resistance is crucial in order to make sense of the convergence between politics and performance in the postcolony

Social media, platform power and (mis)information in Zambia’s recent elections

Open-source, purpose-built digital platforms such as Ushahidi and Uchaguzi have been used to monitor a number of African elections. However, with the growing power of corporate social media platforms on the continent, Facebook and Twitter are emerging as important sources of information on election-related incidents. Based on her recent fieldwork, LSE’s Wendy Willems examines the challenges of the intensive circulation of information during the recent Zambian elections held on August 11

Facebook live-streaming, drones and swag selfies: youth culture and visual social media in #ZambiaDecides

Digital technology is transforming the way in which elections are held globally, including on the African continent. With young voters comprising a substantial part of the electorate, political campaigning is increasingly shifting online. As LSE’s Wendy Willems argues in the second article of a series about the role of digital technology and social media in Zambia’s recent elections, political parties tapped into digital youth culture in a number of interesting ways

#BlackLivesMatter in General Gordon Square: a history

The global anti-racist protests that George Floyd’s killing has provoked, combined with the strong focus on our local area as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, offer opportunities to better understand the legacies of slavery and colonialism immediately around us. LSE’s Wendy Willems examines the intersection of race, space and media in her local Woolwich neighbourhood in South-East London

Beyond platform-centrism and digital universalism: the relational affordances of mobile social media publics

In debates on digital affordances, mobile devices and social media platforms are often treated as separate (physical or digital) objects which function independently from each other and from the environments in which they are used (‘platform-centrism’). However, mobile phone use has increasingly been dominated by social media apps while social media are frequently accessed via mobile devices, particularly in Global South contexts where users often rely on mobile-only internet access via subsidized/zero-rated social media data bundles. Furthermore, the affordances of mobile social media are shaped by the physical, mediated and political contexts in which they are used. Technological affordances are far from universal (‘digital universalism’) but take on different shapes across the globe. Drawing on research carried out during the September 2011 Zambian elections, this article introduces the notion of ‘relational affordance’ to emphasize the interplay between mobile social media, users and their varied contexts. Despite the relatively low number of mobile internet users at the time, the Facebook group of the popular, privately-owned Zambian television station, Muvi TV, quickly emerged as a fast-paced forum for the sharing of information on the elections. Three ‘relational affordances’ ― infrastructure, home-based access and temporality ― help to explain the emergence of this active mobile social media public. This analysis challenges previous accounts of mobile social media publics which identified negative (constraining) affordances like the control exerted by Facebook page administrators and positive (enabling) affordances such as the ‘always-on’ nature of mobile social media use and their ‘on-the-go’ access in public spaces

Professor Patrick Chabal: A tribute to the unelected Dean of African Studies

LSE’s Wendy Willems and Ebenezer Obadare of the University of Kansas pay tribute to Professor Patrick Chabal, an eminent scholar in the field of African Studies

The politics of things: digital media, urban space, and the materiality of publics

Recent characterizations of publics ― as expressed through concepts like ‘networked publics’, ‘hashtag publics’, ‘adhoc publics’, ‘calculated publics’, ‘engineered publics’ ― or notions describing processes of circulation ― such as ‘virality’, ‘shareability’ and ‘spreadability’ ― fail to appreciate that publics are not just digitally constituted but also manifest themselves in, and are intimately connected to, physical spaces. ‘The politics of things’ refers to the way in which things, objects, infrastructures and physical space remain crucial to political communication in a digital age as well as to the manner in which bodies, objects and urban space become politicized and digitally remediated. Drawing on fieldwork carried out during the 2011 and 2016 Zambian elections, this article proposes a material, mobile and spatial approach to political communication. It hereby extends the relevance of the recent material and infrastructural turn in media and communications in a political context. It examines the physical recirculation of digital content, the digital remediation of physical space, and the communicative role of bodies, objects, and the built environment. Problematizing common dualisms between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as well as ‘public sphere’ and ‘public space’, it argues for an exploration of publicness and processes of circulation across digital and physical spaces