Copyright by Caitlin Tappin McClune 2017
The Dissertation Committee for Caitlin Tappin McClune Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:
‘DIGITAL UNHU’ IN ZIMBABWE: CRITICAL DIGITAL STUDIES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Committee:
Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Supervisor
Joseph D. Straubhaar
Ben Carrington
Kathleen Tyner
‘Digital Unhu’ in Zimbabwe: Critical Digital Studies from the Global
South
by
Caitlin Tappin McClune
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
December 2017
Dedication
For Daryl T. Carr. I love you and miss you.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my gratitude to Karin Wilkins and Kathy Fuller for their helpfulness and consideration, and for modeling generosity and kindheartedness in academia. I especially appreciate the help of Karin Wilkins who aided me through the last stages of this process with consistent, clear, and useful guidance.
I would like to thank Joe Straubhaar who has been an approachable and resourceful presence throughout the years of my work. Additionally, in my first years of graduate school, I took Ben Carrington’s course on critical race theory, which sent me on a trajectory of research for the next seven years that often returned to the insights gained in his class. I'm especially grateful to Kathleen Tyner and Ben Carrington for agreeing to be on my committee very late in the game and for providing a final push across the finish line. I'm grateful to everyone that I worked with and who supported me during my travels in Zimbabwe. I am particularly grateful to the Chaerera family who gave me a room, fed me and cared for me during many months of research. I value especially my friendship with Kenny Chaerera, who spent many evenings telling me stories in Gogo’s living room. Joyline Chaerera opened her house to me and offered her hospitality and a home in Harare. I’m grateful to Madeline Chaerera, Tafadzwa Chaerera and of course Jasmine Chaerera whose strength and resourcefulness continues to inspire me. I’d like to extend special thanks to the staff at ICAPA trust; the interviews and conversation I had with Tafadzwa, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Olaf Koschke, and Yvonne were indispensable. I’m thankful for all of the help Takunda offered me in Harare. In addition to providing me with a room, he found people for me to interview, gave me much-needed insight on my
v research, and showed me some beautiful places in Zimbabwe. Without his generosity, this project would not have happened. I’m eternally grateful to Kevin Hansen for taking me under his wing and introducing me to all of his artsy friends in Zimbabwe. I was overwhelmed and am still thankful for the hospitality and friendship so freely offered to me during my visits. I’m grateful to my sisters Barrie, Sydney and especially Lindsay – who listened to me rant during difficult times. I’m thankful to my grandmother Hildegard (Oma) who somehow survived - and here we all are. I’m amazed by the beauty, intelligence and patience of my friends Iantha Rimper, Hena Bajwa, Leah Mcleroy, Swapnil Rai, Adam W. George, Sigfried Haering, Patty Reyes, JC Leupp (Violent Vicky), Colin Gray, and Audrey Moon. I’m grateful to my parents Karin and Greg McClune, who have supported me throughout the years, and for my father’s last visit with me in Zimbabwe. My Dad’s history with Zimbabwe was the inspiration for this project, a wealth of stories that starts in Ireland and continues in San Francisco. Someday, we should sit down together to write another manuscript about our various global displacements, and our continued search for home. In the last year of my writing process, The Promises group that meets at 7 am was indispensable to maintaining balance and perspective. Lex gave me such kindness during dark times, and I’m grateful to Lil, Dave, Rocco, and Carlotta. I can’t thank the students from the Ph.D. support group enough, especially: Maggie, Stavana Strutz, Yuki Kimmons, Imran Khan, and especially my kind friend Robert Ellis. I want to thank, in particular, Sara Saylor for helping me through some of the more challenging times of this dissertation process. I am not sure how I would have finished without her kindness, intelligence, and persistence.
vi The NCA and NAPA crew were an incredible support and happy distraction from typing and reading alone in a room. I'm grateful, in particular, to Zawahar Butt, Faiza Saleem, Rabia Khokhar, Hamza Ayub, Amna Quaiser, Ashar Khalid, Musa Yawari, Mehar Bano, Tausif Zain, Abdulla Waseem, Nizar Uddin, Cameron Quevedo, and Usman Ajmal. I'm thankful for the good people at the South Asia Institute, including Rachel Meyer, Scott Webel, Rita Soheila, and Sahar Ali. Additionally, I would like to thank my comrades in arms that I met during the first years of my Ph.D. program: Daniel Mauro, Jacob Hustedt, Daryl Carr, Daryl Harris, Vivian Shaw, and Andres Bermudez.
I’m so thankful for Emma Skogstad; her brilliance and unwavering affection continues to be a source of strength and hope. I am especially thankful for my beautiful, intelligent, patient partner Michael Sherer, and our little friend Basil.
vii ‘DIGITAL UNHU’ IN ZIMBABWE: CRITICAL DIGITAL STUDIES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Caitlin Tappin Shona McClune, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017
Supervisor: Karin Gwinn Wilkins
Abstract:
My dissertation examines how creative organizations in Zimbabwe construct the role of digital media and the African philosophy unhu in their practices and creative artifacts. In this project, I introduce ‘digital unhu,’ a concept that acknowledges the rapid increase in digital connectivity in Zimbabwe. I investigate the particular ways Zimbabwean artistic communities have adopted digital technologies to political, economic and creative life in Harare under conditions of extreme precarity. This framework seeks to highlight the role of labor, specifically, what is known as ‘immaterial labor,’ in the creative products developed by Zimbabweans based in an agriculturally centered economy under increasingly digitally interconnected conditions. Ultimately, I argue that these organizations and artists are responding directly to the unstable political and economic conditions of their country by using these technologies to promote non-hierarchical organizations, emphasizing mobility, collaboration and drawing on the reserves of historical legacies of resistance and survival. The first chapter provides historical background and context for the development of digital unhu in Zimbabwean culture. Chapter two investigates the uses of digital technology, and role of unhu in the Zimbabwean organization Institute for Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA)
viii Trust, particularly on its organizational website icapatrust.org. Chapter four compares the experimental documentary Zim.doc to the website Wild Forrest Ranch, in order to point to characteristics unique to the region in uses of open source technology. Chapter five compares the uses of digital media, specifically mobile phones, in the cases of the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and in the dissolution of the Harare- based arts venue the Book Café. Across these different examples, I locate the characteristics of recalibrating cultural practices with new technologies, an emphasis on collaborative production, and the strategies of mobility.
ix Table of Contents
LIST OF FIGURES XIII Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1 Constructing Unhu ...... 4 Contribution ...... 5 Chapter Two: Literature Review ...... 14 Conceptualizing Unhu ...... 18 Historical Overview ...... 18 Media frameworks, ethics and unhu ...... 23 Conceptualizing the Digital ...... 24 The Digital Divide and Access ...... 24 Critical Digital Studies ...... 26 Immaterial Labor in critical digital scholarship ...... 29 Immaterial labor in the global south ...... 33 Alternative legacies in Critical Digital Studies ...... 35 Chapter Three: Methodology ...... 40 Data Sources ...... 41 Research Approach and Questions ...... 42 Self-Reflexivity ...... 42 Participant and Direct Observation ...... 44 Informants ...... 46 Interviewing Process ...... 47 Analysis of Films and Digital Artifacts ...... 49
Chapter Four: Digital Unhu and the History of Zimbabwean Media - Historical Overview ...... 52 Digital media and unhu in historical context ...... 54 Mobile Film Units: Precursors to Digital Unhu ...... 56 From Rhodesian to Zimbabwean Media ...... 57 Post Independence Transition ...... 59 ZANU PF media restrictions ...... 64 Digital Access to Alternative Narratives ...... 69 x
The Rise of Digital Connectivity ...... 72 “They use propaganda”: Reading the news while mobile ...... 75 Baba Jukwa ...... 80 #ThisFlag ...... 81 Conclusion ...... 84 Chapter Five: The digital unhu in ICAPA Trust and its website ...... 88 Introducing ICAPA ...... 91 Icapatrust.org ...... 93 Unhu in ICAPA ...... 94 Unhu on icapatrust.org ...... 95 Unhu in the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005) ...... 97 Unhu in the International Images Film Festival ...... 101 Unhu in March to #BringBackOurGirls (2014) ...... 104 Finding the funds ...... 106 Unhu and Human Rights ...... 112 Robert Mugabe and unhu ...... 116 Larger debates: Immaterial labor, immaterial products ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 120 Chapter Six: The Digital and Unhu: Ubuntu Linux in two Zimbabwean projects124 Ongoing Discussions: The global south and new technologies ...... 127 Zim.doc: a cross-platform documentary project ...... 133 Wild Forrest Ranch ...... 138 Land, Marxism and Cultural Practices ...... 143 Digital analogies, market integration, and Ubuntu Linux ...... 146 Collaborative work and strategic uses of digital media and unhu .....151 Chapter Seven: Localized and Global Expressions of digital unhu: Pixilated Ubuntu/unhu and the dissolution of the Book Café ...... 157 Ongoing debates ...... 161 Pixelated ubuntu/unhu ...... 165 The presence of the past and strategies of mobility ...... 170 The Book Café’s liberation roots ...... 174 Somewhere in Harare ...... 176 The work of digital unhu ...... 180 xi Conclusion ...... 185 Chapter Eight: Conclusion ...... 190 Conceptualizing the Digital ...... 192 Conceptualizing Unhu ...... 195 ‘Digital Unhu’ ...... 197 Economic and Cultural Convergence in Immaterial Labor ...... 198 Critical Studies of Digital Media in Zimbabwe ...... 200 Significance for the field of Media Scholarship ...... 203 Future projects ...... 206 Endnotes ...... 213 References ...... 213
xii List of Figures
Figure 1: Screen Shot from website icapatrust.org ...... 97 Figure 2: Screen Shot from Nyerai Films web page – tab selection ‘films.’ ...... 98 Figure 3: Screen Shot from Kare Kare Zvako (2005) ...... 100 Figure 4: Screen Shot from #BringBackOurGirls ...... 105 Figure 5: Screen shot from Talatala Filmmakers Website http://talatala.net/nuevo/portfolio-items/zim-doc/ ...... 135
Figure 6: Screen Tafadzwa Mano’s Wild Forrest Ranch Home Page ...... 139
Figure 7: Screen Hwati, Masimba. ‘Urban Totems’ 2015, Mixed medium Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu – Zimbabwe Pavilion. Venice, Italy...... 168 Figure 8: Chazunguza, Chikonzero. ‘Portrait of Nehanda’ 2015, Mixed medium Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu – Zimbabwe Pavilion. Venice, Italy ...... 173 Figure 9: Nyandoro, Gareth,“Cheap And Strong Toilet Tissue Mobile Shop” 2015, Mixed medium Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu – Zimbabwe Pavilion. Venice, Italy...... 174 Figure 10: Screen Capture from the Book Café Facebook Feed 10/15. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/bookcafeharare/ ...... 178
xiii Chapter One: Introduction
My interest in Zimbabwe originates in my family history. Born in Ireland, my father moved to Rhodesia with his family when he was six years old, taking everything they could bring on a large ship. In Rhodesia, my father was raised by Irish parents who had swiftly discarding the perceived baggage of Catholic-affiliation after arriving in a British colony that sought to attract Europeans with the promise of land, cheap labor, and abundance of opportunity. My grandfather and grandmother were barely literate, though my grandfather managed to switch from carpentry, to the trucking business, starting McClune Transports, a company that continues to barely survive under economic collapse in Harare. When Rhodesia as a nation fell to pieces, my father packed up my mother and older sister and moved back to the US, where my mother had been raised after having moved there from Germany at the age of six, following the devastation of the Second World War. My little sisters and I were born and raised in San Francisco, and though Zimbabwe was not critically discussed, the country and its history left traces across our childhood in the Mission District of San Francisco. It is perhaps because of this complicated attachment, the lack of overt discussion, and my own cognizance of racial injustice in the United States that I went as close as I could to the texts that would help me understand a place I knew only from a distance, and through a prism of complex sentiments. Over the course of my life, I have had limited exposure to Zimbabwe, including several visits to the land-locked country during childhood. Throughout the decades of independence, my family maintained contact with several people, including the Chaereras, a Shona family I stayed with while doing fieldwork. The Chaereras had
1 worked with my father in the trucking company, which he transferred to Kenneth Chaerera in the late 1970s, just before my family moved to the United States. In addition to this limited exposure, prior to traveling to Zimbabwe in the Summer of 2013, I established contact with Tsitsi Dangarembga, a prominent Zimbabwean cultural figure who allowed me to do an internship with her organization, the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust. During the weekday, I would go to the office of ICAPA Trust to help with a film festival that was set to happen in August of that year. In the evenings, I would visit the Book Café (a popular arts venue), or the National Gallery of Arts, both in the city center. It was during these days at the office, and downtown in the evenings, that my focus shifted from Zimbabwean film to digital practices.
During my visit to Zimbabwe in 2013, I had arrived with the intention of studying the film industry, or the lack of a film industry in Zimbabwe, with a focus on the work of
Tsitsi Dangarembga and her organization ICAPA Trust. In the Chaerera household, I witnessed the regular use of cellphones by all members of the family. One of the members of the family with whom I felt closest, used his phone to stay in contact with his church group, and played chess on his phone at night on bus rides to and from his house.
He listened to music and watched videos, sharing these with his network of connections on Whatsapp. I noticed that this was a pattern with the people I met in Zimbabwe - cellphones were deeply embedded in their lives.
On public transportation, in the streets, the house I stayed in, the office I worked in, people were on their phones scrolling through Facebook, talking with their friends and family through Whatsapp. In the mornings, the people I worked with were busily texting while they labored over grants or film projects. In the evenings, the young people I lived with texted with their friends, romantic partners, or the people they hoped to have as 2 romantic partners. While we sat and watched Big Brother Africa a popular pan-African reality TV show, they were with me and with others, all busily scrolling, texting, forwarding, commenting, and building their ‘digital bodies' (boyd, 2007) through the networks accessed on their phones. From what I was discerning, an evolving characteristic in the media landscape was the integration of digital and mobile technologies into the lives of the people living in Zimbabwe. My family history and the observations I made while spending time in Zimbabwe serve as a backdrop to this chapter, which introduces the subject of the dissertation, addresses the central question of the project, and outlines the major ideas and conceptual connections across the case studies I examine.
***
This project is born out of fieldwork done in Harare Zimbabwe while living with a Shona family, interning for the development-based Institute for Creative Arts for Progress in
Africa (ICAPA) Trust, and visiting different cultural spaces in the city during 2013 and
2015. In this project, I introduce the concept ‘digital unhu,’ which acknowledges the rapid increase in digital connectivity in Zimbabwe and I investigate the particular ways
Zimbabwean artistic communities have adopted digital technologies to political, economic and creative life in Harare under conditions of extreme precarity. This framework seeks to highlight the role of labor, specifically, what is known as ‘immaterial labor,’ in the creative products developed by Zimbabweans based in an agriculturally centered economy under increasingly digitally interconnected conditions. Ultimately, I argue that these organizations and artists are responding directly to the unstable political
3 and economic conditions of their country by using these technologies to promote non- hierarchical organizations, emphasizing mobility, collaboration and drawing on the reserves of historical legacies of resistance and survival. In this intensive case study, digital unhu illuminates the role of digital technologies and the role of the Southern
African philosophy of unhu in creative communities through the aid and comparison of several organizations. These organizations include the Institute for Creative Arts and
Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust, its digital practices and cultural products, the Book
Café, and the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Within and across these organizations, I describe four instances where Zimbabwean artists utilize both the digital and unhu to promote collaborative work, to investigate and recalibrate local culture, and to practice strategies of mobility to maneuver around economic and political hardship.
I operationalize ‘the digital' broadly within the categories of websites, open source holdings, and the rapid rise of digital connectivity through the sudden influx of cell phones in Zimbabwe. In the fifth chapter I look at ICAPA Trusts integration of various technologies specifically its website icapatrust.org to consider their narrative and political strategies. In sixth chapter I look at the use of websites and open source holdings in two particular projects of ICAPA. In the seventh chapter, I look at the use of mobile phones at the Venice Biennale and the Book Café.
CONSTRUCTING UNHU
The word ‘unhu’ loosely translates to ‘humanness’ or ‘human kindness,’ and has been variously described as a Southern African-based philosophy, a code of ethics, and a
4 worldview whose practice has roots in indigenous ontologies. Broadly, unhu is a concept that gathered distinctive characteristics during the eras of the Pan-African movement,
Marxist-inspired uprisings in the region, liberation battles fought and won on the continent, and in the eras of nation building. Throughout the following chapters unhu is historically grounded in eras of colonization, the liberation war, and post-independence nation building through the contested figure of Robert Mugabe. Specifically, unhu is understood through detailed historical accounts of Zimbabwean strategies for community building, and resistance to corrupt regimes, from British colonization, to Ian Smith's Rhodesia, to Robert Mugabe's ZANU PF. Particularly highlighted is unhu’s emphasis on how identity should be produced through community, as this has converged with the Marxist-influenced liberation struggles, and the national rhetoric that Mugabe continues to enforce. In addition, the ways that these organizations, venues, and projects construct unhu are complicated by the contemporary constraints of economic restrictions including economic collapse as well as development funding.
As is later highlighted in the following chapter, the concept of unhu has its variants across the continent of Africa though is best known as ‘Ubuntu’ as a result of extensive use in South African political and ideological frameworks. In this project, a conscious use of the Zimbabwean-based term ‘unhu’ seeks to conceive of the concept as a way to illuminate the cultural and historical specificities of the philosophy within the region of Zimbabwe across its different eras of social and political and economic organization.
CONTRIBUTION
Zimbabwe has been called ‘a failed state,’ even more pejoratively, a ‘pariah state,’ 5 though as I will describe in the following chapters, postcolonial Zimbabwe is an important location of cultural productivity, creativity, political networking, and dissent. It is also a critical site within which battles over the legacies of anti-colonialism, the traumas of a protracted liberation war, and the influence of neoliberal policies, are all passionately contested. Much like the rest of the global south and particularly identifiable in Africa, the dramatic rise in mobile phones has ushered in an increase in digital connectivity. Zimbabwe's position as a landlocked country with one of the longest lasting dictatorships provides a rich site from which to understand the role of digital technologies in creative and cultural production.
Though postcolonial scholarship has provided a set of tools through which to understand the political implications of digital connectivity in the global south, the list of empirical studies of digital practices in the Southern African region is short. While this project is only a partial account, the radical influx of digital media and connectivity in the global south needs to be addressed as global connectivity steadily increases. In this way, this project speaks to scholarship that has explored the ways that the spread of media and communication technologies have intensified or extended the reach of Southern African cultural, such as work that explores the role of media and democracy in the region (Middleton, 2011; Wasserman, 2011), the development of national narratives in Zimbabwean popular culture on the internet (Mano and Willems, 2008) and the increasing use of social media platforms to express dissent (Iris Leijendekker & Bruce Mutsvairo, 2015; Albert Chibuwe Oswelled Ureke, 2016). This project seeks to build on the work done by these scholars to consider the role digital media is currently playing in the production of culture as it is embedded in local history as well as contemporary social, political and economic conditions. 6 Addressing the limited scholarship that considers communication technologies in the global south, this project aligns with the premises of Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) who claim that “Old margins are becoming new frontiers” (121), while the linear progression of ‘Universal History,’ enshrined in the past two centuries of Eurocentric, modernist doctrines have been radically disrupted. Academic work on the topic of immaterial labor will benefit from scholarly attention to Zimbabwe, where the effects of world-historical processes play out and “prefigure the future of the former metropole” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 121). As these authors assert, “It is in these spaces, where populations producing outsourced services for the North are ‘developing cutting edge info-tech empires of their own,’ whose results are sometimes legitimate, and are sometimes illicit” (2000:26). In agreement with these authors, the larger premise of this project suggests that these conditions have promoted ‘new idioms of work, time and value’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012:130), which take root and are altering production and cultural practices dramatically. As outlined above, this project aligns specifically with the notion that addressing the gaps in the literature, particularly through generating scholarship on Southern African digital practices, is an important step towards a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the role these technologies play at all levels of society and across the globe. While a research project on digital connectivity in a country suffering from massive food shortages, political violence, and economic collapse may appear a trite and apolitical endeavor; this project does not seek to ignore the material concerns of those living in the region and the daily struggle for survival many must endure. Zimbabwe is a landlocked Southern African country that borders South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and Mozambique and is considered a parliamentary democracy, though, in practice, many regard Mugabe as a dictator. The ruling ZANU PF party stage elections on a regular
7 basis, yet human rights-based organizations have documented intimidation and torture as a means of winning these elections. At one point, Zimbabwe was considered one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. It has since become a country with one of the fastest shrinking economies on the planet. Commentators, such as Mangena and Chitando (2011) understand the crisis in Zimbabwe in terms of the collapse of social institutions, such as health and education. This deterioration also includes political polarization, violence, and government-generated propaganda. Also exacerbating conditions is the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar leading to rampant inflation, basic commodity shortages, and the emergence of a vast informal market. In addition to the need to self- censor in order to avoid government retaliation, ‘disappearance,’ or jail,i (Dzamara, 2015) every-day practices of survival depend on the establishment of networks and economic structures that operate outside state sanction, and which are required to be mobile in the face of political violence. Within these significant constraints, artistic communities continue to thrive, against all the odds. It is the purpose of this project to highlight some of the work these communities have produced under these extremely difficult conditions. In the next chapter, I give an overview of the literature on the subjects of digital technologies, unhu and immaterial labor, illuminating themes that I build my argument on. Further, I point to the work that has been previously done on the subject of digital connectivity in the global south, and outline the ways in which my research serves to address various gaps in the literature. Importantly, this chapter outlines the ways that this project serves to intervene in the Euro-centric, and arguable ambiguous character of the framework ‘immaterial labor’ by grounding its premises in an agriculturally based, and economically marginalized country. Chapter three outlines the mixed methods employed in the research design of this project. I include in this chapter my own position as a white, western woman in order to
8 address how I approached the inevitable barriers to communication and gathering information in a country where racial tensions are still extremely high. In chapter four, I explore the historical antecedents to digital unhu. I ask, what sorts of historical events are key or central to understanding the nature of digital unhu? This chapter primarily relies on secondary sources, organizing literature in order to form a backdrop for the case studies examined in the following chapters. In addition, I point to the ways in which these histories inform ZANU PF media policies that seek to control and censor all forms of expression under the regime. This history gives much-needed context for the development of creative expression under these conditions, giving some sense of the high stakes for creative expression under Robert Mugabe. This historical background, likewise, outlines some of the creative strategies used by Zimbabwean creative communities to move around and within the various levels of restriction in contemporary Zimbabwe. In chapter five, I examine the narratives, films, and discourses found on the website ICAPA Trust. I ask: In what way are members of ICAPA using new digital technologies in their organization? In what way does community affiliation get expressed through their digital products and practices? In what ways is creative expression restricted in their organization? In what ways do they work around these restrictions, and how is this an expression of digital unhu? Specifically, I consider how the ideology of human rights fits into larger debates about postcolonial autonomy, and economic, liberal, democratic integration. In particular, I consider the cultural figure Tsitsi Dangarembga, the shifts in cultural production and narratives in her work from the early 1980s to the 21st century. This chapter relies heavily on the theme of combining cultural concerns with new digital technologies, as Tsitsi Dangarembga started out as a novelist whose narratives foregrounded the importance of unhu in traditional and rural Zimbabwean
9 social cohesion, a theme which her website reflects. A primary theme this chapter explores is financial restraints and their colonial legacies, as ICAPA regularly negotiates with European donors who are largely responsible for the continued functioning of the arts in Zimbabwe. In the sixth chapter, I examine the connection between the open source platform Ubuntu Linux, the practices and products of key ICAPA cultural figures, and the Southern African philosophy of unhu. In this chapter, I ask, “What is the role of digital, open source aesthetics in Zimbabwean creative projects, and how does this relate to the politics of digital unhu? What in Zimbabwean history provides a better understanding of these connections? What is the role of land, the history of its contention in Zimbabwe, and how these issues resurface in the uses of Ubuntu Linux in ICAPA and by the organization’s web-designer, Tafadzwa Mano?” In particular, I consider the project Zim.doc, an experimental web-based documentary made by ICAPA’s Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe, and spearheaded by Rabia Williams and María Sala, from the Spanish-based organization Talatala Filmmakers. I compare this documentary to the practices and products of ICAPA members, in particular, web designer Tafadzwa Mano. I examine Mano’s website Wild Forrest Ranch in order to observe the convergence of growing digital connectivity in the region, open source holdings, and historical legacies of affective longing for land in Zimbabwe. Ultimately, I suggest that digital unhu, as it is expressed through the framework of Ubuntu Linux integrates utopian narratives of ‘return' to land, which emerge through the work of a young Zimbabwean digital worker. Additionally, this chapter deals with the themes of communal identity formation as it is expressed in digital platforms. Ubuntu Linux and digital unhu are compared in order to show how unhu’s focus on collaboration, shared humanity, and community orientation are being combined with digital labor that utilizes open source holdings. In addition, this
10 chapter deals with the theme of connectivity to land, and outlines the history of open source movements that invoke a desire for utopian space while comparing this to the history of Zimbabwean land enclosure, and contemporary desires for return to land as this surfaces in immaterial cultural products. Chapter seven considers the Zimbabwean Pavilion titled ‘Pixelated Ubuntu/Unhu’ and the Book Café, an artistic performance hub that exists in Harare Zimbabwe. This chapter asks: What is the role of digital media, and what is its political potential as it is used as a strategy in these venues? How do cultural concerns articulate to digital media in these venues? How do Zimbabwe’s liberation roots articulate to digital technologies in these venues? How is digital unhu manifesting in two separate venues: the Book Café and the 2015 Venice Biennale, specifically through the use of cellphones? What does this say about immaterial labor as it occurs in Zimbabwe? This chapter draws connections between the cultural products exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and the dissolution of the Book Café in order to show the multiple strategies at play in the immaterial labor used to sustain creativity and community survival. This chapter gives particular attention to the theme of community and cultural production, as the Book Café requires the coordinated and digital connectivity of communities of artists and audiences. Likewise, it gives focus to the theme of commitment to political resistance evident in the work of the Book Café artists, and the artists exhibiting at the Biennale. Finally, the sixth chapter outlines the findings of the above chapters and makes some suggestions for future research trajectories and topics. Each of the case studies I look at through the framework of ICAPA Trust, Tafadzwa Mano and his website Wild Forrest Ranch, and the Book Café as it compares to the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. These may appear at first sight to be wildly different case studies loosely connected through a tenuous account of ‘the
11 digital.’ I understand the trajectory and connecting logic of the project to originate in the deeply interdependent arts and performance communities operating in Harare, and the cultural patterns and characteristics that are legible across the three case studies I provide. This project starts with an intensive look at the organization ICAPA Trust, whose history of integrated technologies and creative production I examine in chapter five. Having spent a significant amount of time with this organization, I was able to attend and be made aware of several cultural events, and projects produced by the organization. Chapter six zooms in on two of these projects giving detailed specificity to the organization’s cultural productivity by highlighting the voluntary work of Tafadzwa Mano as this compares to the project funded and organized largely by the Spain-based organization Talatala Films. Chapter seven looks at the Book Café, a locally well-known performance venue that worked closely with ICAPA Trust. In addition to ICAPA holding weekly film screenings in its large performance space, several artists who regularly performed at the Book Café worked on film projects with ICAPA. I compare the characteristics and patterns across the history of this organization to the visual art of the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, a pavilion titled “Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu,” which shows the patterns locatable in ICAPA, its projects and at the Book Café as resurfacing in a global visual and performance art event. These patterns include an emphasis on collaboration, a fusion of cultural history with newer technologies, and the strategy of mobility. This pattern of mobility in digitized Zimbabwean cultural products can be understood in the literal sense, when seen in the context of the roughly one-third of Zimbabwe’s population now living in the diaspora. Likewise, mobility is a requirement for the Book Café, whose overt expressions of resistance to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF resulted in the physical space of the café shutting down. Now, through cellphones and
12 social media, the Book Café organizes pop-up events that happen at venues across the city. This mobility is also identifiable in the more figurative case of ICAPA’s organizational founder Tsitsi Dangarembga and her required negotiation with Western Donors, the narrative strings attached to their funding, and her capacity to navigate around the harsh censorship laws of the state. Dangarembga’s travel and education abroad, along with her strong identification with Shona culture and roots, uniquely positions her in the role of what Lazzarato (1996) and Hardt and Negri (2001) refer to as knowledge worker. In this way, Dangarembga is able to skillfully draw from, and navigate through, the cultural legacies of the west while simultaneously drawing from Zimbabwean history and cultural narratives. There is a lot to say about digital unhu and this project is, in many ways, just a beginning. Digital connectivity in Zimbabwe happens in a non-linear way, creating unlikely combinations, following down winding pathways, at times circular, at others open ended, lacking a cohesive form. This has allowed for the emergence of a contiguous though mutating sense of historical and cultural specificity, which is dependent on the history of colonization and the strategies of resistance as they are extended and intensified through new technologies. Ultimately, I argue that the material and historical realities of Zimbabwe when articulated to the practices of creative expression through digital technologies promotes identifiable patterns that critical digital studies would benefit by paying attention to. These characteristics include the expression of community orientation whose roots travel back to pre-colonial social structures, the era of Marxist, anti-colonial struggle and the contemporary era where one is required to remain mobile and agile under extremely precarious conditions.
13 Chapter Two: Literature Review
Identifying Digital Unhu:
This project is an interdisciplinary endeavor, and for this reason, I have read broadly across multiple and intersecting fields. In addition to introducing a new concept, this project seeks to close the gap in the literature on digital media and cultural production by performing three primary interventions. The first is to generate empirical knowledge on digital connectivity in the understudied region of Zimbabwe. The second is to utilize the framework of immaterial labor throughout cultural analysis, in order to understand broader changes in labor and productivity as this is manifesting in Zimbabwe.
This type of analysis allows for a way to understand the economic as well as local, cultural factors influencing the artifacts and organizations I examine. Thirdly, this project seeks to revise and reconfigure theories and methodologies associated with scholarship on ‘immaterial labor,’ a theoretical framework that has been applied primarily to the centers of global capitalism. I make use of the framework of immaterial labor because of the way that this enables an analysis that considers the cultural, social dimensions as well as economic components, while promoting critical analysis of digital media use in creative Zimbabwean groups. However through focusing on a globally marginalized nation in the Southern African region, I seek to point to the gaps in the literature that address changes in labor on a global scale to suggest patterns and characteristics
14 identifiable in Zimbabwe, that challenge the Euro and American- centric conclusions drawn in the scholarship.
Based on the research I do, I discern patterns across the different case studies I examine, and the different uses of technology among artists and organizational participants, which I call digital unhu. Using the framework of immaterial labor, I draw from Lazzarato’s understanding of the two components of immaterial labor. This includes first, the informational content of the commodity, which refers directly to the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control. The second is the activity that produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, involving a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work” – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. An example that I provide of this in this dissertation is the cultural figure Tsitsi Dangarembga, who as an artist based in Zimbabwe, plays a particular role in addressing consolidated cultural norms of Zimbabwe, while addressing the narrative requirements of
Western donors, whose financial backing often comes with strings attached. Ultimately, I recognize an alternative orientation towards these technologies that, because of radically different historical contexts and economic, social conditions, differs from the creative products developing in the centers of global capitalism, as described by scholars such as
Ceraso and Pruchnich (2011), when they talk about open source aesthetics, and which I discuss at length in chapter six.
In this way, digital unhu seeks to revise and refine the arguably vague concept of
‘immaterial labor’ by examining its possibilities and emergences within a very localized
15 context and through the creative products of Zimbabwean artists and their organizations.
This gives immaterial labor much needed specificity, though likewise, operates on two levels. First, the digital, as this is broadly conceived and understood in the project, is an integral component of immaterial labor’s inquiry, and is centralized in the case studies I explore. In the case of the artists I look at closely, and the narratives they produce, I argue that these individuals can be understood as knowledge workers, as described by
Lazzarato (1996), as well as Hardt and Negri (2001). This is further expounded and made clear by the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), in his description of two forms of history in cultural productivity, where the characteristics of labor have shifted to centralize performance and communication, seeking to address directly the needs, tastes and desires of particular audiences.
Specifically, understanding ‘immaterial labor’ as it is performed by virtue of, and through, digital connectivity in the postcolonial nation of Zimbabwe is aided by Chakrabarty’s groundbreaking work, Provincializing Europe (2000). This starting point helps to illuminate the inculcation of culture into market relations, particularly through Chakrabarty’s description of the double vectors of capitalism’s history. Under this framework, Chakrabarty describes ‘history one,’ or the universal and necessary history we associate with capital, which forms the basis of the usual narratives of transition to the capitalist modes of production. Under the structures of this history, the past is considered a precondition for a capitalist future, without any real meaning outside of this structural progression. In contrast, ‘history two’ indexes existing antecedents to capitalism, which have little in common with capitalist logic, though are in constant contact with history one. In this way, history two is constituted by “the multiple encounters and clashes between those logics and the heterogeneous forms of life and the ‘habitations of the 16 world’ it interpellates – and seeks to ‘subsume’ – in its development” (Mezzadra, 2011:158). As a way of clarifying the integration of these two histories, Chakrabarty makes an important intervention in Marx’s thoughts on labor and productivity, illustrated by contrasting the production of a piano to a piano performance. According to Marx, piano producers are considered economically productive, while piano players are not, based on the immateriality of performance as a commodity. Counter to this, Chakrabarty insists on the productivity of performance, supported by scholars such as Paolo Virno (2003), who suggest that though performance has always been productive, it has shifted from occupying a marginal role in economic structures to becoming central under the recent changes in capitalist economies. The ways that these seemingly obtuse theories help to uncover how Zimbabwean culture is fragmenting and being integrated into productive economic relations is part of the structuring of Chakrabarty’s formulation of ‘history two.’ If ‘taste,’ or the ‘ear of the listener,’ or even, ‘affective desires,’ can be understood to be structured by local and historical specificities, then the artist, or cultural producer, seeks to respond to these tastes and desires, suggesting the ways in which these social relations of performance, as they are channeled through communication technologies, are likewise routed through market economies. As Steingo writes, “the formerly unproductive (yet social) relationship of the piano player and the listener has transformed into a productive- consumptive relationship, which nonetheless continues to be social”ii(Steingo, 2016:250). As affective narratives of pleasure and aversion are expressed through these devices they become thresholds within which multiple histories converge, particularly as certain narratives or images catch hold, are manipulated, multiplied or become viral. It is with these frameworks that the production of digital artifacts displayed on the ICAPA website,
17 the visual art presented at the 2015 Zimbabwean Pavilion, and the dissolution and reemergence of the Book Café in Harare Pop-up events are understood to be experimentations with localized tastes and market integration. Specifically, knowledge workers such as the artists Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tafadzwa Mano, Thomas Brickhill, and all of the artists who exhibited at the ‘Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu’ Zimbabwean pavilion, are understood as drawing on the history of collaborative work and communication that comes with cultural norms and trends, in order to ‘play to the ear’ of multiple listeners, straddling an increasingly wide range of potential consumers.
CONCEPTUALIZING UNHU
Historical Overview
The political and philosophical history of unhu is useful for understanding the ways in which the term invokes anti-colonial and postcolonial strategies of resistance as these are calibrated to contemporary conditions. In other words, sketching out a history of unhu as it relates to Zimbabwe is helpful to this project because of the ways that the African liberation movements and the colonial era persist in national narratives and local culture.
Throughout this dissertation, historical background is of particular importance for this project, specifically regarding colonial land dispossession, anti-colonial liberation struggles, and the contemporary land question in Zimbabwe. In this way, this project is in conversation with scholars who emphasize the importance of regionally and historically grounded research (Fuchs, 2017; Galloway, 2011; Morley, 2017).
While the word ‘unhu' is unique to the region of Zimbabwe, similar concepts and practices are found across the continent of Africa, revealing antecedents in precolonial
18 societal formations, likewise consolidated under the shared, if differing, conditions of colonization. According to Mogobe B. Ramose (2001), Ubuntu is the foundational epistemological category in African Bantu populations and is in this way not confined to the borders of any one nation in the Southern African region. Additionally,
Kamwangamalu (1999) suggests that Ubuntu is a pan-African philosophy, where phonological variations can be located in the concepts umundu in Kenya, bumuntu in
Tanzania, vumuntu in Mozambique and gimuntu in the Congo. This mutual reinforcement of self and other is captured and encouraged using proverbs, idioms, and aphorisms in numerous African languages.
The word “unhu” refers loosely to interdependency among community members, expressing a humanist ethics or ideology, roughly translated as “humanness” or “human kindness.” As Stanlake Samkange writes, Unhu is, “The attention one human being gives to another: the kindness, courtesy, consideration and friendliness in the relationship between people, a code of behavior, an attitude to others and to life....”iii For other scholars, the term is predominantly understood as a form of moral guidance for ethical behavior (Gade, 2011; Sibanda, 2014). Augustine Shutte (2001:56) adds that ubuntu is
"the wholehearted identification of the self with the other so that self-determination can only be achieved in dependence on the power of another." Ngubane (1979:64), likewise conveyed this idea when he describes Ubuntu as the way that an individual cannot "exist of himself (sic), by himself, for himself; he comes from a social cluster and exists in a social cluster" (Huffman, 2000:21). These variations on the theme of an interrelation between subjectivity and community evidence the coincidental similarities between 19 various definitions, though are better understood within the context of colonial and postcolonial history.
The concept of Ubuntu had many precursors in the political thinking of postcolonial leaders during the early era of de-colonization and Marxist inspired resistance of the late 1950s and 1960s. The concept Ubuntu was first used publicly in an address to a conference held in Durban in 1960, (Gade, 2011). However, before this public exposure, Tom Lodge (1999) unearthed how Jordan Kush Ngubane used Ubuntu in his novels published in the famous African Drum magazine of the 1950s (Lodge,
1999). The concept gained traction during the ‘Africanization’ movements of the 1960s that sought to look inward at cultural expressions that were unique to the region. Heroes of Pan-African and Marxist inspired liberation movements, including Kwame Nkrumah,
Léopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Obafemi Awolowo, Kenneth Kaunda, and Ahmed
Sékou Touré, all made efforts at solidifying a movement towards independent political formations based on traditional African humanist or socialist values.
While all of these thinkers ascribed to various forms of African traditional values one notable example is the call for Africanization by Julius Nyerere who argued that
Tanganyika (later known as Tanzania), should base its political framework on a return to
Ujamaa, which he described as a traditional African form of socialism. He writes,
Ujamaa is:
Opposed to capitalism, which seeks to build a happy society on the basis of the
exploitation of man by man; and it is equally opposed to doctrinaire socialism
which seeks to build its happy society on a philosophy of inevitable conflict 20 between man and man. We, in Africa, have no more need of being “converted” to
socialism than we have of being “taught” democracy. Both are rooted in our own
past – in the traditional society, which produced us (Nyerere, 1966:170).
Nyerere’s formulation of Ujamaa distinguishes itself from the traditional doctrine of
Marxist socialism, by suggesting that its framework does not make strict distinctions between exploited classes and the owners of the means of production. Instead, Ujamaa distinctly points to the reliance and interrelation between these two supposed oppositions.
Another example of a conceptual antecedent to the term Ubuntu is Kwame
Nkrumah’s philosophy of consciencism, which emphasizes being in harmony with the original humanist principles of Africa. His consciencism required a honed awareness of the ways in which colonial administrators in Ghana and their African employees had become beholden to European ideals, which he framed as being based on the premises of possessive individualism and the mandate to exploit others for the benefit of self. In distinction, Nkrumah’s philosophy advocated for a more relational ethics that thought beyond the contours of the individual. A final example of Ubuntu’s antecedent is in
Léopold Senghor’s concept of ‘négritude.’ Developed by Senghor during postcolonial
Senegal, he argued for a distinctive type of African socialism, which foregrounded what he considered as the civilizing values inherent in black populations across the globe.
Common themes throughout both the antecedents and the early formations of
Unhu/unhuism were the notions of a philosophy that enabled a return to practices that evolved before violent encounters with colonialism. This refrain of ‘longing to return' 21 resonates throughout various contemporary iterations of the concept Ubuntu/Unhu – as a desire to escape or as a mechanism for imagining alternative futures.
In addition to the production of unhu as a way to understand Marxist liberation struggles, unhu became a way to consolidate national belonging. The idea of unhu began to take a more solid form during Zimbabwean and South African struggles for independence in the late 1970s and 1990s respectively. Under these conditions, the term became a means to guide these nations in the search for autonomy and in the arduous task of shifting from minority or apartheid rule to independence. The first publication that used Ubuntu as a guiding principle is the book, Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwean
Indigenous Political Philosophy (1980), written by Stanlake J.W. T. Samkange, who sought to fold the term into the fabric of national cohesion. This book weaves Unhuism within traditional philosophy or ideology perceived of as indigenous to Zimbabwe.
Samkange’s book attempted primarily to suture the term to an ideological infrastructure where, as Patrick Sibanda (2014) asserts, the term ossified in a way that established a moral interdependency requiring obedience to the community above all else. In agreement with Sibanda, Kamalu (1990) suggests that in this supposed traditional view, moral responsibility is tied indelibly to a community, where a wrong done by one individual has enduring effects on a clan or community.
In addition to unhu’s capacity to consolidate national identity, the philosophy drew global recognition as the figures of Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, both made extensive use of the term in the nation-building enterprises of post- apartheid South Africa during the challenging conditions of transition from minority rule. 22 In the case of South Africa, Ubuntu is engraved into the doctrines of the nation, as it appears in the epilog of the Interim Constitution of South Africa, written in 1993. "There is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for Ubuntu but not for victimization" (“Truth or Reconciliation
Mechanism: Interim Constitution Accord | Peace Accords Matrix,” Webpage, n.d.).
Throughout these dramatic alterations in the terrain of politics and social organization, unhu is a flexible and robust concept, adapting to the parameter of history and its forces.
Media frameworks, ethics and unhu
Several scholars have pointed to the ways that the philosophy of unhu intersects with media frameworks and norms, particularly in the context of media ethics. For example, authors such as Okigbo (1996), Blankenberg (1999), Shutte (2001), Chistians (2004), and
Wasserman and De Beer (2004) emphasize unhu's premise of ‘community first' as a means of structuring normative media policies. According to these authors, and under these principles, mediated communication could potentially take on the role of an intermediary for the concerns, ideas, and opinions of the community. Accordingly, the media function to stimulate community participation by developing or engaging consensus based on consultation with particular population groups. As a way to further understand these conditions, Fourie (2007) contrasts these normative constraints to a western epistemological emphasis on media that focuses primarily on information, surveillance, entertainment, and education. In contrast, ubuntuism in media strategies would focus mainly on, "dialogue towards reaching a consensus based on the social
23 values and morals of a community' (Fourie, 2007:10). However, more usefully, Raphael
Capurro (2007) helps to inform this project’s explicit attempts to historicize digital media integration into Zimbabwe cultural practices, and the ways in which this gives basis for alternative legacies of critical digital studies.
This set of authors, engaging specifically with the ethics of Ubuntu/unhu media practices, has been useful in highlighting alternative and contrasting perspectives on the role of media in society emanating from the Southern African region (Gunaratne,
2002:8). In contrast, this project seeks to consider digital unhu within the context of larger economic forces, and the expression of alternative organization of society informed by postcolonial legacies. With the rise of digital technology in Zimbabwe, I suggest that the previously normative role of unhu in media practices has been ‘pixelated' or,
‘digitized,' through the rapid increase in hand-held internet accessibility, where networks and active participation of media production converge with a multiplicity of networked users, and that this pixilation should be considered with localized, historical, cultural and economic forces in mind.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE DIGITAL
The Digital Divide and Access
Up until recently, many discussions about internet and digital connectivity in the global south have been part of the body of scholarship dedicated to recognizing massive inequalities in ownership and access known as the digital divide. For decades, the notion of a digital divide has been extensively explored in academic research, influencing not
24 just academic scholarship but policy and popular discourse around ICTs, including work done by scholars such as Jan van Dijk (2005) and Pippa Norris (2001). Even before the shift to mobile phones that could access broadband signals, there were critiques of the binary and oversimplified concept of a digital divide. In response, several scholars have focused on more complexly interrelated and overlapping divides (Rice and Katz, 2003;
Van Deursen and van Dijk, 2013; Sinikka Sassi, 2005). Still, other scholars suggest that we reframe access and divides as more of a spectrum of access and affordances, opportunities or skills (van Dijk and Hacker 2003; Lenhart and Horrigan, 2003; Hargittai,
2013; Warchauer, 2003). We can now think of 85 percent of the world as potential internet users (Donner, 2015), given the proximity to cell signals and handsets. However, access does not necessarily translate to use, and it is an oversimplification itself to think of potential users as the same as users. As Donner (2015) suggests, where cellular signals cover much of the world’s population, there is so much variability in access that thinking in these terms has ceased to be useful as a measure. Similarly, the temptation to speak of a type of connectivity, or technology that will close the divide is to promote the premise that there is a single divide that exists to be closed. A more localized, and tailored understanding of the phenomenon of access would consider the 85 percent of users with potential access as a starting point for understanding the multiple and persistent differences of internet/digital experiences among populations. In other words, as use and access spreads around the world, we need to account “for a greater, and more stratified heterogeneity of Internet experiences than ever before” (Donner, 2015:50).
25 Critical Digital Studies
Understanding the scope and orientation of scholarship that addresses digital connectivity in the global south is an important starting point for framing this project. This next section seeks to map my conception of the digital within the landscape of proliferating digital studies. The question of what is and is not new media has remained open and ongoing. Some focus on computer technologies, cultural forms and contexts in which technologies are used – art, film, commerce, science, and the internet. For the purposes of this project, defining the digital must necessarily remain fluid, because of its evolving characteristics, though I use certain parameters as a guide. To some extent I derive my notion of ‘the digital’ from broader definitions of cyberstudies, which consists of domains of digital communication and information technologies, such as the internet, email, digital imaging systems, chat rooms, and interactive digital entertainment systems.
Additionally, I frame digital media as an extension of older technologies, suggesting that these media should be understood as existing on a spectrum (Bell and Kennedy, 2000).
For this reason, I do not use the term ‘new media.’ Ongoing difficulty with framing the practices and content associated with digital technologies as ‘new’ in what has been labeled as ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins, 2006) is exacerbated as our mediated landscapes are evolving rapidly, with innovations and alterations, trends and discoveries, shifting the technological landscape at a breathtaking rate. Instead, I perceive ‘the digital’ to be an adaptable term to use in the case studies that I examine. The digital avoids the pitfalls and loaded ascription with what is termed ‘the new,’ and is sufficiently expansive to include multiple phenomenon operating sometimes, simultaneously. 26 In addition to widespread adoption, skepticism on the ‘newness’ of these technologies not withstanding, this project is particularly interested in the distinctive characteristics of these technologies and their affordances. The integration of ICTs is distinguished, in part, by the deterioration of top-down models of media production.
Additionally, the material elements of digital media are distinctive in that they are characterized by numerical representation, modularity, variability and transcoding, which radically change what can be done, expressed, thought and communicated with digital mediums. An important component of these material aspects of the digital and the affordances they provide, is the rise in what Henry Jenkins has labeled as participatory culture (2006, 2009, 2012) or convergence culture (2006), characterized as being deeply political; these frameworks are useful in understanding the changing structures of production, consumption and distribution.
In response to these changes, Lev Manovich (2001) suggests that we need to develop a new software theory, rather than cultural theory, to account for new media objects. Because of this project's focus on creative and digital output, Lev Manovich’s book The Language of New Media (2001) provides entry into the disciplines of poetics and cultural aesthetics in the field of software studies. During the first era of digital adoption when Manovich wrote this book, commentators speculated that alliances made under post-industrial economic conditions would destroy previous power structures, and unleash the power of virtual communities. In the aftermath of this era of technophilic and utopian-driven projections, several contemporary scholars question Manovich's (2001) focus on the aesthetics and formal properties of new media for being ahistorical and 27 American-Centric. In the fast pace of technological innovation and integration and since
Manovich's (2001) book, scholarship on the topic has speculated on and re-evaluated how these technologies will alter social and political organization. As new technologies increasingly integrate into social, political and economic spheres, scholars in this field of interest now "reassess the rampant open sourcing of all aspects of cultural and aesthetic life, from our tools to our texts, from our bodies to our social milieus" (Galloway,
2011:377).
In order to challenge overextended conclusions drawn from scholarship on digital characteristics and trends, this project seeks to place Zimbabwe's technological present in historical perspective (Edgerton, 2008) suggesting that the primacy of historical and spatial contexts should be put over the moment of technological innovation, which runs the risks presuming technical ‘essences,' and homogenous uses of mediated technologies
(Morely, 2017). In other words, contemporary digital scholarship that focuses on the global south, when approaching larger conversations in the field, must first confront the persistence of eurocentrism, mediacentrism and technological determinism in digital media scholarship, predominantly focused on western educated and industrialized democratic nations (Fuchs, 2017). From this perspective, the rise of technologies as they merge with Zimbabwean culture should be understood from the standpoint of localized historical and cultural conditions.
Drawing from these various authors, this project suggests that critical digital studies need to take into account a multiplicity of crises and economic trends that disproportionally effect nations existing in the global south. These conditions include the 28 preponderance of precarious labor, the digitization of work, and lower wage income
(Fuchs, 2017) along with ongoing legacies of resource extraction, structural adjustment programs, and sanctions. As Stuart Hall noted, in cultural studies' effort to move away from reductionist thinking, the workings of economic forces and the shifting parameters of capitalism were underemphasized (Jhally and Hall, 2012). In alliance, Christian Fuchs claims, "What is needed is a critical digital and social media studies that draw upon real- life alternatives (such as free software and the digital commons) to neoliberal principles”
(Fuchs, 2017:38). Exposing the existence of ‘digital unhu' in Zimbabwean creative and digital cultural practices takes steps in the direction of drawing upon these alternatives.
Immaterial Labor in critical digital scholarship
The first generation of internet culture extolled the subversive qualities of new technologies and their capacity to destabilize old hierarchies. This has given way to the realization that digital technologies are deeply enmeshed in the spectacle of market strategies.iv Scholars associated with this field of thinking draw from Marx’s optimistic assumptions of the shared social knowledge that workers would own in the automation of labor, predicted in his lesser-known manuscript, Grundrisse written in 1857 and published in 1939. Scholars affiliated with Post-Marxist autonomists suggest that the
Grundrisse (1939) predicted the consolidation of a ‘common intellect’ easily graphed onto the computational knowledge that continues to be acquired by large groups of digitally literate populations. In the first decade of the twenty first century, the hope was that these digital skills and the platforms for more democratic forms of expression, would
29 aid in the organization of global activist grids and help to facilitate transnational movements such as flash mobs or twitter organized protests. To a certain extent, we have seen these movements take place in the mobilization against authoritarian governments such as Arab Spring, and Zimbabwe’s 2016 twitter-inspired demonstrations. However, there are others that, while acknowledging the organizational potential of digital technologies, likewise point to the persistence of these authoritarian regimes (Hindman,
2008). Additionally, David Golumbia (2009) suggests that the use of computers in contemporary culture is coinciding with centralized infrastructural ownership and the consolidating power of dominant social institutions, such as the state and transnational corporations.
Recognizing the integration of digital, computational communication technologies into the functioning of market structures, and the consolidation of ownership to a frightening degree is necessary, though I suggest that these conditions be acknowledged as a backdrop. Bodies of literature that understand these processes, likewise point to the ways that populations continue to resist their circumstances, such as scholarship that focuses on participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2006a, 2006b; Benkler, 2007;
Ito, 2008). These scholars have laid important groundwork for understanding the tightening feedback loop between production, consumption and participation (Burgess and Green, 2009; Gray, 2010). However, this line of inquiry continues to assume a linear production model affiliated with what has been termed Post-Fordism. This project takes as a key tenant that the internet is “simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy” (Leonard, 2010), and for this reason, scholarship influenced by 30 autonomist theory, particularly the framework of ‘immaterial labor’ is useful in the larger goal of parsing out the changing contours of production and labor in the terrain of global culture and economics, particularly through the aid of scholarship done by Terranova
(2004a, 2004b), Mazzadra (2011), and Virno (2003). These framing devices are useful in understanding the characteristics of digital unhu in contemporary Zimbabwean art, as the cultural and creative production of artists channeled through communication technologies are being integrated into Zimbabwean populations at an alarming rate.
As many commentators on contemporary global conditions point out, dramatic economic and productive changes have been happening since the 1970s. Seismic shifts in labor formations and economic structuring have been explored famously in the work of
Hardt and Negri (2001), who introduced the concept ‘immaterial labor.' According to
Hardt and Negri, this form of labor is characterized by three defining characteristics, including the communicative labor of industrial production that has recently become integrated with informational networks; the interactive and collaborative labor of
‘symbolic analysis and problem-solving;' and the labor of producing or manipulating affects. Discussions about immaterial labor have grown as the organization of capital has shifted from the production of things to the production of social relations themselves, including communicative, informational, interactive and affective relations (Steingo,
2016). This suggests that while this type of labor is sometimes remunerated, often it is not. In this way, while these practices can still be understood as ‘labor,' they fall out of any orthodox Marxist structures of capital, labor, and class.
The dramatic shifts in production and labor in the rise of service economies, in 31 what has been referred to as Cognitive Capitalism, or the Knowledge Economy, is heavily dependent on the modes of production currently driven by hardware, software and technical skills in living labor. A dominant characteristic of this new phase is the enmeshed and interlinked conditions of labor production and consumption particularly evident in the ongoing productivity of social media platforms, and other forms of network-connectivity, where the work of communicating and gathering information from open-source platforms has blurred the line between work and everyday practices.
Specifically defined, immaterial labor points to two different elements of labor.
According to Lazzarato (1996), "as regards the 'informational content' of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers' labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication)" (p.1). In addition, immaterial labor includes a collection of activities that are not typically recognized as work. This includes the activities “involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato, 1996:1). Lazzarato’s formulation of these changing dynamics of labor suggests that immaterial labor directly produces capital relations, changing the dynamics of capitalism significantly. Immaterial labor, in this context, is useful for helping to understand how digitally networked activity can be seen as a form of productivity. In addition, the framework of immaterial labor helps account for the affective drives sustaining digital networks such as the desire to connect, to extend one’s social network, and to build identity within community. 32 Immaterial labor is a tricky and unwieldy category. As a concept, it has pre-dated digital technologies and amalgamates cultural performances of all types, including artistic, domestic and gender-based practices (Terranova, 2003). Important for the purposes of this project, it has expanded to include work done on the internet. Though not typically understood as a form of work, the mundane acts of scrolling, posting, forwarding, extending and keeping track of online networks is at the heart of immaterial labor. Throughout the course of this dissertation, I engage with these productive capacities in the projects and on the website of ICAPA Trust, in the working of the Book
Café, and in the visual art of the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Particularly significant to this project is that the activities associated with immaterial labor promote an investment of desire into production in a way that cultural theorists have mostly understood in terms of consumption, a concept I engage with more extensively in chapter five.
Immaterial labor in the global south
George Caffenzis and Federici (2007) argue that capital has thrived historically by organizing production at both the lowest as well as the highest technological levels of the global economy, and by producing development as well as underdevelopment. They insist that understanding the ways that digital technology are integrating and altering global capitalist organization requires that we examine these changes from the perspective of the global south. In alliance with these premises and taking the concept
'immaterial labor' away from its original formulations since Hardt and Negri (2001, 2001,
33 2009) popularized the term, I reclaim it from subsequent scholars who say it is not useful to postcolonial societies. This project seeks to show that it does and should apply to a critical analysis of cultural production in Zimbabwe. Beyond just implementing these concepts, I try to use the case of Zimbabwe to modify and complicate immaterial labor by expanding the breadth of its framework to include postcolonial nations in Southern
Africa.
The term ‘Digital unhu’ is recognized, in part, as a result of the influx of hardware and software into Zimbabwe as it converges with artistic communities and practices. This influx has coincided with the ‘immaterial and voluntary labor’ (Hardt et al., 2001, 2005,
2009; Terranova, 2004; Virno, 2003) or the digital, affective, and cognitive labor that goes into producing immaterial commodities. The framework of immaterial labor usefully helps to understand the construction of both the digital and unhu.v This theoretical framework, and the scholarship I call on help to illuminate how cultural and technological forms of labor respond to the influences of capital. The cases that I examine in this project are not “produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is, they have not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of capital” (Terranova, 2004a). Instead, these cases occupy a more ambiguous role as the cultural industries have expanded in the process of experimentation with the creation of value from knowledge, culture, and affects. This experimentation with capital extraction is specifically addressed in chapter five, though influences the shape of chapters three and four, by responding to the works of several scholars in post-colonial studies who suggest an integration of political economy with cultural studies’ methodologies and theories. 34 In contrast to the more widely known works on immaterial labor, this project explores the rise of this form of labor in a nation relegated to the margins of the global economy. Specifically, digital practices promote an ambiguous relationship between consolidated and locally nuanced tastes, desires and opinions, which are channeled through the devices that are driving global capitalism. This ambiguous relationship allows for the potential incorporation of digital laborers who have become familiarized with the habits and skills associated with cognitive and creative labor, identifying as well as developing potential target markets. However, what this project focuses on are the ways that Zimbabwean communities work within these parameters by using these digital devices while maneuvering around the devastating results of economic restructuring imposed by liberal democratic lending nations and the dictatorial rule of Robert Mugabe.
To participate in this form of intervention, I draw from research that explores how changes in production, labor and consumption are manifesting in the global South (Partha
Chatterjee, 2004; Kalyan Sanyal, 2014; Couze Venn, 2006; Stefano Harney, 2010;
Miguel Mellino, 2006).
Alternative legacies in Critical Digital Studies
An ongoing theme of this project is to foreground the ways that the relational quality of unhu maps on to scholarship on network culture. In the advent of communication technological innovations, several media scholars have emphasized the rise of networks and community, such as the seminal work of Manual Castells (2010, 2012).
Additionally, the work of Yochai Benkler (2006) focuses on the new forms of social
35 interaction that new communication technologies facilitate, such as the radically decentralized, distributed mode of interaction he calls ‘commons-based peer production’
(Benkler, 2006). Others, such as Geert Lovink (2016), Tiziana Terranova (2001), and
Eugene Thacker (2008), focus on the rise of networks of information that extend beyond the reach of personal computers or hand-held devices.
In particular, unhu’s relational framework maps seamlessly onto Terranova’s
(2001) description of the cultural politics of information, or the basis for what she calls
‘network culture,’ which resonates with the descriptions of unhu’s open systems as they are outlined by various African philosophers including Mogobe Ramose (1999) and
Michael Onyebuchi Eze (2010). Specifically, Ramos and Eze’s flexible understanding of unhu suggests that unhuism represents a type of flow, continual movement, and
‘becoming’ that is based on the fundamental conditions of interrelation.vi Across these two different fields of literature, both emphasize the ways that connectivity alters the mechanisms of identity formation and community affiliation. A particularly conspicuous parallel exists between the tenants of unhu and recent descriptions of the digital terrain where both emphasize “openness, obstruction, resonance, contagion, bifurcation, and emergence” (Terranova, 2004a: 11). In particular, open systems of relation, whether social or otherwise, emphasize probabilities over predeterminations, highlighting alternative possibilities, which has tremendous political potential.vii However, Terranova
(2001, 2004), in particular, is careful to ground her analysis of network culture in the flexibility of market extraction, refusing to be seduced by the promise of full-scale collective leveling under the democratic possibilities of digital technologies. This allows 36 for a particularly critical bent to the conception of immaterial labor, as mentioned in the previous section, which allows for the space to theorize these concepts within the under- examined context of Southern Africa.
Despite being a generative concept in providing a critical understanding of technological integration, practices and products, immaterial labor has been accused of being too vague, abstract, totalizing and Eurocentric.viii Specifically, scholars such as
Silvia Federici (2011), and George Caffentzis (2011) have questioned the relevance of post-autonomist frameworks to nations outside of postindustrial centers. Despite concerns for imposing western-derived theories onto the global South, and recognizing deficits in a theoretical framework derived primarily from the centers of late capitalism, this study allies with scholars such as Sandro Mezzadra (2011) and Gavin Steingo (2016) who make use of these Western-derived concepts in the context of the global south. These scholars merge postcolonial studies with immaterial labor, suggesting that resonances between the two bodies of literature, when applied to material conditions, are rich in possibilities. In alliance with these authors, I insist that this framework can be illuminating when combined with the historical nuance and local specificity of
Zimbabwean artistic communities. In this way, this project seeks to perform an intervention in this very western-centric theory, using these ideas as a partial framework for examining the locally specific case studies of Zimbabwean artistic community practices. Ultimately, this project stages what Zimbabwean visual artist Masimba Hwati calls ‘Harmonic Incongruence,’(Hwati, 2015) by illuminating the workings of immaterial
37 labor as it manifests with its own properties and characteristics reliant on the specificities of the region.
Digital Unhu, in this way, seeks to make use of the framework of immaterial labor in order to analyze critically how digital technologies, broadly defined, are being used in
Zimbabwe. Across the case studies highlighted in the following chapters, I chart characteristics and trends, exploring nuances in contexts. These include the resurrection of cultural practices as they are enmeshed with new digital technologies. Political projects reliant on community collaboration are advanced through digital unhu, a phenomenon I go into greater detail in chapter five. In addition, the requirement of mobility is a notable quality of digital unhu, though can be understood in a literal sense, as well as in the more figurative sense, as I explore further in chapter three, where I ask,
‘how do digital technologies promote literal types of mobility that enable a form of resistance to state restrictions? What are the historical precursors, if any, to this form of mobility?’ Across all the case studies explored in this dissertation, narratives of anti- colonial Marxist struggle are legible in the creative projects examined, requiring understanding the constellation of people and technologies as they are embedded in particular political, historical and economically influenced conditions.
Research Questions:
In the context of the digital and unhu in the sites that I examine, I ask broadly: “How do creative organizations in Zimbabwe construct the role of digital technologies and unhu in their work? Over the course of the five following chapters, I seek to answer questions that 38 1) conceptualize the digital, 2) conceptualize unhu, 3) address primary research, 4) address Zimbabwean history and context. In addition to these questions, this dissertation also includes several themes and identifies patterns across the different levels of research.
These topics include a deep and historical connection to land and a required negotiation with Anglo-European donors who are primarily responsible for financing the arts in
Zimbabwe. These last two themes are important for understanding the significance of
Zimbabwean cultural production within the political and economic constraints of which the colonial era and post-cold war US hegemony continue to play a meaningful role.
In the next chapter, I describe the methodologies I used in conducting this research. Using mixed methods, I employ the strategies of participant observation, ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis. I lay out the processes I developed throughout the course of this project.
39 Chapter Three: Methodology
When I initially approached fieldwork in Harare, my goals were to interview Zimbabwean filmmakers through inductive and exploratory methods, asking open-ended questions, without seeking to control the responses. I went into the process with a flexible understanding of what I hoped to find, and despite initial research on the region, approached the process with the goal of not imposing preconceived assumptions. As a result, this is an intensive, qualitative study that operates at different levels, focusing on the implications of a dramatic rise of digital technology and internet connectivity in Zimbabwe. I utilized several research approaches, including participant observation, interviews, and textual analyses of website images and descriptions. Since digital unhu has been analyzed within its material conditions where the boundaries between the phenomenon and its context are not explicitly evident, I use many variables of interest, multiple sources of evidence, and a collection of theoretical propositions to guide, collect and analyze the data. This design seeks to use multiple units of analysis, including units on different levels, where I look for patterns within the contexts of organization, event, venue and cultural artifact. This has required a flexibility of case study design, and the capacity to select cases unintended from the initial start of research, a strategy that is used for the study of this complex social phenomenon. As an intensive qualitative case study, the findings of this research are reliant on literature on immaterial labor, recognition of economic changes, and shifts in patterns of labor, production and consumption occurring on a global scale. These literatures and phenomena are elaborated on across the multiple case studies using the concept digital unhu to examine theoretical premises through the units of analysis and interpretation. This has required extensive reviewing of literature from several different fields, asking
40 questions of this literature, being aware of a range of theories and selecting from the levels of individual, organizational and societal in determining what is to be learned from the study. This study also makes use of two general analytic strategies that rely first, on theoretical propositions, such as the work done by postcolonial scholars exploring the integration of digital technologies in the global south. These theoretical frameworks help to guide the analysis and to focus attention on certain data, such as the project’s emphasis on the historical influences on the uses of digital technologies in Zimbabwean creative processes and artifacts. Secondly, this project develops a case descriptive framework for organizing the case study. This includes analysis organized on the basis of description of the characteristics and relationships between the levels in question, including, at the level of organization, venue, event and cultural artifact. These analytic techniques were used as part of the overall strategy and include a practice of identifying empirically based patterns determined through observation and analysis done during field work conducted in 2013 and 2015. This project identifies a set of links between the rise of digital technologies, the legacies of colonization, localized Zimbabwean history, the socio-political conditions under Robert Mugabe’s rule, and the creative artifacts produced by Zimbabwean artists. The exploration of the links between these phenomena are a result of working with the theoretical basis of the study, comparing the case studies which led to revision of the theoretical basis, the details of which were compared and supplemented by additional cases.
DATA SOURCES
This project relies on six sources of evidence including, 1) documents such as letters in the form of email, 2) archival records, such as films sought out at the Zimbabwean
41 archives in Harare Zimbabwe, 3) open ended interviews obtained through a convenience, snowball sampling, 4) direct observation, 5) participant observation in the form of interning at the ICAPA Trust organization during the Summer of 2013, 6) cultural artifacts, such as the website icapatrust.org, films by ICAPA Trust, paintings, collages and mixed medium pieces of the 2015 Venice Biennale. The research approaches of this project were participant observation, interviews, and textual analyses of website images, visual creative artifacts, and descriptions.
RESEARCH APPROACH AND QUESTIONS
Self-Reflexivity
Racial tensions are very high in Zimbabwe. As a result, my position as a white woman from the West influenced the interactions I had with members of ICAPA, the artists I had contact with, and my everyday interactions with the black population in Harare. While the United States is no stranger to racial tension, the particular nuanced characteristics of racial strain in Zimbabwe is one that I have yet to understand fully, and for this reason can only speculate on. Broadly speaking, that a young nation only recently independent from an explicitly racist state institution should still be distrustful of white populations is understandable to me. This is compounded with Robert Mugabe’s continued reliance on invoking the liberation war, the threat of imperialism, and the callousness of white populations when seeking to fortify his hold on power. Additionally, I am well aware of the hostility that could be directed my way as the daughter of a Rhodesian. In some instances, it garnered me some level of inclusion where it was assumed that I understood to some degree, Zimbabwe’s violent history and the ongoing efforts to build some level of cohesion across the small white minority and black populations in the country. Having grown up in my family, I understood some of the 42 tensions intuitively, however, much eluded me. In order to confront, to some degree, these strains and the inevitable lack of trust proffered to outsiders, compounded by my western whiteness and my family history, I used several different strategies. The first was to embed myself in the organization and to conduct interviews with members of the ICAPA organization over time, with the hopes that through a measure of familiarity I might enable some degree of comfort. The second was to conduct interviews that didn’t directly ask informants to speak about the liberation war, contemporary political conditions, or the dynamics between black and white populations, though these things often came up spontaneously and without my coaxing. Interviews were about creative projects, the procurement of funding, distribution and hardware for production. I also asked about media consumption, following up with neutral topics, which often, though not always, led to moments of candid discussion about political conditions, despite my different experiences as a white woman from the United States. My third strategy was to observe as best I could what I saw around me, including the interactions I had with the relatively insular white population that remains in Harare. I sought to contextualize these interactions, what I saw and heard, with background information on Zimbabwean history, told from the perspective of ZANU PF supporters, as well as those more critical of the party’s rule. Finally, I relied on the creative products themselves, seeking to ‘listen’ to these objects of study, their visual cues, narratives, overlaying discourses, and how they articulated to Zimbabwean history and contemporary global positioning. All this being stipulated, I recognize that my positioning necessarily influenced the interactions I had with black populations during the course of my fieldwork. Remaining aware of this influence was a necessary part of conducting the research.
43 Participant and Direct Observation
Direct observation and participation with the organization of ICAPA was central to the inductive structure of this project. While much of this project addresses the digital practices and products of Zimbabwean artists and creative communities, the motivation to speak with people offline while being heavily invested in their digital practices, creative projects and cultural artifacts is partially inspired by Dhiraj Murthy’s (2008) insistence that a balanced combination of physical and digital ethnography gives researchers a multiplicity of methods for analysis. This aligns with the work of Jenna Burrell, whose chapter contribution to the book eFieldnotes: The makings of Anthropology in the Digital World (2016), suggests that despite the enormous capacities of access to images, video, maps, and interviews online, [A]vast gulf between observation and meaning remains. The tech tools help us work around and grapple with a research role that does not entail fieldwork immersion, but they are still not, nor are they likely to be, sufficient to supplant the need for and value of that immersion both for securing memory and for arriving at meaning (Burrell, 2016:150).
For these reasons, central to this research are the interviews and interactions I had with Zimbabweans in Harare. Working as an intern at the ICAPA Trust organization, I was able to observe the staff members in action as they worked with editing software, sound and web-design in the effort to produce new material, and promote the organization on their webpage. Attending meetings, and observing the regular visitors to the organization, I was able to get a sense of which other organizations and artists were affiliated with ICAPA Trust. Additionally, I witnessed the general feel of the day-to-day workings of the organization,
44 the daily banter, and the rhythms of coffee, tea, lunch breaks, and rides to and from the city center to the small office. I believe, that because of my regular presence at the organization, I was able to promote some level of familiarity that played into the eventual interviews I held with each of the members. These interviews were held informally, with a recording device, and a set of questions that I built off of, depending on the way that the conversation went. Despite this structure, including the requisite informing of each interviewee of their confidentiality, I held interviews at a location of their choosing in an effort to promote a level of comfort and familiarity. Additionally, through the contacts I made at ICAPA, and based on the regularity of interaction, I was able to access the highly interconnected network of affiliated artists and organizations in Harare through email and phone numbers provided in the form of snowball sampling, originating from this primary space of ICAPA. Through my internship, I was able to work extensively with members of ICAPA, including Derek Bauer, Dangarembga's creative partner, producer, and film editor. I also made a strong connection to Sincerity Chirisa, the Programs Assistant of Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe, a subsidiary of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) / Nyerai films, and the program director of the International Woman’s Film Festival of Zimbabwe. Through this participation, I was able to maintain communication with ICAPA members, which allowed for the accretion of documents in the form of emails, which promoted further understanding of the ways that ICAPA participated in various projects. Particularly in the case of communication I had with Tech designer Derek Bauer, email correspondence with him helped to answer the question, “What role does open source platforms play in the organization ICAPA Trust?” Besides making connections with filmmakers associated with ICAPA, I made contact with other filmmakers affiliated with the Zimbabwean arts community more broadly. In
45 particular, I regularly attended film screenings at the Book Café, where I took copious notes on film attendance, film narratives shown, themes that arose in conversations after the screenings, as well as relevant observations about the space and population of the organization. At these screenings, I developed a working relationship with organizational leader Rudo Itali, the program director of film screenings at the Book Café, who introduced me to filmmakers and cultural producers regularly in attendance at Wednesday night screenings. As a way to record my observations and to reflect upon them regularly, I maintained two journals, which I wrote in multiple times a day. In one journal I recorded observations I had made on ICAPA Trust, and the Book Café as well as more general observations on the landscape of media in Zimbabwe. In the second journal, I documented personal reactions and reflections I had in response to the project, thus maintaining a self-reflexive awareness of my research by etching out affective resonances between myself, the environment I was in, the artifacts, and people I encountered.
Informants
After establishing my internship at ICAPA in 2013, those whom I selected for interviews were obtained through a convenience snowball sample. Contact with these key members of the film industry in Zimbabwe exposed me to multiple communities involved in the arts in the region. Through networking with Nyerai Films, the Book Café, and independent filmmakers associated with both of these organizations, I collected and analyzed 25 interviews of Zimbabwean artists and artistic organizational leaders. The target population for this study initially, was adults over the age of 18 who were members of the ICAPA organization, but grew to extend to other creative figures in Zimbabwean artistic circles. I recruited members from the five organization leaders of the project, who
46 put me in touch with several filmmakers from Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe. In addition, I interviewed ten artists in Zimbabwe who were loosely affiliated with ICAPA, having worked with them on several projects. This included web designers, bloggers, filmmakers associated with the organization Pamberi Trust, and artists who had regularly exhibited their work at the performance space of the Book Café. Through access to some of these artists, I was put into touch with other creative figures, as the community was very tight-knit and more than willing to discuss their projects and the conditions within which they produced their work.
Interviewing Process
The interviewing process was exploratory, using open-ended questions allowing themes to arise. This provided sustenance for multiple lines of inquiry, using interviewing techniques matched for the sensitivity involved in discussions of artistic production in Zimbabwe. The use of open-ended questions related to the subject of film production in Zimbabwe revealed the complexity of the issues and increased its face validity. In line with the overarching theme of flexibility, my role was to facilitate the discussion without directing or controlling the process. Thus, specific themes were anticipated and sought, though were not predetermined. Interviews occurred at ICAPA Trust office headquarters in order to maximize comfort levels and foster a sense of safety. Through connections made with the founders of the organization in question, I was able to approach members and participants of the organization and requested to set a time for interviews. After going over confidentiality issues, I asked a series of open-ended questions while recording responses on an audio recording device. Once contacts with these members of the organization led to further access to Zimbabwean artists, through convenience, snowball sampling, I was able to contact these sources over the phone and arrange an
47 interview at a location of their preference. These interviews were transcribed and analyzed after returning to the US. The UT IRB approved this study, as all participants gave informed consent according to IRB guidelines. Since this study was low risk, I applied for a waiver of signed consent. However, verbal communication informed participants of their role in the process of the study, as well as their right to privacy and confidentiality. The privacy of all those interviewed was ensured by allowing those interviewed to determine the length of the interview, as well as when they wish to be interviewed. Confidentiality was established, as none of the information provided was shared for any other purposes then the stated intentions of the study. Recorded interviews were kept in a file cabinet in my home office, and written findings were kept in a password-protected file. Pseudonyms were used on data obtained from those who were not public figures in Zimbabwean. All audio recordings were erased once six months had passed after the interviews were held. After going over confidentiality issues, I asked a series of open-ended questions while recording responses on an audio recording device. These questions often led those being interviewed to talk about their own trajectories in media consumption, a direction I encouraged in each interview. The questions posed sought to get an overall sense of their personal histories, their relationship to the organizations they were involved in, their role in these organizations, and their basic media practices. Among others, I asked questions such as,
1. What are the challenges to making art in Zimbabwe? 2. How did you get involved in the arts scene in Zimbabwe? 3. What are your creative influences? 4. What are the sources of your funding?
48 Analysis of Films and Digital Artifacts
Because ICAPA as an organization grew out of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s desire to make and promote film, I put some emphasis on film narratives produced by the organization. I conducted extensive textual and discursive analysis of films produced by ICAPA Trust, as well as films associated with the organization through the International Woman’s Film Festival of Zimbabwe. In particular, several of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s films are especially relevant to this project. Specifically, the films Neria (1993), Pamvura (At the Water) (2005), Nyami Nyami and the Evil Eggs (2011), Elephant people (2000), Hard Earth Land Rights (2002) and Kare Kare Zvako (2005) are visited in certain chapters. Some of these films I was able to access at ICAPA headquarters, and others were obtained through UT library services. Discursive, textual analysis of the films of ICAPA trust answered the questions, “How does Zimbabwean and colonial history interact with the creative projects of ICAPA trust? How does development organizations, and rights-based narratives influence, or restrict narratives told by ICAPA trust filmmakers? In what ways are Zimbabwean filmmakers promoting alternative narratives that defy the parameters imposed by the state and by donor agencies? What, if any, are the connections between these narratives and the ones being displayed on the organization’s webpage?” By using textual analysis as well as the other methods employed in this study, I was able to conjecture on some of the likely interpretations that could be made of certain cultural products. As cultural studies has shown us, one can interpret most cultural products from television programs, magazines, advertisements, graffiti, cloths, to dance. These productions of culture through the application of textual analysis allowed me to obtain a sense of the ways that, in Zimbabwe, at particular times, the artists made sense of the world around them. This allowed me to embrace the variety of ways artists interpret their
49 conditions, and to shed light on their strategies for contending with these same conditions. In textual analysis, the cultural product, performance or phenomenon in question can be understood as material traces that are left in the practice of making sense of experience and conditions. This suggests that the cultural products I examine, including the creative artifacts made by Tsistsi Dangarembga, the cultural artifacts made by her organization more generally, the event and website of Zim.doc, the Website made by Tafadzwa Mano, and the visual art produced by the contributing artists of the Zimbabwean 2015 Venice Biennale, provide clues, which when understood within the larger context of Zimbabwean history, provide insight into the practices, and consolidated understanding of conditions in the region. Particularly when understood from the framework of immaterial labor, these cultural products and practices can be understood as activities of knowledge workers, seeking to address the consolidated and resonant characteristics of localized culture as well as the capacity to mold this to audiences that will remunerate their labor. In addition to textual analysis of films, I conducted textual and discursive analysis of the websites of various Zimbabwean organizations, including the Book Café’s official website, its Facebook page, ICAPA Trust's website icapatrust.org, its Facebook and Twitter pages, and articles posted online about the 2015 Venice Biennale, as well as the Venice Biennale website. Guided by the work of Jenna Burrell and Heather Horst in the book eFieldnotes (2016) I gathered additional descriptions, and images from websites that provided crucial information about the Book Café, the 56th Venice Biennale, ICAPA Trust, and digital connectivity in Zimbabwe. This allowed for use of textual analysis as a research approach that promoted a close examination of digital products, and images of the various organizations and artists of this study. This approach made it possible to
50 discursively analyze the ICAPA website, and the visual art at the 2015 Venice Biennale, within a larger ecosystem of social media use (see chapters five and six). Discursive and textual analysis of the website icapatrust.org answered the questions, “How do development based agendas, as well as ZANU PF media policies restrict narratives being told on these websites? How does digital unhu emerge on these websites? What does digital unhu have to say about the ways that Zimbabwean artists are combining traditional concerns with new technologies? What does it say about the ways that these artists are engaging with digital labor as strategically, as a way to contend with economic and political hardship?” Specifically, close, discursive and textual analysis of the visual art of the artists who exhibited at the “Pixels of Ubuntu/unhu” exhibition sought to answer the questions “How are digital technologies being integrated in the creative work of Zimbabweans as they are being exhibited in an international art’s exhibition? What do the narratives in their work say about the ways in which Zimbabwean philosophies are being digitized? What does it say about the ways that mobility is being used as a way to resist historical and contemporary restrictions?” Like most research designs, my original intentions for the project had to adapt and reconfigure around the limitations of funding, distance, and access. The adoption of mixed methods and the implementation of inductive approaches enabled the flexibility I needed for a cross-cultural, international project that required extensive travel. In the next chapter, I give needed historical background to Zimbabwean media adoption, and key political events that continue to reverberate through the creative products of artists based in Zimbabwe. The historical background I provide is necessarily partial, with events and phenomena selected for the purposes of elucidating the organizing concept of this project – digital unhu.
51 Chapter Four: Digital Unhu and the History of Zimbabwean Media -
Historical Overview
In 1890, the British South Africa Company headed by Cecil Rhodes demarcated the territory now known as Zimbabwe, before it became a British colony in 1923 being named Southern Rhodesia. In 1965, in the wake of Black Nationalist movements, Britain withdrew from the territory, and a conservative white minority government declared independence unilaterally calling the territory Rhodesia with Ian Smith as Prime
Minister. This culminated in international isolation and a 15-year war between Black
Nationalist armies and Rhodesians. The liberation war produced two political factions,
ZANU and ZAPU, which have had considerable conflict between each other. The distinctions between ZANU and ZAPU play an important role in Zimbabwean history, and deserve careful consideration, however this is out of the scope of this particular project. What is relevant to this research is the fact that ZAPU was aligned with the
Soviet Union whose ideology sought to mobilize urban workers. This contrasted with
ZANU’s pro-People’s Republic of China, which sought to mobilize, first and foremost the rural peasantry. This tension between rural vs. urban centrality has been overlaid with the elements of race, class and international influence in ongoing patriotic and populous ideologies put forth by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF regime. Independence was established in 1980 when elections secured Robert Mugabe as Prime Minister within the newly created ZANU PF party.
Since independence, Robert Mugabe has maintained a position of leadership, holding the title of president since 1987. However, he has since fallen into disrepute. In 52 the early 2000s, Robert Mugabe's ZANU PF sought to strengthen itself from external and internal threats, aided through the mobilization of a particular political rhetoric premised on the ‘return of land to the landless peasant.' Much of this rhetoric finds its justification in the ongoing legacies of colonial violence that replicates itself in the uneven acquisition of wealth on a global scale, particularly in the aftermath of the 1990s Economic Structural Adjustment programs that devastated already shaky Southern African economies. Under conditions of extreme political instability, especially since these policies further exacerbated economic instability in Zimbabwe, Mugabe struggled to maintain his hold on power culminating in the 2000 Fast Track Land Reform, a policy heavily dependent on the rhetoric of righting the wrongs of a colonial past. In the aftermath of the 1990s, a decade in which the ideology of Human Rights was gaining dominance in development discourses (see chapter three), Mugabe's land appropriation provoked considerable outrage in Anglo-European international circles. Mugabe's status as an outspoken critic of contemporary uneven conditions as this reflects histories of extraction, slavery, and colonialism led to his isolationist policies. In part, this inspired Condoleeza Rice to label Zimbabwe as one of the world's six "outposts of Tyranny" in early 2005, something that Robert Mugabe predictably rejected (“BBC NEWS | Americas | Excerpts: Condoleezza Rice”). While it is impossible to deny the ruthlessness of Robert Mugabe’s political tactics, as many scholars point out, uneven developments link ongoing conditions of poverty to colonial history. A contemporary expression of unhu, as I trace it across distinct artistic communities and organizations, ambiguously and selectively embrace historical legacies that manifest in present conditions (such as those condemned by Robert Mugabe) and gives the concept new meaning as it is used to express living under the threat of state-sanctioned violence. In this way, in Zimbabwean media history, unhu has a strong connection to colonial and
53 neocolonial resistance, though manifests distinctly within particular communities as they utilize the tools of digital connectivity to move in and around the restrictions of the state.
Digital media and unhu in historical context
Unlike the following chapters, which are focused on analysis and interpretation of the primary case studies, this chapter provides an unfolding of history that takes a long view, while focusing on the main events. I narrate this selection of a historical sequence to shed light on and give context to, the emergence of digital unhu as evidenced in Zimbabwean organizations and cultural artifacts. As such, this chapter argues that digital unhu has antecedents in the colonial period, from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when mobile film units exposed rural and agrarian Zimbabwean communities to film. Beginning in the 1930s, these didactic films sought to alter the behavior of rural populations, though were often shown along with B-grade cowboy movies, which promoted the adaptation and appropriation of cowboy culture for a short while in the region. This discussion, likewise, takes us through the era of the 1960s and 1970s, when Rhodesian rule heavily censored media narratives and produced propaganda through policies of censorship to elucidate the ways that these systems continue to affect contemporary media conditions in the country. It also takes us through the era of the 1990s when Economic Structural Adjustment Programs destabilized Zimbabwe’s industrial economy and created the type of economic strife that led in part, to Robert Mugabe's strategic Fast Track Land Reform. Since the early 2000s, just as Robert Mugabe's regime sought to solidify national cohesion through policing the boundaries around national history,ix the steady rise in alternative media accessed through digital technologies, DSTV, unregulated markets, and above all, internet connectivity, has led to the production of digital unhu. This chapter, in particular, foregrounds how unhu serves as a contested, flexible concept that people at
54 various ends of the spectrum of power have put to use. At points, these political figures mobilize unhu as an anticolonial or anti-statist mechanism of resistance, and at others, as a device for unifying populations behind a liberation legacy, still being broadcast by an aging ruler whose legitimacy is questioned at home and abroad. When tracing the history of digital unhu, I further outline the current restrictive media policies that provide a sense of the stakes and risks taken by those who continue to resist contemporary Zimbabwean conditions. The media history of the Zimbabwean region under colonial and postcolonial conditions is one of centralized control, producing propaganda for British imperialism, Rhodesian supremacy, or the sanctity of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF government. Contemporary media policies encourage self-censorship at best while practicing violence, disappearance, and incarceration at worst. Despite these conditions, Zimbabweans have creatively found ways around these restrictions. In this chapter, this brief history of Zimbabwean media seeks to show some of the parameters of state control, though likewise gives needed context to contemporary creative expression within artistic communities in Zimbabwe explored in the following chapters. In this chapter I locate iterations of unhu within multiple contexts through an analysis of Zimbabwean media policy documents, press releases from the Zimbabwean Media Commission, articles, podcasts and videos accessible on the website http://www.techzim.co.zw/. I also locate the changing media landscape in Zimbabwe by engaging with these iterations of unhu by looking to literature addressing the history of Zimbabwean media. In the first section, I give a brief overview of Rhodesian media policy and practices. In the second section, I delve into the Zimbabwean media landscape, providing industrial and infrastructural background. In the last section, I outline my findings, by suggesting that with the rise of digital connectivity, particularly
55 mobile phones, a more contemporary and destabilizing form of unhu has emerged, diverging from the government sanctioned and patriotic version of community affiliation. A recent outcrop of media products that promote connectivity through digital and mobile devices are distributed outside state enforced channels, and the narratives obtained through these devices undermine and threaten the centrality of patriotic unhu, with its rigid requirements for indigenous belonging.
Mobile Film Units: Precursors to Digital Unhu
It was with the establishment of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) that imperial ideology and cinema became intricately linked. Under the CFU, films were purportedly used to teach Africans to abandon practices conceived of as "primitive," and to familiarize them with Western forms of hygiene, agriculture, and literacy. Other than the didactic films of the CFU that later became the Central African Film Union (CAFU), these units exposed native Zimbabweans to B-grade cowboy films. These communities consumed these narratives through the mobile film units that traveled across the nation's territory to show films in villages removed from urban centers (Ambler, 2001). The ways that Zimbabweans use ‘new' media in flexible ways has antecedents in the ways in which these populations creatively and selectively engaged with the narratives provided. This capacity to read against the grain was explored more extensively in scholarship done by Charles Ambler (2001) and James Burns (2002), who examined the influence of mobile film units as they traveled into rural and urban Zimbabwean environments under British rule. Burns explores the tropes of colonial assumptions of superiority, and the effort to ‘develop' native Zimbabweans through mobile film narratives, though points to how alternative readings of these films served other functions for media consumers. For example, according to Burns and Ambler, film viewings of
56 development oriented colonial film often acted as a platform for critiquing British Rule by the jeering of crowds during the exhibition (Burns, 2002). Similarly, Ambler examines the ways in which populations domesticated the B-grade cowboy films from the US that CAFU showed along with the development-based shorts, as the mobile units traveled across the territory. His findings showed that native Zimbabweans found a means of affiliation to these Westerns, heralded as being a quintessentially American genre, by using them to express their understanding of historical circumstances, simultaneously providing forms of pleasure and fantasies of empowerment. In addition to Burns and Ambler’s research on the interaction between Zimbabwean populations and film, Katrina Thompson (2012) outlines the way that Zimbabwean identities were constructed and policed through legislation and state media and, on the other hand, reconstructed and resisted through independent media and everyday talk (Thompson, 2012). In alliance with these premises, Ambler writes, “Audiences on the Copperbelt in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were by no means passive consumers of cinema. They absorbed exotic images and discussed the actions and motivations of characters, but they also appropriated and reinterpreted film images and action in their own terms” (Ambler, 2001:86). In this way, while unhu as a concept came into form during the liberation era, the capacity to maneuver around and to creatively engage with state-enforced media narratives was already in development.
From Rhodesian to Zimbabwean Media
In Zimbabwe, attitudes towards the press are suspicious, at best - a condition many found themselves in under Rhodesian rule, where media policies heavily endorsed censorship albeit for very different purposes (Mano, 2008). Although Rhodesia’s patently racist policies were interested in maintaining a minority rule of white settlers over black
57 populations, both whites and blacks were subject to state-controlled media. Rhodesian government policy advocated for tight control of media narratives to solidify community coherence, to conceal the number of casualties as a result of the liberation war, and to control black populations (Msindo, 2009). Under these conditions, propaganda had been the primary function of film and television under Rhodesian rule as colonial administrators believed that film was able to disseminate favorable portrayals of whites, while also being a conduit for promoting ‘development,' such as western patterns of agriculture, work practices and codes of conduct amongst blacks.x The ability to produce alternatives to Rhodesian propaganda was a central concern of black resistance leaders. Between 1965 and 1980 one of the fundamental aims of the liberation struggle was to achieve freedom of the press. A series of restrictive laws imposed by the white minority-run government led by Ian Smith centralized control of media. Some of these laws included the Official Secrets Act, which made it a crime to report on "classified information," and the Law and Order Maintenance Act (LOMA), which allowed the state to take action against individuals deemed guilty of crimes of reportage, including 20 years of imprisonment. These acts were used, in part, to impose a silence around the casualties suffered at the hands of the Rhodesian Government Forces during the war of liberation and to maintain the sense of a right to rule on the part of the white minority (Thompson, 2012). Television in Rhodesia followed the same patterns as the film industry did under colonial and minority rule. The medium was introduced to Rhodesia in 1960 and was the first public television service in Southern Africa. The Federation Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) established a branch of Rhodesian Television (RTV) in 1958. During its early period, RTV operated as a private corporation based on the model of the BBC, theoretically free of political influence and control. However, the Rhodesian Front feared
58 to air dissenting political opinions, particularly “publicity given to African nationalists, or representations that might cause enmity between the races”(Thompson, 2012: 76). After Rhodesia's Universal Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, the Rhodesian government withdrew the private corporation's license to televise and created a public television broadcaster operated by the government. During this time, as an organization actively seeking to shed the influence of Britain and its principles of freedom from propaganda, it officially became the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation (RBC). Within a few years, television in Rhodesia was designed to serve the needs of the minority government by airing programs that were geared primarily for white populations.xi
Post Independence Transition
After the long and protracted war of independence, black liberation leaders prevailed gaining independence in 1980. Despite optimistic claims for structural change, Mugabe did little in the way of reforming the colonial media infrastructure. Instead, he deemed the arrangements already in place as useful for disseminating information approved by the new and independent government. Initially, at least, there were efforts to promote alternative media practices such as the Zimbabwean Mass Media Trust (ZMMT) set up by ZANU PF in 1981. The policy was inherited from external control and was intended to oversee the transition of the media from white minority control to Zimbabwean society and emphasized free and non-partisan media that served the national interest. Initially, it seemed as though Mugabe was willing to integrate suggestions from Britain, regardless of a fraught history. Immediately after the establishment of independence, Robert Mugabe turned to a study group from Britain for advice on how the newly independent country should reform broadcasting. That same year the BBC published its report by the study group on the Future of Broadcasting in Zimbabwe,
59 assessing Zimbabwe’s inherited system from Rhodesia, and making suggestions on how to improve it. The report suggested the implementation of privatization, democratization, and nation building (Thompson, 2012). The unification of the nation, it was recommended, required combining the cultural and historical differences between white and black populations, rural and urban communities, and the ethnic divide between the Shona and Ndebele. One of the major findings of the British study was a general distrust of film and by extension television networks on the part of the black majority population – a distrust that remains to this day. Members of the study, therefore, suggested the implementation of a broadcasting system that shielded itself from government influence, similar to the systems of the BBC or the US-based Voice of America. Instead of following these suggestions, Grey Tichatong, the appointed ZBC director in the early 80s, favored the now ruling party’s absolute control of the broadcasting system. This inclination developed out of the assumption that the population needed "news, information, and education," all of which sought to advocate a unified, patriotic history (Ranger, 2005). Until 1997, ZBC operated two channels. ZTV1 was known for broadcasting primarily imported entertainment while ZTV2 was a noncommercial educational channel airing informational programs and documentaries to only Harare viewers. A small attempt was made towards privatization during 1997 when ZTV2 was leased out to three commercial broadcasters: Joy TV, Munhumutapa African Broadcasting Corporation, and LDM. However, privatization didn't last for long as both MABC and LDM were short- lived operations, expiring within a year. Joy TV lasted a little longer, until 2001, though was required to censor any material having to do with Zimbabwean politics. For example, because Joy TV often broadcasted material that came from the BBC, they were forbidden from showing newscasts that referred to conflicts or events occurring in Zimbabwe.
60 ZBC's control of Joy TV is considered primarily responsible for the stations' failing, as "Joy TV was (…) restricted from airing local news with the exception of musicals and apolitical documentaries" (“Joy TV Shut down after Lease Cancelled,” IFEX, accessed April 8, 2015). Nation building during this era was less focused on the production of nationally oriented entertainment and was more interested in producing heavily censored newscasts, showcasing local music, and carefully selected imports of TV programs. In this context, the purchasing of television series’ was limited to those that were produced in African nations, or were required to be black-centered productions from the US. Unhu’s Patriotic History Post-independence Zimbabwe has been witness to the mismanagement of funds, cronyism, extreme political corruption endorsed by the ZANU PF party. During 2008, the global financial crisis hit Zimbabwe's economy hard, resulting in a rapid decline in GDP. A shaky agricultural industry in conjunction with international sanctions devastated the economy, culminating in an official 80 percent unemployment rate, spawning mass migrations and a vast informal sector that grew in its place (Mutasa, 2015). Over the handful of decades of Zimbabwean independence, media technologies were used assiduously as a means for building national consolidation. Despite these efforts, Zimbabweans use these same media for accessing alternative narratives, as is the case with digital satellite television, or the use of decoders to access South African television stations. Especially with the rise of digital media, networks of alliance, and the capacity to be mobile while maintaining contacts have further undermined an already controversial national narrative. The leadership of ZANU PF began its steady production of propaganda through a combination of pan-African liberation axioms and Marxist-Leninist doctrines, and, as many have argued, continued to employ many of the practices of Rhodesian state
61 interventionism (Thompson, 2012). The political and industrial economy of Zimbabwe has undergone dramatic transitions, from a partially socialist, redistributive state in the 1980s, to an elite-driven set of accommodations for international capital enforced by international financial institutions and white-dominated local capital, enshrined in the 1990s Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) policies. These policies, adopted in 1991, were experienced as a “swirl of economic shocks, deindustrialization, declining real income levels and rising social crisis which followed” (Saunders, 2011:213). These destabilizing effects culminated in increased power of ‘war veterans' in 1997, that became a force to be contended with by a ruling party under increasing attack from within and from abroad (Saunders, 2011). This combination of effects exacerbated Mugabe's fear of losing hold on the presidency leading to a populist rejection of capitalist market principles in the form of re-appropriation of white-owned farmland, known as the Fast Track Land Reform. This re-appropriation was justified based on colonial imbalances of land tenure, though was also heavily reliant on ‘indigenization' policies that targeted a transfer of 51 percent of shares in mining, industry, and commerce to black and native Zimbabweans. The most recent phase, since the 2000s, is characterized by militarization and is most known for its narrow conception of national history as post-independence conditions have transformed the ideological terrain. Regional diplomatic efforts by the South African Development Committee (SADC) have urged Robert Mugabe and his party to practice internationally accepted strategies of rule, though was countered by a liberation rhetoric that advocated redistributive justice through the means of an authoritarian regime. Under these pretenses, ZANU PF claims to value social and economic justice over advocacy for individual human rights, tenants that are central to the liberal development paradigms of the West. In this way, redistribution to indigenous
62 populations reframe these policies as a celebrated antidote to western forms of ‘possessive individualism,' and in its earlier stages embrace a self-consciously Africanist emphasis on community, above all else. One of the strategies that ZANU PF used to suture these policies to the national project was by mobilizing a version of ‘unhu,' notably encapsulated in the work of Stanlake John Thompson Samkange. His book Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: a Zimbabwe indigenous political philosophy (1980), enforced a sense of unhu as an organizing political structure connected to pre-colonial practices, and in particular, the politics of the dominant party post-liberation. This embrace was not only strategically useful for the consolidation and justification of various policies enacted by ZANU PF during a period of economic and political instability, but it has also been a useful bridge of connectivity between Zimbabwe and the nation's political and economic allies. With an emphasis on community over individualism, the philosophy of unhu has parallels with socialism, communitarianism, and Confucianism (Ngcoya, 2009). Zimbabwe received aid from Russian and China during its protracted and bloody liberation war against the Rhodesian State, which, while directly linked to proxy battles waged during the cold war, also highlights ideological linkages between these nations and their constructions of national belonging. In addition to clear connections between unhu and national cohesion, unhuism, linked to indigeneity, has been strengthened by the centralized control of ZANU PF and its harkening back to the pan-African liberation movements during the second half of the 20th century (Mangena, 2014). Ideologies based on the work of visionaries from the late 1950s and 1960s leaders of African and African diaspora liberation movements infuse the rhetoric of Zimbabwean media policies that seek to consolidate power in the hands of a few. This includes a mixture of ideologies that generated from figures such as Julius Nyerere, Haile Selassie,
63 Ahmed Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, and Marcus Garvey, men who challenged the core premises of colonialism and lodged systemic attacks against institutionalized assertions of the superiority of whites over blacks. The effort to make indigenous expression a mandate of policy, likewise, is reminiscent of Fanon's influence on African liberation, which emphasized black control of the institutions of governance, as well as the circulation of ideologies in the effort at decolonizing the mind (Fanon, 1963). In light of this, and during the era of developing national independence, unhu emerged as a motivating concept for unification, and as a corrective practice aimed at the harmful effects of a prolonged and destructive exposure to inaccurate, racist media representations. Unhu, in this context, was something to be unearthed, much like ‘negritude’ an embrace of indigenous authenticity as a moral and edifying practice and based likewise on the lingering influences of colonialism (Senghor, 1998). These valid concerns and historical legacies profoundly affect the language that undergirded the inflexible economic and media policies passed in the early 2000s by Mugabe's ZANU- PF.
ZANU PF media restrictions
The Zimbabwean government has based media restrictions on the premises of promoting national history, something that Fourie (2008) helps us to understand when he frames unhu as a normative blueprint for media practices. In some ways, these restrictions reflect the historical struggles of black populations in Zimbabwe. However, under Robert Mugabe, the appropriation of black liberation, pan-Africanism, and anti-Imperial struggle has been used extensively to promote strict media policies. Understanding the parameters of these restrictions and the consequences for directly flouting these policies sheds light on the political stakes and real risks populations take in expressing any form of resistance
64 to the regime. Well known for repressive media laws, the Reporters Sans Frontiéres (RSF) Press Freedom Index listed Zimbabwe as number 131 in 176 in 2015. The Zimbabwean constitution theoretically promotes freedom of expression and a free press, though the news media are highly restricted, and most major outlets are controlled by the state. Most research done on media in Zimbabwe has focused on state jurisdiction where the nationally controlled media and draconian legislation severely restrict free speech or alternative news sources in Zimbabwe. Further, ‘freedom’ is impeded by the interference and implementation of draconian media laws such as the 2002 Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act which forces all journalists and media companies to obtain licenses, and allows the country’s information minister to decide which outlets can operate legally (Bond, 2002). Various other laws, such as the Public Order and Security Act, place severe restrictions on what journalists are allowed to publish and come with harsh penalties. According to a 2012 Gallup World Poll, Zimbabweans are among the least likely in the world to perceive their media to be free (“WhatsApp Changes Communication Trends in Zimbabwe,” Dev-Age, accessed February 2, 2014). The unyielding climate towards any open criticism of the ruling regime culminated in the 2001 Broadcasting Services Act (BSA), which consolidated the control of media into the hands of the state and signaled the type of double speak endemic of the Mugabe regime; liberal democracy was advocated, but ruling elites practiced an autocratic rule. The 2001 BSA was the Zimbabwean government's response to the pressure to liberalize the airwaves in combination with concerns of the polluting effects of western influence, perceived as ongoing threats to ZANU's version of national patriotism. The act helped to consolidate the state's monopoly over broadcasting by its requirement that 75 percent of ZBC content be locally produced, seeking to create "radio
65 and television stations that are truly Zimbabwean in every respect” (Thompson, 2012). The controversial closure of JoyTV ended soon after the Broadcasting Services Act was put into practice, finishing the one privately owned television station remaining under Zimbabwean independence. Currently, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporations (ZBC) is the only TV and radio broadcast in the country. Since ZANU PF passed the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) in 2002, the government has shut down some private press outlets, including The Daily News the same year they put this policy into action. As a result of these restraints, exiled Zimbabweans have set up media organizations in neighboring and Western countries. Likewise, current news media in the country are careful to reflect the government line when reporting through self-censorship, as opposition to ZANU PF is distorted or not covered at all when mentioned in state media. Foreign newspapers have a minimal presence in Zimbabwe, where up until 2009, a Zambian newspaper, The Post, was the only foreign press allowed to work in the country. Since 2009, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera and SABC news agencies have been allowed entrance. The main national TV channel, ZBC1, broadcasts news and documentaries, music videos and a limited amount of drama shows bought from other industries. It broadcasts nationwide in English, Shona, and Ndebele with the supplementation of weekly programs in various minority languages. In contrast, ZBC2 is a commercial channel that focuses on entertainment and sports and is broadcast mostly in English. Many of its programs are brought in from the South African broadcaster ETV and are geared primarily towards urban citizens located in or around Harare, as these residents received the channel within 80 km of the capital city. It was launched in May 2010, though after initial interest has lost much of its viewership (“Zimbabwe All Media Products Survey Circus,” The
66 Standard, accessed April 1, 2015). The government's Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), tightly controls television and radio media, where no domestic private stations are allowed. Chinese technology has been used to jam frequencies employed by foreign-based radio stations from South Africa, the US and the UK, that criticize the government ("Chinese-Style Internet Censorship Coming to Zimbabwe - President Mugabe," Techzim, April 4, 2016). Overall, 30 percent of the population receives broadcasts, the vast majority of content being government backed propaganda, featuring themes that center on African and black communities. The government perceptibly influences even entertainment programming where "local dramas" emphasize simple domestic topics and avoid issues that might lead to questioning the government (Bond, 2002). An important mechanism of ZANU PF media control is the Zimbabwean Media Commission (ZMC), created by section 38 (1) of the AIPPAA – a policy that became law in January of 2008, and was affirmed through the Constitutional Amendment number 19, of February 2009. Robert Mugabe appointed and announced the ZMC boards of commissioners' members himself in 2010. The ZMC's website, located at http://www.mediacommission.co.zw, lists accreditation requirements, policy documents and press releases promoted by the ZMC, which put forth the ambitions, policies, and restrictions of the organization. Of particular interest are the press releases and speeches transcribed by the chairman of the group. Although none of these press releases overtly mention unhu as an organizing principle, the contours of what Pieter Fourie (2007) calls an "Ubuntu normative framework" of media ethics are evident, especially through policing the boundaries of what ‘community' means. Another of the defining characteristics of the commission is a form of double speak, advocating for diversity, and freedom of the press while enacting the restrictions allowed under the provisions of
67 AIPPA. This ambiguous speech is evidenced, in particular, by statements made by the controversial figure of the first Media Commission Chairman, Tafataona Mahoso, detailed on the Media Commission's website www.mediacommission.co.zw. In one of these speeches, he claims:
The recently appointed Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) will strive to promote freedom of the press and ensure a balance between competing for societal interests and the demands of the fraternity. The ZMC calls upon all media services to espouse and enforce professional standards in their day-to-day operations. This will undoubtedly empower the readers and listeners by giving them quality information. The Zimbabwe Media Commission advocates the principle of plurality. This the Commission will achieve through the registration of diverse media services to cater for different interests (“Zimbabwe Media Commission” Zimbabwe Media Commission. N.p., n.d.Web. July 15, 2016).
While this quote assumes the importance of plurality and claims to promote diverse media to provide for the interests of many, in the same paragraph he insists: "While we crave for more and more freedom we should also take heed of the concerns of the communities which we serve. The press has the power to influence, and that power should come with a great measure of responsibility. We have one Zimbabwe; we should endeavor to promote its interests through responsible reporting." Such proclamations echo Fourie’s (2008) concerns of political misuse of moral philosophy to subvert freedom of expression, and the type of heavily policed journalism justified by unhu as a consequence. This normative framework which emphasizes ‘community first' a concept that is echoed in the words of the media commission is widely determined by a top-down
68 approach to media production and distribution. Under these conditions, the state seeks to control the definition of community and the qualities of a unified nation.
On the national Press Freedom Day of 2012, Webster Kotiwani Shamu,xii current Minister of Publicity and Information made a cryptic speech, which outlined the ways in which media self-regulation was not functioning well within the country and thus requiring government enforcement. Similarly, he compared Zimbabwean and Southern African media policy, claiming that self-regulation of South Africa's system of media reportage had failed. Instability was evidenced in the rumblings of the ANC who cited a Human Rights Commission of South Africa's Interim Report of the Inquiry to Racism in the Media, published on 21 November 1999 (Durrheim et al., 2005). According to Shamu (2012), self-regulation in Southern Africa needed to be abandoned because the report claimed it was “whites who controlled universities and colleges and whites who controlled the media” (Durrheim, 2005:183). Towards the end of his speech, he overtly threatened media sources that promoted what he termed, anti-Zimbabwean content. He stated, "I can also predict that if the clearly anti-African and anti-Zimbabwe frenzy we have experienced through some media outlets and platforms in this country continues, and if the conspiracy of silence within the media industry and journalism profession also persists, the gloves may soon be off” (Durrheim et al. 2005: 170).
Digital Access to Alternative Narratives
Highly restrictive media laws and ongoing production of state-owned and distributed media content on television and radio have not prevented the average Zimbabwean from a wide selection of content in their media consumption. While the police force severely punishes media that deviates from the patriotic history espoused by ZANU PF, Zimbabweans can access alternative narratives through digital satellite television,
69 decoders, bootleg markets and the internet. The majority of Zimbabweans have a working television in their homes, and about two-thirds of Zimbabwean television owners say their TV receives its signal via an individual satellite dish or shared satellite dish (Mardeni and Chimheno, 2013). Zimbabweans receive satellite stations in the country unrestricted, which means that a variety of extra-national narratives are available to a significant proportion of the population (“1st TV Boasts Massive Viewership,” NewsDay Zimbabwe, accessed April 12, 2015). With this increase in digitally accessed television and a growing consumer base in wealthier urban and rural households, a significant amount of television viewers has stopped watching ZTV almost altogether (“Creative Spaces Foster Civic Engagement, Study Finds,” Text, accessed October 6, 2016) Additionally, up until 2013, Zimbabweans were able to access alternative television stations through the use of a decoding technology known as the ‘Wiztech,’ a hardware device that decoded signals from South African television broadcasting. Access to these channels required only the purchase of a decoder, the device than provided a bouquet of foreign channels that were available free of charge from the Wiztech satellite TV service (Zhangazha, 2013). SABC channels that were available through the Wiztech included SABC1, which provided Entertainment and sports and SABC2, for news, current affairs, and sports. SABC3 provided entertainment broadcast in English and several South African languages, including Zulu, Xhosa, and Sesotho. In addition, E.TV, a South African private television station was available free-to-air in Zimbabwe via the Wiztech satellite, which broadcasts mainly in English and carries a mix of news, sports, and entertainment. Access to South African television had become something that people relied upon in their regular media consumption as according to the Zimbabwe All Media and Products Survey (ZAMPS) done in 2011, 57 percent of urban satellite TV viewers in
70 Zimbabwe watched one or more SABC channels (http://www.zarf.co.zw/zamps.html). In the summer of 2013, I witnessed the loss of access to SABC channels through Wiztech. During the month of July, the decoders became worthless and viewers were left watching screens that carried the message that the channels had been scrambled. Viewers in neighboring countries such as Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar, and Angola were also affected, as these countries had come to rely on SABC broadcasts via the same decoding technology (Zhangazha, 2013). However, since South Africa’s signal provider Sentech scrambled the signal, Bulawayo-based Tech analyst Robert Ndlovu told ITWeb Africa that Zimbabweans had discovered a way around the signal scramble (“SABC Codes on Philibao Decoder and Supertech Decoders,” Techzim Answers, accessed April 20, 2015). Dealers in Zimbabwe or from South Africa sell consumers DStv South African smart-cards or discs, which then can be slotted into decoders and allow them to watch SABC shows, in particular, the popular soap opera "Generations." Zimbabweans can then pay for a DStv South African package using a VISA or MasterCard, which DStv then broadcasts to their decoders. All of this information is made available on online forums, which describe several ways to illegally view SABC in Zimbabwe (Zhangazha, 2013). This history of access to alternative media sources is significant in considering the ways that Zimbabweans have been able to access a multiplicity of narratives from outside of national borders. This speaks to conditions across the global south where there is interest in television programs and films that are not required to conform to development- based story lines, or to propaganda-inflected narratives promoted by the government support. These desires for alternative narratives have gained momentum as access to different sources has increased dramatically with a more comprehensive integration of mobile and internet connectivity.xiii
71 The Rise of Digital Connectivity
Central to this project’s focus on immaterial labor in the aftermath of digital connectivity in Zimbabwe is the expansion of opportunities for communication, organization, and circulation of material in increased internet access, primarily through mobile devices. As a landlocked country, Zimbabwe had experienced limitations in international bandwidth for many years, which had held back the development of internet and broadband sectors, but this has changed since neighboring territories have established fiber optic links to several submarine cables (McGregor, 2010). Zimbabwe's first internet service provider and Data Control and Systems Organization was founded in 1994, and in 1997 the National Post and Telecommunication Corporation (PTC) built a National Internet backbone to sell bandwidth to private ISPs. In 2009, the Mugabe/Tsvangirai Government of National Unity established a Ministry of Information and Communications Technology intended to focus on ICT growth and development (Mugwisi et al., 2015). The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) oversaw ISP licensing, and as of 2009, licenses cost two to four million us dollars, depending on the level of service the ISP wished to provide. Much like many other countries in the Southern African region, the telecom sector has continued to thrive in Zimbabwe despite overall economic difficulties in recent decades (Mudhai, et al., 2009). The trend in mobile adoption has maintained a strong track record, as the rate of penetration has increased more than seven-fold in four years, breaking the 100 percent penetration barrier in 2013 with the introduction of 3G mobile broadband subscriptions. Although only a segment of the Zimbabwean population enjoys internet connectivity, those who live and work in Harare have access to cheap data bundles, providing easy access to social networking sites such as Facebook and the messaging platform WhatsApp.xiv Purchasing data bundles is a common practice for 72 young urban Zimbabweans where a two-dollar bundle provided one-month unlimited access to Facebook, and a three-dollar bundle bought unlimited WhatsApp. Less common is the purchase of 10MB of mobile data for one dollar. At the time of fieldwork, Twitter was just starting to catch on, proving particularly popular with younger populations though gaining traction with the larger arts communities as well.xv One of the most prominent businessmen partly responsible for the rise in digital connectivity and cellphone access in Zimbabwe is Strive Masiyiwa. CNN’s Fortune Magazine has labeled Masiyiwa as one the 50 most influential business leaders in the world. In 2014 and the following year, Forbes Magazine named him in the list of the ten most powerful men in Africa, while Ventures Africa estimated that he was worth over 1.4 billion (“Strive Masiyiwa | Econet Founder | Econet Group Chairman,” accessed July 25, 2016 http://www.econetwireless.com/strive_masiyiwa.php.) Masiyiwa returned to Zimbabwe in 1984, after having been in the Diaspora for 17 years, after which he worked briefly as a telecoms engineer for the state-owned telephone company. He quit this job to set up his business with what was the equivalent of seventy-five dollars and in five years, after building a large electrical engineering business, he became one of the country's leading businessmen. The rapid growth of mobile cellular telephony led him to turn to telecoms, though he ran into conflict with Robert Mugabe who refused to give him a license to operate his private Econet Wireless business. Masiyiwa appealed to the constitutional court of Zimbabwe, by a violation of his "freedom of expression." The high court ruled in his favor and is considered one of the key cases in opening the African Telecommunications sector to private capital. After a five-year legal battle, the ruling removed the state monopoly in telecommunications, connecting the first cell phone subscriber to the network in 1998. Soon after, his
73 company Econet Wireless Zimbabwe became the second largest company in Zimbabwe. In the year 2000, Masiyiwa left the country for South Africa where he founded the Econet Wireless Group, a separate organization to the listed Zimbabwean company. Now, Econet Wireless is a privately held global telecommunications company that has business operations and investments in more the 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, The United Kingdom, Europe, China, United Arab Emirates, and New Zealand (Mugwisi et al., 2015). The current largest internet player in Zimbabwe is in Masiyiwa’s London-based and privately held Liquid Telecom Group, a subsidiary of Econet Wireless. This local fiber network is the most important in the country and since early 2013, it also operates the largest fiber network in Africa, where this pan-African fiber network stretches across nine different countries in the region, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. In 2011, Zimbabwe's largest ISPs were YoAfrica and Zimbabwe Online (ZOL). Government owned communications company TelOne is another major ISP, providing the bandwidth to most other ISPs in the country. Zimbabwean mobile internet use is increasing rapidly. In January 2014, internet penetration was 40 percent, with 5.2 million internet users in Zimbabwe, though this has increased to 47 percent. The total number of internet subscriptions in the country at the end of June 2014 was 6.1 million, up from 5.6 million in March of the same year. This is in contrast to 15.7 percent penetration in 2011 and 0.4 percent in 2000. (“Zimbabwe’s Internet Penetration Almost 50%. More than 99% of That Is Mobile,” Techzim, accessed May 18, 2015, http://www.techzim.co.zw/2014/10/zimbabwes-internet-penetration- almost-50-99-mobile/). The marked increase in internet use is most remarkable because of the number of mobile as opposed to fixed internet subscription. Mobile subscription to
74 3G, Edge, GPRS, LTE and CDMA is 99.05 percent of internet subscriptions in Zimbabwe. Fixed internet, Your Fiber, DSL, WIMAX and dial-up compromise the remaining 0.95 percent of subscriptions, adding up to 58,000 connections ("Zimbabwe's Internet Penetration Almost 50 percent. More than 99 percent of That Is Mobile," Techzim, accessed May 18, 2015, http://www.techzim.co.zw/2014/10/zimbabwes- internet-penetration-almost-50-99-mobile/). As is evidenced by the percentage increase of mobile phone users, despite overall economic difficulties in recent years, the telecom sector has shown considerable promise, particularly since the government allowed foreign currency to circulate in the country. Increased internet connectivity, particularly as the influx of mobile phones in Zimbabwean populations promotes this connectivity, has laid the groundwork for the types of narratives I discuss in the following chapters of the dissertation. Especially in the case of the cultural products shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale presented in chapter five, this rapid increase in internet connectivity and mobile communication networks has inspired self-reflection among the artists at the Biennale who consider the ways that these digital technologies have drastically influenced cultural expression and social organization. The artists at the Biennale, the Book Café, and the workers at ICAPA trust, likewise have embraced this rise of connectivity particularly as it has affected the modes of communication in the advent of Zimbabwe's cell phone boom.
“They use propaganda”: Reading the news while mobile
Despite Zimbabwe's rapid economic decline under the contested leadership of Robert
Mugabe, the country has seen a sudden increase in mobile communication technologies, from which most Zimbabweans access the internet, which in its initial stages, Mugabe conceived of as a threat. At the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003, 75 President Mugabe described the internet as a tool used by the "aloof immigrant settler landed gentry, all royal, all untouchable, all western supported." He went on to warn against former colonists who use the medium as a mouthpiece "through which virulent propaganda and misinformation are peddled to delegitimize our just struggles against vestigial colonialism…to weaken national cohesion and efforts at forging a broad Third World front against what patently is a dangerous imperial world order led by warrior states and kingdoms" (Fleck et al., 2003). Since 2003, such condemnations appear anachronistic in an established integration of digital communication devices into the daily lives of Zimbabweans, however, efforts to control national affiliation on the part of ZANU PF continues. The three mobile networks, Econet, NetOne and Telecel Zimbabwe, are investing in network upgrades to support data services and their fast-expanding m-commerce and m-banking facilities. These investments show the shifts in mobile internet capacities are moving rapidly (“Mobile Phones Big Hit in Rural Zimbabwe,” Inter Press Service, accessed February 2, 2014 ). NetOne’s parent company TelOne, formerly known as PTC, still holds a monopoly on fixed-land services. The government is planning to privatize up to 60 percent of TelOne and NetOne, either through an IPO or a strategic partnership with a foreign investor. Econet has reported that its network users number at 8 million, while Telecel and NetOne have indicated that they have respectively, 2.5 million and 2 million users. While sources point to the penetration of cell phones into all strata of the population, cell phone use is noticeably prevalent within youth populations. About nine in ten young people use cell phones for making and receiving calls, as well as sending and receiving text messages (Archie Bishops Hymnbook, “WhatsApp Changes Communication Trends in Zimbabwe”). Significantly, as of the end of 2014, the mobile market penetration rate was at 128 percent in comparison to the fixed internet penetration 76 rate of 2 percent and internet accessed through these mobile and fixed means is growing at a 64 percent increase ("Zimbabwe's Internet Penetration Almost 50 percent. More than 99 percent of That Is Mobile”). Cell phone use has caused a drastic shift in what types of media Zimbabweans consume. As a result of the restrictions discussed above, many Zimbabweans visit online news sites set up by exiled journalists and news organizations (Thompson, 2012). As is explored in greater depth in chapter four, this phenomenon gives context to the increase in digitally literate media consumers who have begun to try their hand at media production. In addition, this points to a growing culture of digital media consumption, as online networks have become spaces within which alternative narratives are circulating. As is explored in chapter five, the Book Café's survival as an organization is heavily reliant on communities that regularly connect to their social media networks, where members of these communities share narratives outside of state sanction, and news media circuits. After internet access and digitally networked communication became more readily obtained in the early 2000s, the phenomenon of viral media, and social organization through digital connectivity built off of the hunger for alternative news sources. According to the Gallup Poll of March 2012, among those who share news at least weekly, text messaging is the most popular method. 51.9 percent of frequent sharers report that they use text messaging to obtain or pass on news or information about current events (“2012 Gallup-Zimbabwe-Brief,” accessed December 1, 2016). Social networking sites are accessed by 35.1 percent of the population and are also an attractive option for discussing current events, where access requires nothing more than a basic mobile phone, something most urban Zimbabweans have access to (“2012 Gallup-Zimbabwe-Brief.pdf,” accessed December 1, 2016). Many of those I interviewed claimed to read the Harold
77 Newspaper; they likewise stated that they were aware of its manipulation. As one interviewee said:
At least with our age group, we don't believe it. It's a way of brainwashing people so that people can concentrate on material things where they are not paying attention to the real issues. That's how I feel. Those are terms that are used to propel Zanu PF philosophy; they have a very strong control over the media. Most of the time they use propaganda, excessive propaganda. They tend to popularize certain trends, sometimes through music, sometimes through short poems. Constantly they are on television to just buttress their philosophy. For many of us, it is easy for us to figure out that it's propaganda to further certain philosophies (Kenneth Interview, 2015).
Despite its efforts, the ZANU PF party is unable to control what Zimbabwean audiences consume in a landscape saturated with bootleg DVDs, decoders, and mobile cellphone users. In a highly networked and connected space, it has become easier, cheaper and faster to get credible news on social media than through traditional media sources. During interviews done on the uses of cell phones by young Zimbabweans living in Harare, all responded that they used their cellphones to access news and social networking sites on a regular basis to supplement the news that is immediately available through government- controlled TV and radio stations. As one interviewee explained:
I get my news online. I browse all papers online. There are some online publications. There's a new one called "news for Zimbabwe." They simply take some key stories from all newspapers, and they publish them online. I can also
78 open online the Herald, and I read them on my phone. A lot of people read the news on their phone. It doesn't mean that I don't know about what is going on in Zimbabwe because I read the news through WhatsApp (Innocent Interview, 2015).
While most Zimbabweans whom I interviewed made it clear that they were aware that the media produced by ZANU PF was a form of propaganda, several of them admitted to continued scouring of the headlines via their smartphones, though supplemented this with access to other sources. Some of these sources have sprung up as a result of the so-called ‘brain drain' of journalists who have fled with the mass exodus of Zimbabweans starting in the early 2000s contributing to the significant Zimbabwean diaspora heavily concentrated in South Africa, Britain, the US and Australia. Several of these sites are located abroad and self-consciously cater to Zimbabweans in the diaspora. Although many of these sites gear themselves to the concerns of Zimbabweans abroad, often their stories are published with an eye to informing Zimbabweans located in the region
(“Introduction -- The Popular Media Sphere : Theoretical Interventions. De-Westernizing
Media Theory to Make Room for Africa,” n.d.). In addition to more officially recognized news sources found in Zimbabwe and the diaspora, cultural figures who have threatened the government’s hold on national narratives have emerged in social networking landscapes. During fieldwork done in 2013, concern arose over one particular internet blogger named Baba Jukwa in the build-up to elections held that August. Posting on Facebook and on a separate internet blog, his posts about the government caused much commotion in the city of Harare. Baba Jukwa grew out of the expanding criticism of the Robert Mugabe ZANU-PF government spreading in online platforms now readily available to digitally connected Zimbabweans. Expressing 79 ire and frustration towards ZANU-PF and reporting on informed insider scandals, people mentioned him wherever I went. In the office where I worked, at a preacher's pulpit in a church I visited on a Sunday, in the Harold Newspaper, and in the house in which I stayed, the subject of the online blogger came up with regularity. Speculation on his identity fueled excitement over his public denunciation of a political party who had criminalized this type of public criticism.
Baba Jukwa
Available on Facebook, Jukwa’s posts include insider information on corrupt practices of the ZANU PF government and top officials, predictions of assassinations, and open criticism of the regime. This incorporated condemnation of past political abuses such as,
“Operation Murambatsvina,” the 2005 government campaign to destroy slum areas across the country, and the Gukurahundi, the name given to the mass murder of members of the Ndebele ethnic minority during the 80s. In this way, the blog promoted counter- narratives to those established by the party’s central tenants of patriotic history, giving exposure to these particular events of brutality, and providing a forum for questioning the coherence of ZANU-PF organized nationalism. Within weeks of his first posts on Facebook, the site had about 200,000 followers. By July, he was at 500,000 prompting the South African daily newspaper Business Day to report "Baba Jukwa is whispered in buses, bars and on street corners by Zimbabweans eager for the inside scoop on President Robert Mugabe's ruling party. One avid follower even climbs a tree in a rural village awaiting a signal to call a friend for him latest tidbits from the mysterious yet stupendously popular blogger."xvi Baba Jukwa was mentioned on a regular basis and in excitement by members of the office in which I interned, where workers speculated that he was a member of the ZANU-PF party. One rumor insisted that 80 the blogger was Robert Mugabe himself, where Mugabe's exhaustion and deep alienation from the party had prompted him to undermine his own party. According to the blogger's page, his main purpose was to expose ruling party political infighting, murder, voter rigging, corruption plots and assassinations in the run- up to the July elections in 2013. Among other things, the blogger famously predicted the death of politician Edward Chinodori-Chininga who had criticized the diamond industry in Zimbabwe. Chininga's death in a roadside accident (a commonly known form of orchestrated assassination), happened on the 19th of June in 2013 after which Jukwa stated “I told you there will be body bags coming this year…the war has begun”(Gotora, 2013). I attribute the significance of Baba Jukwa in this project to the open criticism expressed on the platform of Facebook, a very popular social networking site among Zimbabweans. His relevance became apparent at the time of fieldwork as his anger, expressed online, was distinctly resonant across the national landscape in the buildup to the election. While the digital work of the organizations I consider in the following chapters, are not as blatant in their criticism (due to a lack of anonymity), resistant forms of organization through digital technologies are evident, particularly in the work of The Book Café. Additionally, the visual art of Gareth Nyandoro at the "Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu" Zimbabwean pavilion depicts the use of mobile devices in the organization of unregulated markets as common strategies of survival on the ground in Zimbabwe.
#ThisFlag
While Twitter was not a big phenomenon at the time of fieldwork, the proliferation of alternative media sources, access to these sources online, Baba Jukwa, and the rapid rise of digital connectivity through mobile devices were precursors to the sudden
81 consolidation of widespread protest in the Summer of 2016. These protests were organized initially through Twitter hashtags, after one video posted on Twitter went viral. In the month of July 2016, Harare-based pastor Evan Mawarire posted a video venting his frustrations with the state of the country on Facebook. The short video shows Mawarire seated at his desk with a Zimbabwean flag draped around his neck, where he recounts the difficulty of surviving in Zimbabwe's failing economy, and his inability to make ends meet for his family. Looking into the camera, he says, "When I look at the flag it's not a reminder of my pride and inspiration. It feels as if I just want to belong to another country. This flag. And so I must look at it again with courage and try to remind myself that it is my country” (Mwarire, 2016). Mwarire goes on to use the metaphors of land, and longing to cultivate land, in his narrative of protest, a tendency highlighted throughout the case studies examined in this project. In the viral video, he goes through each color of the flag’s stripes, saying, “They tell me that the green is for the vegetation and for the crops. I don’t see any crops in my country. (…) the green is the power of being able to push through soil, push past limitations and flourish and grow” (Mwarire, 2016). As I address in the following chapters, land, longing for land and the ability to cultivate land are recurring themes within national consolidation and political resistance narratives. As is explored in depth in chapter four, land is likewise deeply enmeshed in the concept of unhu, as the spiritual pre-capitalist practices of land fertility were heavily dependent on the forms of socio-political organization that consolidated itself with the guerrilla fighters of the liberation movement. These deeply embedded cultural narratives establish a continuum of affiliation with land across the spectrum of cultural products emerging from Zimbabwean artists as they converge their messages with digital capacities.
82 After posting this video on Facebook, Mwarire adds the comment and hashtag:
“#ThisFlag. If I have crossed the line, then I believe it was long overdue. I'm not a politician; I'm not an activist...just a citizen #ThisFlag.” The video and hashtag quickly went viral on Twitter, along with #ShutDownZimbabwe2016, which galvanized large groups of angry, hungry, unpaid and unemployed workers into Harare streets. In response, in late August 2016, Robert Mugabe held an emergency meeting, to respond to the hashtags circulating on Twitter expressing protest. Publicly, Robert Mugabe announced that there would be "No Arab Spring" in Zimbabwe, as riot police were deployed to counter demonstrations (“No ‘Arab Spring’ in Zimbabwe, Mugabe Warns Protesters,” Reuters, August 26, 2016). Likewise, in keeping with his tendency to blame any form of protest on western influences, Mugabe claimed that Anglo-European forces had backed these protesters.
The type of resistance found in the phenomenon of Baba Jukwa and #ThisFlag is not new and is rather part of a continuum of acts of defiance.xvii What is different in these current protests is what is conspicuous at the center of these debates: the use of digital media. Part of the response to these protests has been to compare the uprising to the Arab Spring, a phenomenon that animated media scholars and commentators while recognizing new capacities available in organizing, expressing and fomenting resistance under corrupt regimes. As already stated, protest movements have a long history in Zimbabwe. What is different is the unification across diverse occupations and populations; perhaps, most notable is the inclusion of dissenting members of the war veterans group, historically one of Mugabe’s most dedicated supporters. The veteran’s association spokesperson was reported to have said, “The entire crisis that has befallen our country is a result of poor governance and endemic corruption which is now bearing its evil fruits that are on the verge of consuming the entire fabric of Zimbabwean nationhood” (Tinhu, 2016). 83 As I examine in chapter five, forms of resistance have a long legacy in Zimbabwe, from the first Chimurenga to the Twitter hashtags such as #ShutZimbabweDown2016. Unhu in these previous conditions promoted a sense of connectivity to land, a connection that motivated mobile and elusive networks of guerrilla fighters, allied with spiritual leaders and mobilized young peasants in the rural areas in a war that profoundly affected a whole generation of young Zimbabweans eager for freedom from racist political institutions. This fight for land continues to inform cultural expression, which embraces the strategies of connection to rural and cultural practices, the principles of collaborative and community-oriented action and the strategy of mobility. As media consumption and production under the colonial regime exhibited these characteristics, they emerge again under Robert Mugabe's rule and are extended and intensified in the rise of digital connectivity, offering evidence of digital unhu.
Conclusion
The dictatorship of Robert Mugabe has enacted several restrictive policies, which have made it tough for Zimbabweans to express freely criticism of the government or accounts that challenge what Terrance Ranger has called "Patriotic History” (2004). Outlining the severe restrictions of the ZANU PF government is central to this chapter; however, recognizing the historical context of Mugabe's dictatorship is likewise essential for situating his proclaimed right to leadership, and the organizing logic behind national narratives that inform specific media policies. Zimbabwean national consolidation bolstered by popularized notions of unhu have particular tendencies in the Southern African region, associated with shared social and political conditions, not least, overlapping and shared concerns during the liberation movements of the last decades of the 20th century. What is particularly poignant in the trajectory of Zimbabwe’s national
84 history is the resurrection of colonialism’s crimes as a rallying call to unity. Part of the success of these claims is attributable to existing disparities of wealth that overlap with historical legacies of western domination. As I explore in more depth in chapter four, drawing on the scholarship of Raphael Capurro (2007), analysis of media practices in Southern Africa requires taking into account the histories of colonialism, slavery and resource extraction, contexts that introduced new technologies to Southern Africa populations. Within the framework of Zimbabwean nationalism, Zimbabwean leaders and politicians connect the concept ‘unhu' to historical legacies of land dispossession, forced labor, and the liberation movements that rose up in response to these conditions. These legacies are important for understanding the contemporary artistic expressions I later explore in the following chapters as digital connectivity continues to reproduce unhu in the rapidly changing media landscape. Specifically, colonial dispossession of land is a historical legacy that continues to profoundly influence artistic production, as I will later examine in chapter four, which considers the digital practices of former ICAPA trust employee Tafadzwa Mano, as his work reflects a convergence of digital skills in an agriculturally-based postcolonial nation operating under a dictatorship. The conditions of dictatorial rule, violence, and poverty are realities that the average Zimbabwean must contend with on a daily basis. Histories of hunger for land and sustenance continue to affect in large and small ways the everyday lives of Zimbabweans. Crumbling infrastructure, political cronyism, and most recently the ‘misplacement' of billions of dollars made off of the diamond mines has resulted in dramatic wealth discrepancies (Peter, 2016). In this chapter, I have highlighted some of these difficult conditions and the policies of media censorship in place to give context to the conditions
85 cultural figures and digital laborers in Zimbabwe confront and the risks they take in expressing anti-Mugabe sentiment. This is not to say that, with growing networked communication in Zimbabwe, the national rhetoric enforced by ZANU-PF has no sway. Robert Mugabe, despite his advanced age, and widespread discontent with his rule, is still in power, notwithstanding changing parameters of cultural production in the era of advanced capitalism. Regardless, these narratives of national consciousness do not contain the same interior integrity they once did, now unable to avoid multiplying threats from outside or inside the country. Alternative and critical narratives are readily available in the unregulated markets of DVDs, music, movies and TV Shows. Even more significant is the increase in digital connectivity, where alternative news sources are easily accessed, and open expressions of frustration are found on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In response, ZANU-PF has been reasserting itself through strategies that legally and culturally seek to consolidate national belonging and identity as a way to combat the mobile and multiplying networked affiliations in the media landscape. A type of territorial incongruence emerges since Zimbabwe continues to invoke narratives of national sovereignty, while simultaneously being positioned within the wider, global political and social economy. In addition, internet connectivity and the rapid influx of smartphones in the Zimbabwean landscape have drastically destabilized the tightly controlled national narratives of the state-run broadcast media. As is shown in the example of Baba Jukwa who undermined state-sanctioned national narratives through postings made on Facebook in the summer of 2013, and in the hashtag-organized demonstrations that happened three years later, social media platforms have provided opportunities for expressions of frustration and organization of protest under highly dangerous conditions. In other words,
86 the new modalities of technologies circulating in Zimbabwe are permitting levels of intervention that are effective, because they “short-circuit the regulatory mechanisms that operate at the national level” (Leonard, 2010). Under widespread adoption of communication technologies, the characteristics of speed, abundance, repeatability, and mutability of digital networks, has made the multiple links and networks of communication impossible for the Zimbabwean government to contain. In the next chapter, I follow up on this broad historical background to examine in more depth the organization ICAPA Trust and its website icapatrust.org. This chapter’s historical background helps to embed precedents for Zimbabwean artists and contemporary creative expression in digitized spaces. The following chapter will show how the historical conditions that afforded the production of unhu manifest explicitly in the practices and narrative ideologies of the creative organization ICAPA Trust, as it contends with the political and economic obstacles of contemporary Zimbabwe.
87 Chapter Five: The digital unhu in ICAPA Trust and its website
In this chapter, I ask ‘how does ICAPA trust construct the role of digital technologies in their work, and how do they create the role of unhu in their work?’ I answer these questions through a careful examination of the organization ICAPA Trust, the website icapatrust.org, its International Images Film Festival (IIFF), the film Kare Kare Zvako
(2005), and several documentaries posted to the site by Women Filmmakers Of
Zimbabwe (WFOZ). To understand how the organization constructs the role of digital technologies in their organization, I place prominence on the website itself, its form and structure, to foreground evidence of media integration. I examine the construction of unhu at the level of the organization, the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005), the IIFF event, and the website. In addition to examining the digital and unhu at these various levels, I ask, how does ICAPA Trust construct the role of digital technologies under economic and political hardships? How does ICAPA Trust construct the role of unhu under these same conditions? To address these questions, I provide historical context to the narrative impositions placed on creative production in Zimbabwe. These questions are important to the larger research question, because of the role Western nations have played in the production of creative narratives in Southern Africa historically, from the era of colonization up until the present. In addition, this chapter addresses the over determined role Robert Mugabe plays in the production of unhu in Zimbabwean narratives, as an icon of Zimbabwean liberation, and as a dictator under contemporary conditions.
88 This chapter takes the broader research questions and focuses them in on the organization ICAPA Trust; its website, and the cultural artifacts locatable on the site giving much-needed specificity to the ways that Zimbabwean creative organizations construct the role of the digital and unhu. The research approach to these questions for this chapter is participant observation and interviews gathered during an internship at
ICAPA in 2013 and through textual and discursive analyses of digital and film narratives accessed through the organization’s website icapatrust.org. The final section of the chapter seeks to incorporate the findings to the larger contextual and historical conditions of financial restrictions and political hardship. These connections aim to illuminate the ways that ICAPA, its members, its events and cultural artifacts strategically incorporate the digital and unhu in their practices in order to maneuver within these conditions. This analysis requires considering ICAPA and icapatrust.org within the context of colonization, the liberation struggle, and contemporary conditions of dictatorship, drawing linkages between these eras and the narratives produced by ICAPA trust and its members over the years.
In the first section of this chapter, I introduce the organization ICAPA Trust, and its website icapatrust.org. In these two sections, I give some background on the ways that the organization, in particular, the organization's founder Tsitsi Dangarembga, has incorporated technologies over recent decades. In addition, I point to the ways that the organization has structured its website as a site within which visitors can communicate directly with the organization. These observations are based on the organization's incorporation of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and email lists onto every page of the site. 89 The following sections address how ICAPA Trust constructs the role of unhu. This chapter examines this role from a historical perspective at the level of the organization's founder Tsitsi Dangarembga, who has overtly embraced unhu during various interviews, and as an organizing theme in her novels Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not
(2006). I likewise point to the ways that the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005), a film that
ICAPA's website centralizes, expresses unhu. I give prominence to this film and its narratives through textual and discursive analysis, because of the recognition this particular film got, the centrality the organization places on the film in their list of works.
In the following section, I examine the way that the organization constructs the role of unhu through links, videos, and descriptions of the organization’s primary event: the International Images Film Festival. I argue that the dispersed characteristic of the organization's founder, and the lack of foregrounding founding members on the site provide evidence of the expression of unhu. In addition, I point to visual queues of the site that, I argue, evidence the characteristics of unhu. Specifically, the website’s prominent image on the top of every page reads ‘When You Change Africa, You Change
The World.' I follow this up with a short description of the short video posted on the site and organized in part by WFOZ, called ‘March to #BringBackOurGirls' and its prominent use of the hashtag throughout its footage. In the last two sections, I give contextual complexity to the role of unhu as it is constructed in Zimbabwean national history, originating in the liberation war and solidified through the rhetoric of Robert Mugabe. In the following section, I contrast this production of unhu to the influence of donor
90 agencies on rights based narratives while giving some historical background to these phenomena.
Introducing ICAPA
The unassuming office that houses the ICAPA organization is located down a leafy driveway on 9 Windermere Close in the low-density neighborhood of Helensvale in
Harare, Zimbabwe. The small space is made up of three rooms including a tiny kitchen and is attached to the house of the organization's founder Tsitsi Dangarembga. Although not centralized on icapatrust.org, Tsitsi Dangarembga is a celebrity in Zimbabwe, well known in international scholarly circles for her valuable contribution to the canon of feminist post-colonial literature. Dangarembga became internationally known for her novel Nervous Conditions (1988), which won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize in 1989.
The book is considered one of the twelve best African novels ever written (Mabura,
2010). Before her book received major recognition, Dangarembga became involved in filmmaking. She moved to Berlin, earned a degree in film direction at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie, and continued to live there for some time, producing several works. It is through the film program, and in Berlin, where she met her husband, and future artistic / business partner, Derek Bauer, who, at the time, had been involved in experimental, and political activist video based organizations in Berlin. The two returned to Zimbabwe in the early 2000s and began their film production company Nyerai Films.
Over the years, from the 1980s to the second decade of the 21st century, Dangarembga and Bauer have been involved in cultural production encompassing the modes of
91 literature, documentary, experimental video and web-based narratives. In other words, as a creative team, the two have embraced the capacities of new technologies to enhance modes of expression and audience access. One of the essential tools the organization uses to organize and promote projects is the website icapatrust.org.
On the Zimbabwean Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) website, icapa.com, its statement of purpose reads " [ICAPA] is an organization which is engaged in all aspects of creative art, including research, training, publication of papers and production of creative art products." On the site, a collection of films produced and directed primarily by Tsitsi Dangarembga, are grouped under the heading of the organization Nyerai Films. Production of films through this organization has stalled due to lack of funds. As a result, the members have focused on ICAPA's affiliated organization, Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ). This organization is an association of women who focus on producing narratives that centralize and hope to improve on, the rights of women in Zimbabwe. In addition, its most important ongoing project is the International Images Film Festival (IIFF), which is held every year in
Harare. Since the organization has shifted away from focusing on the production of film narratives, the organization has concentrated on the promotion of a variety of projects, from supporting demonstrations advocating for women's rights, to the advertising of their
Ebook initiative called Breaking the Silence, which seeks to raise awareness around domestic violence.
92 Icapatrust.org
The website divides the structure of the organization into three broad categories. These include the films made by the production company Nyerai Films, the activities of Women
Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ), and the yearly International Images Film Festival
(IIFF), primarily organized by members of WFOZ. The website icapatrust.org was developed and designed by Tafadzwa Mano who worked with ICAPA for four years beginning in 1999. Its simple graphics overlay a color scheme of beige, brown and green with a menu bar of pages with links to other sites and connected topics. Each page on the site is a richly layered space containing articles interspersed with images, video, manifestos and projects with overlapping trajectories, objectives, and goals. The invitation ICAPA extends to visitors on their site to interact is made possible through comments on videos, the distribution of newsletters, and through the provision of links to a variety of social network sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In addition, the "Wild Track Newsletter," is regularly submitted, and delivered to the email inboxes of those who subscribe. Links on pages of the site lead to articles, videos and members of affiliated organizations putting into connective motion a diverse array of people, projects, and websites.
On the site's homepage, at the top of the screen are links to various pages with the headings of Home, WFOZ, IIFF, Nyerai Films, Projects, News and Features, Contacts, and About Us. On the ‘Home' page, just below this menu bar are the words: "What we do…" This page divides up into three sub-pages with the titles: Activities, Projects, and
Events. At the base of each subpage is written, "Who We Are…" Below this heading are 93 several paragraphs that serve as a statement of purpose for the organization. The first section outlines different elements that make up the organization including its broad embrace of modes of artistic expression and activities, "including research, training, publication of papers and production of creative art products"(“Who We Are” icapatrust.com n.d.). In addition, the embrace of multiple modes is deemed a requirement for the production of quality audio-visual narratives: "This broad view has been taken, as all the creative arts are required to produce adequate international standard audio-visual narratives that tell the stories many less creative individuals shy away from. Thus, the institute fosters creativity of expression in all the arts and brings them together in the form of audio-visual narrative" (“Who We Are” icapatrust.com n.d.). I will discuss the technologies adopted by this organization in greater detail in the next chapter, where I will talk about the incorporation of the open source platform Ubuntu Linux as a means to stay abreast of technological changes.
Unhu in ICAPA
Tsitsi Dangarembga has openly ascribed to the practice of unhu and has incorporated the philosophy as central tenants in her books Nervous Conditions (1988) and its sequel The
Book of Not (2006). In interviews, Dangarembga has been clear about her adherence to the philosophy and the important role it plays in her work as part of her ‘Shona and
African heritage.’ In an interview done by Upenyu Makoni-Muchemwa, for Kubatana.net
Dangarembga said,
94 What is a strong person? What we have are certain sets of conditions, in which
people have to act to do the best for themselves and the group. For me, this is very
important. And it's an aspect of my Shona and African heritage that I will not
discard no matter what. You do the best for yourself AND the group. It can't just
be the one or the other; it's got to be balanced. If one insists on a definition of
strength, I think it is somebody who is able to do the best for self and the group.
(Makoni-Muchemwa, Upenyu, Kubatana.net, How can you be balanced at the
moment of unhinging? Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga, 2009:10)
Unhu on icapatrust.org
This sense of community emphasis was evident to me while interning at the organization during fieldwork in Harare in 2013. This dispersal of authority is likewise apparent when clicking through the various links on the ICAPA website. The organizations clustered on the site do not highlight Dangarembga on any of the pages, despite her role as the founding member. On the IIFF tab at the top of the home page menu bar, a page with another collection of photographs in the form of a slide show has a link to a review of the event. Mid-page is a link in a green font that says ‘Meet the IIFF Team.' Clicking on this link leads you to the names of IIFF staff, including short biographies. Highlighted on this page are past director Yvonne Jila, Founder Tsitsi Dangarembga, Technical Director
Derek Bauer, Karen Mukwasi the Program and Projects Officer, Florence Makore the
Office Administrator, and Technical Assistant, Morepower Nyandoro. This page is one of
95 the few places that you can find mention of Dangarembga, ICAPA founder, and central filmmaker.
Despite the status that she enjoys in Zimbabwe as a well-known cultural figure, and the central role she plays in these organizations, the website depicts a non- hierarchical affiliation of members and participants. No one, including the founding member, is centralized in the framing of any of the organizations, portraying a distinctly dispersed sense of affiliation. In addition, this sense of horizontal networking is relevant to the website's title quote, which is prominent on the homepage of the organization. It reads, "When You Change Africa, You Change the World," emphasizing the ways in which the organization's embrace of unhu, from its more traditional and nativist origins have been pixelated and grown to encompass a global perspective in the sense of international connectivity.
Dangerembga’s belief that to enhance a community is to advance one's self is a driving force behind the organization, though shifts over the course of her work as it manifests in her novels, her films, and the projects advanced in the organization she founded. Specifically, ICAPA's goals and ambitions shift from nationalistic goals to a more global perspective. This shift is explicitly expressed in the framing of the web page, which sees Africa as playing a central role in contemporary global connectivity. Again, this is made explicit in the website's title line: ‘When We Change Africa, We Change the
World,' an expression of unhu’s interconnectivity on a global scale. In this way,
Dangarembga’s work, much like the work of artists who exhibited at the 2015 Venice
Biennale, discussed at length in chapter five, promotes parallels across these diverse 96 forms of artistic expression. These similarities extend to include putting Africa and its history at the center of global conditions while integrating mobile and digital technologies in the process and production of creative work.
Figure 1: Screen Shot from website icapatrust.org
Unhu in the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005)
The films of Tsitsi Dangarembga run the gamut from documentaries about land rights to development-based films about preventing HIV contraction. However, several of her films invoke traditional Shona narratives. Specifically, the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005) uses the framework of a traditional Shona folktale to tell the story of drought and hardship. On the ICAPA website at the bottom of Nyerai's web page, is written in bold black letters: “Low Budget-High Energy is not just an idea with us – it’s a reality.” Under the subpage: ‘Films,’ is a list of film titles made by the organization. Each title, when clicked on leads to pages devoted to each. They include Neria (1993), Pamvura (At the
Water)( 2005), Nyami Nyami and the Evil Eggs (2011), Elephant people (2000) and Hard
Earth Land Rights (2002). Below this list of films, Kare Kare Zvako (2005), which translates from the Shona language to ‘Mother's Day,' is foregrounded. To the right of
97 this image, a list of awards won, special jury mentions received, and film festivals attended, including the Sundance Film Festival follows a short description of the film.
Figure 2: Screen Shot from Nyerai Films web page – tab selection ‘films.’
The film Kare Kare Zvako (2005) is known in arts community circles in Zimbabwe and gained Dangarembga some amount of recognition in small film festivals. Her follow-up film Nyami Nyami and the Evil Eggs (2011) continued in its footsteps by depicting surreal, magical realist interactions between the living, the dead, the deified, and the land with its inhabitants. While its entirety is not available on the website, Nyerai films’ web page foregrounds the movie and provides access to a trailer.
In Dangarembga’s version of the story, a family of five struggle for survival, while sustaining themselves through eating termites. In the shade of their hut, a mother distracts her children from their hunger and fear of death by telling a story of a time of hunger and how the people survived. The storytelling is interrupted by a father figure, who convinces his wife to leave their hut, after which he tricks her into falling into a hole
98 with spikes at the bottom that kill her. He then cuts her up, cooks her, and eats her with the forced cooperation and witness of his four children. After eating her, his stomach grows large, the mother explodes out of him, killing him and returning to her children.
After this climactic performance, a medium close-up lingers on the face of the mother while a tear traces down her cheek. She then leads the children back into the hut to finish the story of the people who survived drought and starvation, though the film does not give the viewer access to this recounting.
In several interviews, Dangarembga describes how she got the idea for the film from stories her mother told her as a child. According to Dangarembga, the structure of the film closely echoes a popular folktale that is revisited during the children’s song that is repeated several times at crucial points in the plot. In this way, using the narrative device of repetition, typical of oral folk tales call and response is used in a convergence of folktale and film (Flora Veit-Wild, 2005). Throughout the film, each time the wife resists her husband's attempts to have her comply with his desires, he forces his children to sing a variation for the line from the folktale: "Mother, please be killed. Mother, please be cut. Mother, please be cooked. Mother, please be eaten" (Kare Kare Zvako, 2005).
99
Figure 3: Screen Shot from Kare Kare Zvako (2005)
This lament is repeated throughout the film, accompanied by the interspersing of parallel plot lines suggesting the possibility of multiple realities happening at once. In these parallel narratives, the family participates in song and dance interludes that at times evoke utopian scenes of abundance. In these interims, the mother comes back to life to express her love and compliance through the production of food and the act of feeding her husband. She then transitions to a song of lament in her disappointment at her husband's greed and violence. This sadness shifts ultimately to her fury when in the father's explosion, she returns to her children with a look of serenity, which shifts back to an image of the mother's mourning.
In addition to the presence and influence of the dead in the lives of the living, termite spirits are influential figures in the film as they sustain the family as the only form of food. In earlier scenes, the mother prays to the termite hill, thanking it for providing her with termites to eat. Later on in the film, termite spirits actively engage with her during moments of parallel narrative, emerging out of the ground to dance in ritualistic synchronicity. In this way, the continued influence of the dead, and regular contact with spirits and their knowledge embedded in the landscape reflect characteristics of Shona
100 religious practices which ascribe significant powers to ancestors, and the spirits of nature
(Lan, 1985).
Kare Kare Zvako’s (2005) oral-storytelling, in tandem with its edifying message of ‘community first’ strongly correlates to the South African based philosophy unhu, especially since the logic of unhu eviscerates the father figure for his self-aggrandizing and destructive individualism. Unhu's premise of identity production through a community, and the recognition of inter-subjectivity acts on several levels including the idea that human beings are not central to the narrative world of the film. Land, animals, spirits and the dead that inhabit the plot play an integral role in meting out justice at the story's conclusion. Unhu in this film belongs to those who protect the vulnerable in the community as a whole, as opposed to fulfilling individualistic desires. In this way, it serves as a cautionary tale for those who deny the inter-dependency of communities by depicting the consequences for those who nourish themselves at the expense of others.
The cultural narrative of Kare Kare Zvako (2005) puts an emphasis on subjectivity as it evolves and survives through a community, another characteristic that resonates across the organization and on the website of ICAPA trust.
Unhu in the International Images Film Festival
As well as centering Africa within the context of global connectivity, ICAPA likewise draws on the shared history and experience of black populations across the continent and in the diaspora. This global outlook is made explicit in the selection of films shown in the
IIFF film festival that predominantly focuses on black communities. Notably, Selma
101 (2014) was one of the opening films for the 2015 Festival, and the IIFF 2015 showcase heavily endorsed the French-based film, Girlhood (2014). The inclusion of these films suggests an alliance between narratives produced across cultures, locations, and languages as those that speak to the unifying conditions, despite differences, in the black diaspora.
This digitally expressed linkage on the ICAPA website has roots in the liberation struggles on the African continent, heavily invested in criticisms of the basic tenants of capitalism. This movement sought to reach outwards in the efforts to make alliances with other countries based on parallel conditions of colonialism and minority rule and attempted to unite populations across the globe in the pan-African, Pan-Arab movements, negritude, and the African Renaissance. Famously, these movements were utilized by figures in the US as well, such as Fredrick Douglass, who linked the conditions of black populations in the US with African slavery and colonialism. Cultural movements such as
Third Cinema drew connections between these environments, finding alliances through shared conditions. Residues of these historical changes, which organize around the structural degradation of black bodies on a global scale are expressed on the ICAPA website.
On the page titled ‘Festival’ is a video reel of highlights of the 2015 IIFF event.
Workshop participants produced the six-and-a-half minute IIFF video, titled IIFF 2015.
Throughout much of the video, sampled music from the movie Girlhood (2015) plays over images throughout the film. Shots of mingling festivalgoers cut to a medium close- up of acting IIFF director Karen Mukwasi, who says, "The organization was founded by 102 Tsitsi Dangarembga. Women didn't have a place in the film industry; they were doing other things. She felt IIFF was an appropriate project for Zimbabwe. Her vision has been playing out, as you can see. The festival has been going on for 14 years. She was right - women need IIFF" (Mukwasi, “IIFF Clips” icapatrust.org). The next few shots are of various press conferences showing interviews at opening ceremonies, and attendees perusing the film schedule. Mukwasi says, "The Selma screening was a highlight. We screened the film Selma and had a very fascinating discussion – people opened up about how we can use art to contribute to peace building and conflict resolution in Zimbabwe”
(Mukwasi, “IIFF Clips” icapatrust.org).
After selected cuts from the film Selma, the next shot shows Dangarembga standing before a podium saying, “This is the film that we have been waiting for. It applies not just to the struggle of the 1960s for the liberation of black people in the US, but it applies to the global struggle of people of color” (Dangarembga, “IIFF Clips” icapatrust.org). In this brief and rare moment spotlighting Dangarembga, her promotion of the film Selma (2014) emphasizes united concerns expressed in a narrative set during the Civil Rights era of the US, highlighting the historically linked conditions of black populations between Zimbabwe and the US.
Dangarembga and the organization's stance within the framework of the global exhibit an apparent strategy of mobility. This approach relies on the changing media- scape of Zimbabwe as digital connectivity extends and intensifies already existing networks now capable of producing and consuming a myriad of narratives while on the move. This global embrace suggests dispersed forms of communication that exceed the 103 messages encouraged by the nations providing funds and wielding agendas. It likewise surpasses the centralized accounts of national affiliation, even national memory, in the propaganda promoted by the ZANU PF government. A variety of resistant and varying narratives have certainly always been in existence, though the influx of digital technologies and the cultural products circulated through them accelerate these narratives that are mutable and transferrable with minimal cost. Importantly, the circulation of these narratives drastically undermines the power of both the state and donor institutions. In the effort to expand Zimbabwe's cultural expression beyond the conditions of economic strife, dictatorial rule, and the category of ‘developing nation,’ Dangarembga along with
IIFF, promote the circulation, consumption, and affiliation with global cultural products.
Importantly, she asks her audiences to draw linkages between these narratives as they express the common conditions experienced by black communities. In this way, she requests that these audiences do the work of making connections across the specifics of region, culture and language, a necessary skill in the rapid influx of immaterial products and labor.
Unhu in March to #BringBackOurGirls (2014)
The interaction of these technologies with members of the organization and its imagined audience play a significant role in the active production of digital unhu. A multiplicity of social networking websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and email list serves, as well as the regular invitation on the website that filmmakers submit their work to be shown in the IIFF film festival appear on every page of the site. In addition, the short
104 documentaries found on the page devoted to activities organized by WFOZ, March to
Bring Back Our Girls (2014) and March For Isabel Masuka (2014) prominently display the symbol of the hashtag as a narrative index of technological inclusion and alliance building. Despite the rights inflected language of these short films, several themes emerge that connect with the previous work of Nyerai Films, which include the mandate to create alliances that protect vulnerable populations from misuses of power using matricide and violence against women as a stand in for all forms of abuse of power. In addition, call and response song resurfaces foregrounding orality and the communal in these digitally embedded documentaries, emphasizing the productivity of bodies in an alliance.
Figure 4: Screen Shot from #BringBackOurGirls
The call to end Gender-Based Violence (GBV) as a rallying to arms in the face of misuses of power takes on larger significance in the context of Zimbabwe, where the government's crumbling infrastructure pares with violent responses to any form of protest. The surfacing of this video with the markers of matricide, call-and-response song, and collective mourning resonate deeply with the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005). 105 These components of traditional modes of expression, communal emphasis and the mobility of bodies reflect Zimbabwean history, from the 1894-97 uprising to the 1966-79 liberation war to the dramatic downturn of Zimbabwe's economy. The elements of traditional modes of narration and an emphasis on community in the film Kare Kare
Zvako (2005), parallel the short videos online, whose mobile mass of bodies hold signs containing hashtag symbols, and whose call-and-response singing nestles in the hyperlinked space of the website. These narratives of ICAPA, as beholden as they are to self-censorship and donor-enforced language, reach out to Twitter feeds and social networking sites, extending even further towards the spaces of social networks, where
Zimbabwean populations busily scroll, post, forward and comment upon consolidating opinions, desires, and ambitions.
Finding the funds
At the base of every page of the site is the insignia for the two primary donors that financially support the organization. These organizations include the European
Commission for International Cooperation and Development, and The European Union's
ACPU (Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific) cultures program, funded under the 10th European
Development Fund (EDF) by the European Union. The Zimbabwean ZANU-PF government does not support artistic communities, and because of this, ICAPA Trust, along with most other artistic institutions in Zimbabwe are dependent on donor funding.
As explained by Derek Bauer in interviews, securing funds for making films, and running the organization has always been a major struggle. On its website, ICAPA's stated vision
106 is "A Zimbabwe that serves as a model of democratic tolerance, integrity, and sustainability for its people, the region, and the continent through the provision of uplifting and motivating film narrative" (“Statement of Purpose -ICAPA Welcome," n.d.).
As such, ICAPA hopes “To strengthen gender and related tolerances in Zimbabwean society by narrating women's stories and experiences, whether told by women or men, or any other gender, powerfully through the medium of film” (“ICAPA Welcome," n.d.). As is evidenced by this statement of purpose, the organization's framework heavily invests in the language of ‘human rights,' ‘democracy,' and ‘behavioral change.'
During the early decades of Zimbabwean independence, Robert Mugabe sought to attract foreign filmmakers to Zimbabwe, because of the mild climate, safety, and cheap labor. As a result producers made film such as King Solomon’s Mines (1985), Cry
Freedom (1987) Allan Quartermain (1987), A World Apart (1988) in Zimbabwe. In addition, UNESCO funded a pilot project for a film school in co-operation with the government for ten years financed by Danish aid agencies. Bauer and Tsitsi
Dangarembga joined the team of instructors in 2000 where Bauer worked as an editing instructor, and Dangarembga taught script writing. Many of the students who attended their courses and intensive workshops went on to work in the film industry, including
Zimbabwean filmmakers Tawanda Gunda and Leonard Matza. However, in February
2001, in the wake of the Fast Track Land Reform movement in Zimbabwe, as Bauer describes it,
107 Big crisis. The Danes pulled the plug. They said, “no more money." But the
government took over. UNESCO was reluctant to turn everything over to them,
including the film equipment. There was no more money. Then Government had
to finish that building that they had awarded to another party member to build. It
took them three years to build it. And then they opened the new film school. It has
very meager funding from the government. They expect students to pay for
services they can’t really deliver (Bauer, 2013).
Under these conditions, Anglo-European-based donor institutions continue to be the primary financial supporters of film related projects. ICAPA, and particularly Nyerai
Films, has had to function within limited financial constraints as support for the creative industries in Zimbabwe has not been a priority under Robert Mugabe during the decades of independence. Within these limitations, Tsitsi Dangarembga and organizational members have managed to keep a film-based organization afloat through NGO funding.
The thrust of filmmaking initiatives since the economic downturn of the country has been message rather than profit, an agenda based broadly on the terms of international development. Specifically, donors originating primarily in Europe have promoted a ‘rights-based approach to development' with the advancement of human rights and the rule of law. These parameters often emphasize labor rights, the rights of vulnerable groups such as women and children, and more recently, behavioral change in response to the spread of HIV/AIDS (Hungwe, 2005). The films and projects made within ICAPA trust follow the lead of the Beijing Women's Conference of 1995, where 108 participants and organizers declared an impetus for supporting the rights of women as essential to sustainable development. In other words, "high profile given to these rights has been reflected in the themes of film narratives sponsored by Western donors in
Zimbabwe through Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs)” (Hungwe, 2005).
As already stated, ICAPA Trust relies on donor institutions for financial viability where the European Development Fund, and the ACP Group of States, both multi-lateral donors, supplies the funding. The European Commission development strategy has been an agenda for change, focusing on targeted and concentrated aid, budget aid, and reforms for effectiveness (ECDPM “Blending Loans Grants Development Effective Mix EU?”
October 2013. Retrieved, 3/19/17). The African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States
(ACP), is a collection of countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific established by the Georgetown Agreement in 1975, whose main objectives were to promote sustainable development, poverty reduction and greater integration into the world’s economy. All of the member states in the ACP Group (except for Cuba,) have signed onto the Contonou
Agreement established in 2000 with the European Union. This agreement extends funding to new actors, such as civil society, the private sector, trade unions and local authorities, major players who are then involved in consultation and national development strategies. These participants are provided with access to financial resources and are ostensibly involved in the implementation of programs. In other words, although these countries, and important figures grounded in these conditions are included in the implementation of development programs, ultimately, the funds come from European partnership. 109 Reflecting these development-based initiatives, across the collection of narratives, organized events, and manifestoes generated by the organization are the mandate to address Gender Based Violence (GBV) shaped through the vocabulary of human rights.
Along with Everyone’s Child (1996), the films, I Want a Wedding Dress (2008), thematically focus on the gendered characteristics of HIV transmission, while Peretera
Maneta (2006), and Neria (1993), focus on sexual and domestic abuse respectively. The instructive themes of these films suggest dialogue and increased awareness as a means to address these concerns. In interviews, Tsitsi Dangarembga has described the types of constraints that come with donor organizations whose funding come with strings attached. Dangarembga’s debut film was the HIV/AIDS educational narrative,
Everyone’s Child (1996). The funders of this film required that she tell a particular narrative that aimed to increase acceptance of people with HIV/AIDS and to achieve behavioral change in efforts to prevent further spread of the disease. Dangarembga insisted that without cooperation, "those who do not have the money are debarred from making film (…) Everyone’s is not the film I wanted to make. I didn't want to make another AIDS film in Africa. I was not empowered to make the narrative that I wanted to make” (Dangarembga, 1999).
In resonance with the history of Zimbabwean film stemming from the mobile film units funded entirely by the British under colonial rule, the history of film production by
Dangerembga has consistently been a contentious struggle with Western donors and local
NGOs as the bulk of Dangerembga’s films were funded by Media for Development
Trust, an NGO interested in advancing specific development oriented agendas. In 110 contrast, the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005), though it was partially funded by
Dangarembga herself, was supplemented by ACP – EU Cultures Plus – a program located within the European Development Fund (EDF providing funds for cultural initiatives). Based in France, the organization specifically caters to the production of culture without an insistence on pedagogical or development-centered narratives. In this way, when looking at the films made by Dangarembga, one can see a divergence between the collection of films heavily influenced by NGO and donor funded development agendas, and those where she was able to create more open ended narratives, specifically in the case of Kare Kare Zvako (2005). As Derek Bauer explains it:
When you look at films like Kare Kare Zvako (2005) and Nyami Nyami and Evil
Eggs (2011) wouldn’t have happened with Development aid. The lack of
Development aid money was a slit in the throat of the film industry, but it was
good because the value of the narrative played a bigger role. Kare Kare Zvako
(2005 ) was the first Zimbabwean film funded with cultural money – not money
that was dedicated for a development aid message or a political message, but
actually a cultural message (Bauer, 2013.)
The primary source of income for ICAPA currently does not support film production, but instead, supports Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe as they run IIFF – the International
Images Film Festival held yearly in Harare. As such, rights-based language infiltrates the texts of the website, where under "Aims and Strategic Objectives" the page devoted to
WFOZ has as one of their stated goals: "To effect positive change in relationships 111 between men and women through engaging communities with powerful gender narrative.” Listed as among the ‘Key Achievements' of the organization is hosting the annual International Images Film Festival for Women and the production of
‘international standard films that have won awards at home and abroad.' Most important in these achievements and objectives, besides the emphasis on the development of skills, and professionalism is a foregrounding of film exposure that seeks to change the behavior of communities towards women, embedded in distinct rights based language with the explicit goal of achieving ‘democracy.' The restated ambition to ‘promote rights,'
‘democracy,' and to ‘change behavior,' on a website representing an arts organization working out of a postcolonial and Southern African nation resurrects ongoing tensions between Western funding and political and economic agendas. Specifically, these strains manifest in a country where colonialism and the liberation war are still fresh in the national imagination.
Unhu and Human Rights
This next section gives some historical context to the debates around development efforts and the effects these have had on Zimbabwean creative output by adding the concept of unhu to the discussion. Specifically, I explore some of the continuities between human rights ideologies and unhu, though likewise point to the ways that unhu diverges from some of the founding principles of human rights. This background provides some context for understanding some of the narrative restrictions put on the organization, and the ways that organizations produce unhu within these limitations.
112 The sanctity of human rights has become a common sense trope, indexing the utopian potential of liberal democracy. In postcolonial countries, where historically, democratic nations have extracted resources and people without much care for their
‘individual rights’ this doctrine has always been suspect.xviii In addition, the history of rights, especially since they stipulate the priority of protecting people from state encroachment, has a long history of excluding large swaths of humanity from the category of ‘human.' The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established in the post- second world war era, asserted the sanctity of human rights though was explicit in its efforts to exclude black and brown populations that lived in the colonies as well as in the
US from the category of those deemed worthy of protection. While eventually non-white populations and women were included in the descriptors of ‘human,' the history of exclusion continues to affect nations who based their liberation struggles on the tenants of Marxism, itself a doctrine that distrusted the ideologies of Human Rights.
Policies that uphold, above all else, ‘individual rights’ have been much maligned in nationalistic speeches of Robert Mugabe, where the history of land dispossession and the Marxist ideologies that drove guerrilla fighters in the liberation war is still present in the minds of the majority of an agriculturally based population. The suspicions of these tenants gained momentum, especially as human rights doctrines rose to hegemonic prominence in the 1990s during the implementation of Economic Structural Adjustment
Programs, which deindustrialized and defunded education in an already unstable economy (Federici et al., 2000). The post-9/11 global climate has highlighted a falsely premised invasion of Iraq, the practice of torture, and the continued war in the Middle 113 East with all of its attendant destruction, pushing human rights into further unstable territory. This recent history has cast an even darker shadow on the Washington
Consensus that has drastically affected ‘developing' nations through imposition justified by the inviolability of ‘human and individual rights.'
Debates over the sanctity of human rights are long standing as human rights campaigns have been perceived as an ideological justification for the expansion of capitalism, the attendant impoverishment of the vast majority, and the enrichment of the very few (Kwame Anthony Appiah 1992:91). In these debates, the enforcement of
‘human rights’ resurrects historical legacies of resource extraction, slavery and colonialism, and the impositions of global agencies such as the WTO and the World
Bank. These global organizations are understood to be stand-ins of Anglo-European nations in the aftermath of the fall of socialism and an assumption that neoliberal policies are the inevitable result of development (Chatterjee, 2013). In the wake of Economic
Structural Adjustment Programs, loans provided by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank (WB) requiring that borrowing countries implement certain policies (particularly privatization and deregulation) in order to obtain new loans, economic devastation has developed out of these enforced ‘free market’ programs and policies. Under these coercive policies, loans and reductions in interest rates, the ideology of human rights continues to present itself as a, "defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals” (Brown, 2004: 543). In other words, as Wendy Brown (2004) 114 suggests, the activism based on these premises is shaped around a “discourse centered on pain and suffering rather than political discourse of comprehensive justice,”(Brown,
2004:543).
Economic systems imposed on by the British and now by a combination of
Anglo-European nations have therefore shifted from open forms of exploitation to globally sanctioned forms of financial restructuring, often implemented on the heels of rights-based interventions. While these systems are drastically different in form, it is useful to trace their symmetries, particularly in seeking to understand the sentiments towards them. Under colonialism, race-based land dispossession accompanied by taxation policies forced African populations living on over-worked and infertile tribal trust areas into wage-labor. This excess of cheap labor provided the small white minority with the means to accumulate wealth and lifestyles of leisure. In the decades following independence, structural adjustment imperatives exhibited parallels too blatant to ignore, where Western-based institutions pressured Zimbabwean governments to adhere to market principles that would benefit the few. These conditions opened up opportunities for Robert Mugabe's vitriol towards the west, which, while concealing his corruption, rang true to many who remembered a liberation war that used Marxist ideologies to actively criticize elite accumulation and invoked communal empowerment as well as connectivity to land in the face of colonial dispossession.
Despite the resonance of these historical legacies, the corruption of ZANU-PF has become internationally well known. Under Mugabe, the system of exploitation built on colonial structures has continued to endure, as cronyism and corruption benefit the few, 115 while the mass majority struggles to stay alive. However, Robert Mugabe still invokes a mix of cultural legacies, which added to his current status as elderly dictator includes his role as a liberation war veteran, a once-avid Marxist, and a member of the Pan-African front.
Robert Mugabe and unhu
As has already been established, over its decades of rule, ZANU-PF, specifically,
Mugabe has made use of the concept of unhu in the efforts at establishing a unified national culture. In addition, the concept has been used to bolster an orientation towards socio-economic reform more common in postcolonial African nations. This clashes with the first generation of European-originating Human Rights, affiliated with the protection of propertied individuals from the encroachment of the state. The second generation of rights, most ideologically matched to the formative history of Marxist-influenced decolonization and liberation movements in Africa, emerged from socialist efforts to reform structural inequalities in addressing the everyday problems of the working class and poor. According to several scholars (Fourie, 2008; Gade, 2011; Ngcoya, 2009), unhu bears a ‘family resemblance' to concepts used in defense of socioeconomic rights, with the redistributive goals of destabilizing class inequalities rooted in capitalist social relations, which have grown pronounced on a global scale. These conditions of exacerbated inequality, with their long and violent historical legacies, are what Robert
Mugabe animates as an extremely vocal proponent of economic redistribution,
116 particularly with his promise to redistribute land – a reparation long felt as owed to black
Zimbabweans, dating back to the late 19th century.
This affective drive towards return links itself to the spiritual practices of Shona ancestor worship, which was likewise deeply enmeshed with the Marxist-driven training of the liberation war fighters of the late 1960s and 1970s. These drives contained a complex mixture of spiritual practices and Marxist critical analysis of capitalism, as capitalism was understood to be the driving force behind colonial expansion. This legacy prompts the affective attachment to Robert Mugabe who, since his elevation from revolutionary, anti-colonial hero, has shown himself to be a dictator of a corrupt and ill- run kleptocracy. Regardless, he continues to invoke anti-western sentiments that despite his mishandling of power continue to resonate in important ways. This is not to imply that Zimbabweans are forced to choose between a violent dictator and the ideologies that undergird unchecked free markets. Instead, I suggest Zimbabwean artists have managed to work within the limited choices provided within the constraints of both, evidenced by the emergence of digital unhu on icapatrust.org.
Larger debates: Immaterial labor, immaterial products
Making sense of the relevance of icapatrust.com to more significant trends in
Zimbabwean cultural production and digital practices requires situating the organization and its website within the context of Zimbabwean productivity and digital integration.
Global news outlets label Zimbabwe a developing nation that is agriculturally based, often described as existing in a state of economic crisis. Despite these conditions, the
117 phenomenal rise in Zimbabwean digital connectivity has promoted a spike in immaterial commodity consumption.
In this environment of accelerated access to immaterial products, and a rapid increase in digital networks, the donor-funded, yet, culturally grounded organization
ICAPA Trust embeds narratives that are accessible on their website. Changes in labor that are shifting from material to digital commodity-production, and the resulting increased access Zimbabwean populations have to digital products are reflected in phenomena such as the website icapatrust.org. Notably, as Tafadzwa Mano and Derek
Bauer continually updated ICAPA's website, these workers performed the type of labor required for digital upkeep, including the work of renovations in hardware and software.
This maintenance required the regular work of staying abreast of technical advances while incorporating innovations in communication.
Under contemporary economic conditions, where digital skills and creative collaboration are prioritized in the higher echelons of global business and marketing
(Ceraso and Pruchnic, 2011), ICAPA's website seeks to motivate communities to participate in "research, training and the production of ‘art products.'" These claims echo the guiding principles of creative industries as they are enmeshed in the axioms of evolving and flexible markets. The organization further foregrounds these tendencies as an emphasis on collaboration, creativity and the ability to communicate are understood as the driving forces behind market-based innovations.
In addition to promoting the characteristics encouraged in creative communities under flexible markets, ICAPA supports the creation of new tastes and desires in 118 audiences by accelerating the circulation of artistic works through projects such as the
International Images Film Festival. Likewise, the markers of social networking sites embed themselves in the website's pages, where Facebook and Twitter extend the invitation to communicate. This embrace evidences Dangarembga and Bauer’s tendency to incorporate new forms of networked communication central to the identity production that emerges out of the flux and flow of evolving networks. Each of the elements of the site results from the dramatic rise in immaterial labor across the globe. Specifically, in
Zimbabwe, this labor produces cultural products that are replicable, mutable and communicable on a massive scale.
Despite the digital infrastructure of icapatrust.org, as the work of Tsitsi
Dangarembga articulates it, narratives on the site adhere to certain parameters imposed by the donor agencies which fund them, a common concern for artists located in Southern
African regions. These cultural commodities conform to the requirements of donor institutions that often request artistic products be message based and aimed at behavioral change, as opposed to adjusting to consuming audiences and their evolving desires and needs. In this way, these immaterial cultural products conform to different parameters than the exigencies of capital extraction, and instead to the ideologies of development based doctrines. Regardless of these constraints, within ICAPA's website, digital unhu, with its specific characteristics of merging Zimbabwean culture with new technologies, emphasis on collaboration and community, and the strategy of mobility are legible in multiple narratives found on the site.
119 Conclusion
In this chapter, I sought to answer the questions of how the organization ICAPA Trust constructs the role of the digital and the role of unhu in their organizational structure, cultural products and on their website icapatrust.org. I give evidence for how the organization constructs the digital by pointing to the work of founding members, and their embrace of new technologies over the years. These shifts, from the early 1980s to the 21st century, reflect the changing conditions of cultural production under rapidly shifting global economics and in an era of communication technology innovation. As digital connectivity becomes integrated into everyday life across the globe, on the ICAPA
Trust website, the specificities of Zimbabwean culture, history, and region emerge as
Shona-based spiritual practices, community-based collaboration, and the strategies of mobility are articulated to the organization’s digital products. Specifically, ICAPA Trust founder Tsitsi Dangarembga has embraced a variety of modes of expression, from writing novels, producing film and video, to staging yearly film festivals. The website
ICAPA Trust evidences her strategic embrace of each newly emerging form of communication, where the site highlights social media platforms and multiple forms of digital interaction with the organization are encouraged.
In addition to the ways that the organization embraces digital technologies, this chapter answers the questions: how is the role of unhu constructed in the organization, in its cultural products, and on its website. To address these issues, I point to
Dangarembga’s history of embracing and foregrounding unhu in her work, particularly in her novels Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not (2006). I argue that members 120 of the organization continue to embrace unhu in the products and website of icapatrust.org. Unhu is apparent, particularly, in the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005) foregrounded on ICAPA’s website. This Shona-based folktale adapted to film narrates a story where the order of the universe or 'unhu' punishes selfishness and greed, and community survival perseveres despite brutalization.
In addition to this foregrounded film, the philosophy of unhu is apparent on the various pages of the website, in its visual cues and narratives. The images and videos associated with the IIFF film festival evidence this tendency, where the WFOZ participate in narrating connectivity across geographic boundaries by highlighting the linked conditions and experiences of black populations and women across the globe.
Underscoring this global connectivity, at the top of each page of the ICAPA website is written, “When You Change Africa You Change the World,” extending unhu’s philosophy of connectivity to the global context.
Additionally, in the videos posted on the website affiliated with ICAPA and WFOZ in particular, several evidence narratives of unhu. Specifically, the short documentaries,
March to #BringBackOurGirls (2014) and March for Isabelle Masuku (2014) document solidarity between African populations, and communal resistance. This video likewise contains aesthetic and narrative parallels to the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005), evidenced in the centering of black women protagonists struggling within hierarchies where power is abused. I draw comparisons between the film and the documentaries posted on the website, locating patterns and divergences, particularly evident in the rights-based language of the short documentaries. 121 Finally, background on the funding of the organization ICAPA Trust and the imposition of narrative restrictions on the organization over the years gives some historical context to the influence of donor institutions on the creative products of the organization, and on Tsitsi Dangarembga in particular. Likewise, this draws the philosophy of unhu into the larger orbit of colonial legacies of narrative restrictions and modernizing goals, and contemporary conditions of economic collapse, where
Zimbabwean artists seeking to make a living from producing art are required to work within the constraints of donor funding. In addition to financial restrictions, there are the considerable dangers of expressing any form of criticism towards Zimbabwe's president,
Robert Mugabe.
ICAPA's refrain of preventing gender-based violence (GBV) manifests in a web of narratives that surround the themes of community-based organizational work, and a multiplicity of tactics, members, and modes of expression. In the short documentaries of depicting WFOZ activities, the women participating often join in collective call and response song, which parallels with the centrality of group song in Kare Kare Zvako
(2005). As such, digital unhu, a practice that extends African expression through the hardware and software of new technologies surfaces in ways that exceed the boundaries of narrative restrictions based on funding and expresses resistance to the abuses of power apparent in the practices of ZANU-PF. In this way, these practices strategically use the digital and unhu on the website ICAPA Trust, and in the organization ICAPA more generally to work within and around the political and economic restrictions, they encounter in contemporary Zimbabwe. 122 In the next chapter, I consider digital unhu in light of ‘open source aesthetics' by comparing the experimental web-based documentary Zim.doc to the website Wild Forrest
Ranch in order to contrasts in their political projects. Specifically, I focus on shared metaphors of land, open source history and political ambitions, though point to the different affiliations Southern African populations, specifically, Zimbabweans have toward land. I show how this political project is another expression of ‘digital unhu' as the work of Tafadzwa Mano, the former web-designer for ICAPA Trust reproduces this phenomenon.
123 Chapter Six: The Digital and Unhu: Ubuntu Linux in two Zimbabwean projects
This chapter asks: How is the role of digital media and unhu constructed in particular
Zimbabwean digital artifacts and projects? I answer this question at the level of an experimental, web-based documentary spearheaded by the Spanish organization Talatala
Films and implemented by ICAPA’s Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ). I likewise explore this question at the level of Wild Forrest Ranch (WFR),xix a website devoted to providing information on farming practices produced by Tafadzwa Mano, the former tech-assistant at ICAPA Trust. I derive evidence from direct observation of the event Zim.doc, interviews held with ICAPA members, Tafadzwa Mano, and Derek
Bauer, as well as from textual, discursive analysis of the film Zim.doc and the website
Wild Forrest Ranch. Both of these projects were web-based, and relied heavily on access to open source holdings, specifically through the platform Ubuntu Linux. Because of this connection, I ask, how is the role of the digital and unhu constructed in the use of Ubuntu
Linux in both Zim.doc and Wild Forrest Ranch?
This chapter adds to the broader question, 'how do creative organizations in
Zimbabwe construct digital unhu,' by providing a close reading on the specifics of a particular project and event when compared to a website produced by the web-designer of the organization ICAPA Trust. The connections I draw between open source and unhu are relevant to this project because they deepen links between Zimbabwean history, the philosophy of unhu with its Marxist, pre-capitalist, and African liberation-centered
124 characteristics, as well as contribute to larger conversations about open source and its political potential. I make the connection between these two projects even more explicit, as the open source holding known as Ubuntu Linux directly uses the name of the Sothern
African philosophy: ‘ubuntu.' I draw on the examples of Zim.doc and the website Wild
Forrest Ranch (WFR), to theorize and generate new empirical knowledge about the construction of the role of communication technologies and the development of the role of unhu in open source holdings and practices.
Like the previous chapters, this one considers the political and economic constraints cultural figures must contend with when expressing themselves artistically in
Zimbabwe and asks the question: how are digital media and unhu used strategically in the midst of economic and political hardship? I address this issue by considering the digital artifact of Wild Forrest Ranch, a website that seeks to disseminate information and skills to populations required to maneuver around the conditions of food scarcity, high levels of unemployment and political repression existing under Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Similar to the previous chapter, I address these questions through broad and in-depth historical context used to supplement and give complexity to the visual elements and narratives analyzed in these two projects. In particular, Wild Forrest Ranch and discourses on open source holdings are explored through the history of unhu as it relates to land rights and socio-political instability in Zimbabwe.
Additionally, this chapter offers a theoretical contribution by providing an alternative and understudied context from which to examine the ascendance of what is called ‘Open Source Culture.' Explored by autonomist-oriented scholars, this concept 125 points to the ways that the speed and scope of information access, production and distribution can be made both “more efficient and effective by leveraging the labor, contributions, and feedback of large groups of users” (Ceraso et al. 2011: 338). Since most scholars interested in this topic draw histories addressing open source holdings and practices from the centers of global capital, the following pages seek to address this gap in the literature by examining the role of unhu in open source practices as they manifest in projects connected to the Zimbabwean organization ICAPA Trust.
The section labeled “ongoing discussions” gives an overview of current debates about open source holdings and new technologies as new scholarship directly links these topics to the context of the global south. The next two sections introduce the project
Zim.doc and its associated event. In the fourth section, I outline the project Wild Forrest
Ranch and consider components of this website as it connects to larger discussions about
Zimbabwean connectivity to land at the national level. The fifth section gives an overview of struggles for land during the liberation war in Zimbabwe, and how Marxist frameworks of colonial critique and spiritual practices articulate to connectivity to land.
The section titled ‘Digital Analogies' draws connections between the liberation rhetoric of the late 1960s and 1970s and contemporary discussions of open source, especially since scholarship on open source describes these holdings through the metaphors of land, space, and terrain. The final section addresses the question of how organizations and digital practitioners use the digital and unhu strategically and the ways that open source promotes access to skills such as agricultural productivity, practices that are required to
126 maneuver within and around the precarious conditions produced by Zimbabwe's leading party ZANU PF.
Ongoing Discussions: The global south and new technologies
During one of the interviews conducted in the winter of 2013 at ICAPA Trust, the organization’s graphic designer and tech assistant Tafadzwa Mano casually told me about a side project he was working on called Wild Forrest Ranch. His overall goal in building the site was to share information on ‘best practices’ in land development and cattle farming. Tafazwa's images of land online, and the website’s ambition to provide free access to information on how to work this land, draws attention to two different phenomena. The first is the centrality of land in Zimbabwean culture and history. The second are discourses that frame digitized information as a form of ‘commons,' primarily described in terms of land. In scholarship, the internet has been described as a wild west
(Olson, 2005), as an unregulated space (Raymond, 2001), as a potential utopia
(Shoonmaker, 2012), and as a vulnerable terrain in danger of capitalist incorporation
(Hardt and Negri, 2001). While the enclosure of the commons operates metaphorically in philosophical treaties that debate the commodification and appropriation of what is collaboratively and freely used, in Zimbabwe, land appropriation is a visceral and contemporary concern.
Understanding how Zimbabwean digital connectivity fits into scholarship connecting the commons to land-based narratives draws on histories of land extraction and requires a brief overview of the ways that critical research on open source practices
127 and holdings constructs the commons. According to several scholars, examining the characteristics of creative cultural products under contemporary conditions can give needed insights into how the rise of communication technologies across the globe are altering the organization of productive populations. Ceraso and Pruchnic (2011) argue that as a result of the rapidity and scope of information access, production and distribution processes can be made both "more efficient and effective by leveraging the labor, contributions, and feedback from large groups of users" (p: 338). As these dramatic changes have integrated into everyday practices, the characteristics of open source technology have increasingly become central to contemporary social, economic and cultural production. Similarly, as the logic of open source has become central to understanding the emerging characteristics of culture and changing conditions of production, consumption, and distribution, a resulting interest in how these features have altered the terrain of aesthetics has evolved. According to Galloway (2011), scholarship and investigation of digital aesthetics should not understand the five principles of software including numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding as universal laws of media. Instead they "describe some of the aesthetic properties of data and the primary ways in which information is created, stored, and rendered intelligible" (Galloway, 2011:380). This centrality placed on information, its uses and its components, have promoted what Lev Manovich (2011) calls ‘Informational
Aesthetics' and what Antonio Ceraso and Jeff Pruchnic have called, ‘Open Source
Aesthetics' (2011). In addition, scholars addressing this topic define these emerging aesthetics as: 128 Part of a presumed larger change in human mentalité and sensibility during a time
saturated by collective communication and algorithmic interaction or, on more
familiar terrain, via the assumption that artistic production processes are by
necessity influenced by the dominant structure of commodity production.(Ceraso
et al., 2011:354).
In other words, these aesthetics reflect the growing logic of crowdsourcing and the participatory conditions of popular culture and information. While Ceraso et al. (2011) and scholars such as Hardt and Negri (2001) have marked the shifting coordinates of production and labor on a global scale as these components articulate to new communication technologies, the scholarship produced by these authors has often been criticized for being Eurocentric. In addition, the little work devoted to digital connectivity and the role it plays in cultural production in the global south often gears itself toward poverty alleviation, or as Aouragh and Chakravartty (2016) claim, in touting the successes of liberal democratic principles inherent in horizontal media practices. As
Aouragh and Chakravartty (2016) argue, non-Western nations have begun to receive more attention in media scholarship, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings of 2011. Regardless, much of this research concluded that digital media technologies promote growing networked publics, all of which are believed to foster the evolution of liberal democratic values and ideals (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Castells, 2012;
Howard and Hussain, 2013; Papacharissi, 2014).
In their critical analysis of communication technology scholarship grounded in the 129 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty
(2016) noted that much of this work ignores colonial histories and western cold war strategic intervention in the areas where these uprisings occurred. Instead,
It is as if the Arab Spring was a vindication for the universal appeal of Western
liberal democracy delivered through the gift of the Internet, social media as
manifestation of the ‘technologies of freedom’ long promised by Cold War social
science (560).
As these authors have compellingly argued, in the disciplines of Political Science,
Anthropology, and Literature, the role of US as global Empire, and the legacies of western colonialism are central to major debates in the field. In contrast, they argue, media and information studies is marked with a "myopic focus on digital media in catalyzing and transforming social movements," while being silent about the role of
Western dominance in the past and present (Aouragh and Chakravartty, 2016).
Taking seriously their call for a critically and historically nuanced understanding of the role of technologies in places like Zimbabwe, I propose an alternate trajectory to open source history, giving needed complexity to larger arguments about the political possibilities of open source holdings. Specifically, I argue for an analysis that considers how organizations and individuals construct unhu in open source practices, a process that provides the context of regional histories of colonization and contemporary conditions of
Western domination. This historical grounding gives rise to an embedded understanding 130 of resistance and the commons that do not necessarily adhere uniformly to the doctrines of liberal democratic values. In this way, and in alignment with Aouragh and
Chakravartty (2016), this chapter seeks to examine the construction of unhu in open source holdings in digital cultural production produced by Zimbabwean artists and web- designers.
Useful to this line of inquiry is the scholarship of Rafael Capurro (2007), one of the founders of the African Network for Information Ethics, who asserts that African digital connectivity requires foregrounding the history of colonial violence, slavery, and apartheid in the region. The rise of communication capacities in Southern Africa, and the desire to foster a type of ethics based on histories of extraction is a central theme in his keynote address delivered at the African Information Ethics Conference in South Africa, on the 5th of February 2007. In particular, he draws attention to the discourses implicit in what is often termed by scholars as ‘bridging the digital divide,' while foregrounding how, in the waves of new technologies, these narratives reanimate histories of violent exclusion during the traumatic experiences of slavery, apartheid, and colonialism. As he claims in his keynote address,
African information ethics implies much more than just the access and use of this
medium. The problem is not a technical one, but one of social exclusion,
manipulation, exploitation, and annihilation of human beings. It is vital that
thought about African information ethics be conducted from this broader
perspective" (Capurro, Keynote address, 2007).
131 In this way, Capurro asserts that analyzing the integration of communication technologies is particularly productive when actively engaging with African historical legacies, such as the philosophy of unhu.
Similar to Capurro’s proposed ethical framework, Ubuntu Linux, the open source operating system, foregrounds the African philosophy of ‘ubuntu’ as its guiding principle. In this context, the uses and practices of Ubuntu Linux in the Southern African region, through the aid of Capurro (2007), Aouragh and Chakravartty (2016) can be understood as a mixture of history, ongoing legacies of collective cultural experiences, and digital connectivity. From this vantage point, the phenomenon of Ubuntu Linux is a fertile space from which to explore the convergence of the Southern African philosophy with the widespread adoption of communication technologies and open source practices.
In an unlikely alliance, users of these holdings integrate the technologies of high capitalism with unhu's historical trajectory, which includes the strategies and tactics of a destabilizing colonial rule and deliberate alliances made between various liberation and pan-African, Marxist uprisings.
Although Ubuntu Linux overtly references the traditional philosophy of
‘unhu/ubuntu' in name, media scholarship makes little use of this connection. Sarah
Shoonmaker (2012) sees the development of free software as a process of ‘hacking the global political economy' by challenging the dominant logic of private property under neoliberal capitalism. Though her arguments directly draw from utopian-inflected speculations on the potential of free open source software, little is done to overtly correlate this to the philosophy of unhu as it is traced precisely through the histories of 132 Southern African populations. Following the leads of Capurro (2007) and Aouragh and
Chakravarty (2016), I believe one of the most fruitful places to start this investigation is by examining the rich and complex elements embedded in projects staged by artists on the ground in Zimbabwe. Specifically, against the backdrop of these larger arguments, I ask how digital media and unhu are constructed in these projects to narrate how contemporary digital artifacts and projects harvest a Zimbabwean inflected history of open source.
Zim.doc: a cross-platform documentary project
On the 19th of July of 2013, in the city center of Harare, Zimbabwe, a small gathering of artists, NGO affiliates, the members of the Institute for Creative Arts and Progress in
Africa (ICAPA) and its associated organization Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe
(WFOZ), gathered into a small gallery. For the next handful of hours, attendees and artists participated in the event of presenting an experimental web-based documentary project called Zim.doc. Several months prior, project organizers Rabia Williams and
María Sala, from the Spanish-based organization Talatala Filmmakers provided members of WFOZ with cameras and encouraged them to capture moments of their daily lives.
Participating members then compiled the footage onto links that were then organized on an interface within which one could easily access the recordings. On the evening of the event, participating members were invited to interact with several computers, which when manipulated projected images of the footage captured onto three of the walls. As attendees wandered through the small space, several explored the footage on the
133 computers that followed different interview trajectories. Others mingled with each other, pausing in between conversation to watch members of WFOZ speaking directly to the camera as their images reflected off of the white walls of the room.
The Zim.doc project foregrounded new media technologies specifically, open source holdings. A significant element of the project was the training provided by project organizer Maía Sala on software access and use, HTML5, Javascript, and CSS for the leading members of WFOZ, and ICAPA. In addition, another central component was the staged event that showcased a loose cohesion of narratives and required the cooperative participation of audience members and filmmakers alike. Project director Rabia Williams described the project as "a cross-platform documentary project that consists of an interactive web documentary and a real space exhibition" (Williams, 2013). Maíra Sala, who provided training on software use for the project wrote, “It is the collective process that is the catalyst of this story: we start in the present, trying to march forward and yet we often find interrelated circumstances that complicate our journey” (Sala, 2013). In this way, several key elements of the event resonated with what Ceraso et al. (2011) have termed ‘open source aesthetics' understood as a thematic characteristic in contemporary art under the conditions of increasing digital connectivity. These features are particularly evident in the project's structure of multiple and intersecting narratives that invite the audience to participate in the project, in this way, staging the tightening feedback loop between production, consumption, and contribution now experienced regularly in the cultural realm.
134 Apart from the use of software obtained through open source holdings, open source logic is apparent in the structuring of the project, which instead of using a predetermined mode of storytelling promoted a decentralized, evolving, communally produced narrative. At the event, the emphasis on process over static objects combined with collective expression paralleled Ceraso and Pruchnic's (2011) descriptions of an evolving aesthetics emerging out of open source practices. At Zim.doc's event, a loose cohesion of assembled narratives produced an overall effect mobilized through the input of multiple actors and resonating with the rising trend of crowdsourcing of all kinds. In addition, project participants arranged the narratives for selection in a grid on computer screens that lined the room promoting the sense of an organizing algorithm, despite multiple and overlapping stories. The structure of the event intentionally sought to blur the line between producers and consumers, in effect staging shifting conditions of labor, production, creative performance and the prioritizing of collaborative, digital, and communicative skills.
Figure 5: Screen shot from Talatala Filmmakers Website
http://talatala.net/nuevo/portfolio-items/zim-doc/
135
In addition to highlighting dramatic changes in production and consumption on a global scale, contained in the structure and form of the project were particular political goals.
These goals included Zim.doc’s stated ambition to foreground black African women filmmakers and the familiar political goal of increased visibility. The project also centralized the ‘collaborative work’ promoted in the performance of an event integrating audiences with open source technologies, and implicitly engaging with Nicolas
Bourriaud’s (2002) influential concept of ‘relational aesthetics.’ According to Bourriaud, the political goals of these performances are to establish ‘microtopias,’ or opportunities for participating audience members to implement moments of political resistance through small-scale deviations from the dominant forms of contemporary social life. These microtopias provide moments within which to contemplate alternative possibilities of social arrangement, rather than promoting direct critiques of social conditions, or dictating the contours of utopian alternatives, as is associated with the work of European modernist art and art criticism of the 1960s (Bourriaud, 2002).
While the premise of ‘microtopias' are linked to the common understanding of unhu as a community-building practice, despite staging a kind of collaborative performance, the project neglected to address the material conditions of populations in
Zimbabwe. In other words, the microtopias of alternative social arrangement, potentially transgressive in particular regions of the world, didn't resonate with ICAPA Trust and its mission to address Zimbabwean populations functioning under conditions of extreme precarity. The members of Talatala founded the organization in 2009, in Barcelona, 136 Spain, naming the organization with a word from the bantu-language Lingala that means mirror. The organization’s intention is to bridge “the North-South divide and establish
South-South links in audiovisual production and education” (‘About Us – Talatala
Filmmakers’ http://talatala.net/nuevo/about-us/. N.d. Retrieved 3/29/17). However,
Zim.doc, produced by Talatala Filmmakers, a project conceived of and orchestrated by organizers based in Spain, did not speak directly to the ambitions of ICAPA trust, preventing founding members Tsitsi Dangarembga and Derek Bauer from promoting or even mentioning, Zim.doc on the organization's website. Despite this conspicuous absence, during the months of my internship, the project was described favorably for the technological training provided by Maria Salá and Rabia Williams, and for the funding received through participation.
Much like other creative organizations in Zimbabwe, ICAPA Trust’s funding is received from European donors and is required to adhere to certain development-based principles. Regardless, in and around these constraints, the function of the organization is to promote collaborative work, which most often includes skill sharing and sustainability.
ICAPA’s motto is ‘film on a shoestring budget’ (“ICAPA Welcome,” n.d.) and part of what enables the organization to continue functioning is the capacity to utilize discarded or outmoded technologies, along with the infrastructure of open source software.
ICAPA’s technical director Derek Bauer embraced the training in open source access, and claimed, “I see open source as a similar panacea to the challenges of remaining productive in an impoverished environment. The economy is so distorted towards profits for the ones who have that we need real strategies to counter this ‘Matthew effect.' And I 137 would love to contribute to that" (Bauer Interview, 2013). In other words, the members of
ICAPA expressed an explicit interested in altering the landscape of access to open source in order to confront unequal material conditions. These ambitions contrast to Talatala’s film project and event that created an evening of collaborative narrative, where the bulk of ICAPA’s work seeks to provide Zimbabwean populations access to multiple film narratives in the form of the yearly film festivals, writing workshops, and other projects that provide access as well as training in skills. While ICAPA does not highlight access to literal skills in agricultural productivity, fictional and nonfictional narratives produced by its associated film production company Nyerai Films centralize land in their narratives.
These films include Hard Earth, Land Rights (2001), On the Border (2000), and Neria
(1993) suggesting the role land plays in the creative imagination of the filmmakers, producers and the organization as a whole.
Wild Forrest Ranch
In addition to the work of ICAPA more generally, an example of the integration of web building as it articulates to Zimbabwean conditions is the work of Tafadzwa Mano,
ICAPA's former web-designer. During several interviews, he spoke of a side project he called Wild Forest Ranch, a website with the ambition to enhance agricultural knowledge for farmers in Zimbabwe. As Mano himself explained,
I plan on putting up information for all the best practices on the cheapest method
for cattle fattening, or other things, like how to do beekeeping. My mom is an
agronomist by profession, so she has tons and tons of soft copy of all sorts of
138 [agricultural] related information. So I thought, why not, just to get my skills out
there, get a website that will share all that stuff (Mano Interview, 2013.)
Across the simple graphics of the page, the goal of the site is to provide information, though likewise reproduces several narratives of Zimbabwean history in digital space.
Across the assemblage of ICAPA Trust's various organizations, including Zim.doc,
Mano’s website Wild Forrest Ranch converges multiple elements including, expressions of utopian discourses and open source holdings, the history of Zimbabwean populations’ relationship to technologies, a deep connection to the land and the skills needed for working with it.
Figure 6: Screen Tafadzwa Mano’s Wild Forrest Ranch Home Page
This example of land reproduced in digital space resonates with Zimbabwe’s national history, whose narrative pivots on the principality of land by recalling the racially motivated territorial enclosures during the late 19th century enforced by British colonial rule. These land enclosures have since animated narratives of imagined land before dispossession. These conditions have fueled the struggle to reclaim territories that had
139 been cultivated and integrated into cultural and spiritual practices for generations before colonial presence; these imagined and affectively charged narratives have been vital to the formation of unhu in Zimbabwe.
While the website is not artistically motivated, but rather a tool for information access, it bears repeating the role Mano played in performing digital labor through his extensive technological knowledge while actively participating in the promotion of the arts through ICAPA. Contemporary descriptions of knowledge workers under the growing dominance of digital technologies resonate particularly well with the figure of
Tafadzwa Mano, ICAPA's in-house graphic designer, and tech assistant. By 2013, Mano had been working for ICAPA for four years; during this time, he built and sustained the
ICAPA website, and became familiar with, and regularly used, Twitter Bootstrap, a free and open-source collection of tools for creating websites and web applications. Also,
Mano used the email marketing service, Mail Chimp, accessible through its website and as a smartphone app.
In the two years leading up to zim.doc, Tafadzwa’s gathering of digital skills and knowledge began to pick up speed, though, in addition to the skills made available through the Zim.doc project, Mano acquired much of his knowledge online. As he claimed during an interview, "It was all kind of self-taught along the way" (Mano
Interview, 2013). Through research online, he followed other mobile apps and HTML file innovators on the Internet and eventually found Github, the web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers source code management functionality. In addition, the repository offers plans for private and free accounts, which are usually used to host open- 140 source software projects. Through access to open source networks, Mano became fascinated with what he could build for the organization, and this preoccupation extended to after-hours.
When I go home, I'm on my computer. When I'm on it, throughout the week, I see
something on another website, and want to understand how it's done – and if I try it at
least ten times, and I fail, I just have to figure out what that particular thing is. I have
to go into the various free open source platforms like GitHub and ask questions and
get to hear what other people have to say, and how I can go about it (Mano Interview,
2013).
During the planning of the 2013 International Images Film Festival, Mano worked on making the festival’s program mobile app compatible. Despite the difficulties he encountered in reformatting the program, he insisted,
There's nothing more boring than taking someone else's code, and you copy and
paste it. It looks good, but it means I've learned nothing. And if you ask me in two
months time how I made it, I really don't know cause I really didn't make it which
sucks. But if I find a new technique then I have to try it. It's experimenting. It's
almost like science, just throw something at it and see what happens when you try
something. So, I'm usually experimenting, and occasionally crashing my PC. I've
literally become a computer addict. I'm always on my machine (Mano interview,
2013).
141 Mano’s frank absorption in constant connectivity, summed up in his self-diagnosis as
‘computer addict’ is analogous to apprehension towards the dissolution of the boundaries between work and leisure arising from growing cadres of digital entrepreneurs and cognitive workers across the globe. It likewise paints a different portrait of the ways in which being highly connected and tinkering manifest productively. Specifically, the axiom of open source logic as it intersects with a Zimbabwean based digital laborer as he works with the platform Ubuntu Linux evidences the influence of Zimbabwean history promoting a particular political project. This project has two main elements that I consider, including the recent history of land dispossession, and the ways in which land ties to strategies of resistance, even under the postcolonial conditions of a liberation leader-turned-autocrat.
Mano’s technological skills informed both his active musings on digitized knowledge and led to his founding of the organization Digital Afros, where he plays the role of art director, camera operator, digital designer and editor. Again, the icon of the afro, understood to be a sign of black power in resistance movements over the decades of the 1960s and 1970s unites with the digital in his organization's title, resurrecting and combining the elements of black resistance with digital connectivity. The elements of land, skill sharing, open source web design, and Mano’s subsequent embrace of the icons of black empowerment in his digital branding can is traceable back to the history of
Zimbabwe and its discourses on national liberation.
142 Land, Marxism and Cultural Practices
Understanding how Mano’s website resonates with the narrative of national struggle deeply embedded in Zimbabwean liberation and independence requires excavating the history of land rights in the region. One cannot overstate the importance of land in
Zimbabwe's national imagination, as the country has always been an agriculturally based society, despite rapid urbanization in the post world war II eraxx. In many ways, one can draw a parallel between the migratory practices and revolutionary imagination of the liberation war in Zimbabwe and the framing of migration as a form of resistance in
Marx's essays on modern colonization. According to scholars such as Virno (2011), laborers in Europe deserted famines or factory work for the promise of free lands in the
American West - a myth of freedom that the western imagination continues to propagate lucratively. This history of imagined migratory promise and the fantasy of western open spaces is a major component of the work of Italian socialist thinkers who turned "this cursory account of the workers [desire] to become independent landowners into an anticipation of the postmodern multitude" (Virno, 2003). These narratives framed the tendency of laborers towards exodus as a form of resistance. Likewise, the work of Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005, 2009), foregrounds migration, search for land and independence, and consider exodus and migration as an index of class struggle.xxi
The narrative of land and exodus in Zimbabwe has its characteristics that differ from the descriptions attributed to Hardt and Negri (2005, 2009) and Virno (2003) with their focus on land dispossession in European territories. Territorial enclosures in
Zimbabwe during the late 19th century animated shared narratives of how communities
143 interacted with each other and the land before dispossession. These narratives consolidated distinctly racialized struggles to reclaim the territories cultivated for generations before colonial presence. These movements gained momentum after the
Second World War with the rise of African-centered independence movements, and are foundational to the African philosophy of unhu.
During the Second World War, rapid industrialization as a result of economic limitations imposed by the war encouraged a mix of import-substitution and colonial policies that encouraged migration from rural areas to the city centers. Industrialization was encouraged because of the abundance of mineral resources, a growing domestic market due to urbanization and the influx of European immigrants, as well as the cheap land on which to build factories. Above all, there was the promise of a large, cheap and desperate labor force, full of individuals pushed off of their land largely because of colonial policies, overcrowding, and land-infertility (Mlambo, 2009:76). Rapid urbanization and industrialization led to increased worker union organization and exposure to groups articulating a desire for organized rebellion. It was during this period that the fledgling notion of unhu developed, gaining momentum during the liberation war of the late 60s in tandem with liberation struggles across the African continent. These movements communicated variations of resistance to the colonial presence, often through the language of Maoist doctrines (Bond, 2002). During the liberation war, ZANU PF's
Marxist-Leninist ideology heavily favored guerrilla war tactics that relied on the participation and radicalization of agrarian peasants based on training received in North
Korea and Mozambique, and through support offered by both Russia and China 144 (Raftopoulos, 2009). These Marxist doctrines put an emphasis on industrialized agriculture, centralizing land in the revolutionary imagination.
In addition, according to Shona spiritual practices, land was extensively intertwined with Shona ancestor worship. The worship of particular ancestors under these practices sought to ensure the fertility of the land in territories regulated by specific chiefs perceived to be direct decedents of these ancestors (Lan, 1984). Under colonial administration, officials relegated many of these chiefs to the role of collecting taxes and administering policy. In place of leaders who were perceived to be in collaboration with colonial administration, guerrilla fighters made pacts with spirit mediums, in this way situating guerrilla fighters as stand-ins for Chiefs (Lan, 1984). This tasked liberation fighters who were heavily influenced by Marxist doctrine with the preservation of balance and maintenance of land fertility in Shona spiritual practices.
In this way, those who worked intimately with land were at the center of evolving justifications for anti-colonial, Marxist-inflected resistance, as these ideologies enmeshed with pre-capitalist spiritual practices. Under Robert Mugabe, land again was transformed and molded to a populist production of unhu particularly during the fast track land reform of the early 2000s. These policies of land extraction depended on a ‘return of land to the landless peasant,' and roused an affective longing deeply ingrained in all those who had participated in, and were affected by, the liberation war. In other words, from pre- colonial spiritual practices to the era of colonial violence and resistance, to the decades of independence deeply enmeshed with the legacies of Western imperialism, a sense of connectivity with land manifests as variations on a theme. As land and the skills needed 145 to make the land productive are central to Mano's website, these issues can be traced through the characteristics and components of the site, particularly when recognizing the role that Ubuntu Linux plays in Mano’s capacity to produce these ephemeral images.
Digital analogies, market integration, and Ubuntu Linux
Acknowledging the significance of open source under the title of ‘Ubuntu' as it operates in postcolonial conditions requires a brief outline of the history of open source, the liberation discourses surrounding the concept, and the influence of Southern African history in it. Similar to Zimbabwe’s nationalist narrative, much of the language surrounding open source holdings uses the metaphors of land. Eric S Raymond’s (1997) influential essays on open source, describes these holdings through the metaphors of space, location, territory, and describes open source projects as ecosystems, both private and public. Also, since the late 1990s, open source advocates have invoked the notion of
‘the commons' as a metaphor for non-commodified public space in danger of enclosure.
Hardt and Negri (2005) have written extensively on the commons, linking the narrative of open source to a history of land enclosures in Europe as a way to rethink intellectual property rights and to connect contemporary struggles in the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) to historical legacies of resistance.
These narratives of utopian promise and rhetoric of resistance infused larger debates on the role of new technologies as they rose to prominence in the centers of Western global power, beginning initially with the optimistic hopes that accompany new technologies encapsulated in Steven Levy’s piece "The Last of the True Hackers" (2001)
146 which narrates a free software philosophy. Standard open source history begins its story in the emergence of open source software during the 1980s and builds in tension as a response to changes in intellectual property laws and academic/business partnerships.xxii
This history foregrounds two figures Richard M. Stallman, who founded the Free
Software Foundation,xxiii and Linus Torvalds, computer science graduate student from
Finland who built an operating system that turned the components and programs the FSF had developed into a working operating system that he called Linux. Notably, instead of promoting Linux on his own, Torvalds released the code onto the internet and asked for improvements from users. In response, a large group of users and developers identified and fixed bugs, building a GNU/Linux operating system as a product that was comparable to commercially produced software. These two figures, Stallman and
Torvalds, operate emblematically in open source history, representing the extremes of a divide. This narrative positions Stallman as an idealistic activist, who struggles against the enclosures of commodification, and frames Torvalds as someone who sought to make open source holdings more business-friendly.
While this may appear to be an overly simplistic rendering of the major tensions found in standard narratives of this history, they are instructive as an entry into the dominant discourses around open source, leading up to the contemporary moment where a less strident technophilia meets with the channeling of collaborative production into market structures. In addition, this narration reveals nuances in the rift between the political aims of FSF and the open source movement.xxiv Branding open source as a
‘community driven' enterprise has been successful as software programs produced 147 through free and open source platforms have gained global appeal. GNU Not Unix
(GNU)/Linux- based operating systems have been mainstreamed through organizations such as Canonical, leading to the development of Firefox, the Apache server, and importantly for this chapter, Ubuntu. During the first decade of the 2000s, the energy around preserving the ideological purity of versions of General Public License (GPL) waned, as users have, for the most part accepted the integration of open source holdings such as Ubuntu into the software industry.xxv This narrative reflects in broad strokes the rise of open source during the early years of new media developments, while in contrast, the gradual integration of these capacities into market and business practices leads us to contemporary reflection on what open source means to political conceptions. In the piece
“Introduction: Open source culture and aesthetics” (Ceraso and Pruchnic, 2011), the suggestion is that the staging of ‘microtopias’ provides a partial answer to the role of open source in political contemplations. According to these authors, staging moments of collaboration undermines liberal democratic ideals that value and encourage possessive individualism.
Debates over how open source holdings promote utopian spaces of resistance to the functioning of global capitalism continue to propagate in the west, despite the shift in narrative. However, how they have developed in Southern Africa reveal different emphases and affective overlays. This difference is especially apparent where the concept of open source resurrects the utopian ideals of free territory, and where the fantasy of
‘return to land' continues to be a source of longing and desire and a strategy for survival in Zimbabwean communities. 148 Open source use by a platform called ‘Ubuntu' relates directly to the above-outlined debates on the crowdsourcing of information, as well as its market integration, though likewise animates a distinctly Southern African philosophy. In homage to unhu’s ethics of communality, the Linux-based operating system Ubuntu, founded by the South
African tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, offers free, open-source software and stresses the importance of community in its branding. On the Ubuntu Linux website, the tab marked ‘About Ubuntu,' says, "Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning
‘humanity to others.' It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are'. The
Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers” (“The
Ubuntu Story," n.d.).
However, like the relationship between Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) movement, the use of ‘ubuntu’ in the open source platform reveals significant ambiguities. Even as the name ‘Ubuntu’ resurrects the history of liberation movements and anticolonial struggle in African communities, market integration draws this historical legacy into the platform’s branding strategies. Ubuntu Linux is an organization that employs a small cadre of professional tech workers and is supplemented by the benefits of voluntary open source contribution, part of the mainstreaming of open source holdings.
‘I am because we are' literally reflects the open source functioning of Ubuntu Linux as it monetizes voluntary and remunerated labor by extracting value out of crowd-sourced knowledge. In other words, open source, including the utopian ambitions associated with the Free Software Foundation, are flexible concepts, capable of bolstering the ideological philosophies of liberal market theory as well as the goals of the radical left. 149 Meanwhile, the steady increase of digital connectivity in the Southern African region, and the attendant rise of open source practices reveals a variation on the political projects of these holdings, discernable when considering open source and the artifacts of digital laborers from the perspective of cultural and historically embedded practices in
Zimbabwe. These variations were especially evident during fieldwork at ICAPA, where the use of Ubuntu Linux was recently integrated, and avidly embraced by the organization for the distinct purpose of increasing access, promoting skills and providing information. Specifically, it is most evident on the website produced by the digital laborer
Tafadzwa Mano. The centrality of the platform Ubuntu Linux and its semantic tribute to the African philosophy resurrects Ubuntu/unhu's connection to colonial-based land enclosures, artificially creating countries used for the benefit of extraction and wealth accumulation during the era of Western imperialism, and its anticolonial ambition to reclaim these spaces. Likewise, it resurrects the impoverishment of black populations for the purposes of colonial and metropolitan enrichment during this era. The strategies associated with unhu as it was connected to the consolidation of identity and alliance in
Southern Africa and as a way to reclaim territory, continue to maintain relevance, even as they recalibrate to conditions of postcolonial dictatorship. The uses of open-source in specific artifacts and events help to expose blind spots in larger discussions about open source and politics that remain fixated on the global north. The two examples of Zim.doc and WFR, when in dialogue, show that the ambition to retrieve lost territory in Zimbabwe under colonialism continues to be resurrected. This is evidenced in Mano’s reproduction
150 of land-based knowledge on a website providing information that is circulated for the strategy of subsistence under contemporary economic and political instability.
Collaborative work and strategic uses of digital media and unhu
As argued above, both Wild Forrest Ranch and the organization ICAPA more generally, evidence the characteristics of community orientation with an emphasis on acquiring skills and access to information in order to improve the conditions of African populations as a whole. As communication technologies such as Ubuntu Linux channel these tendencies, they trace back to historical, political and cultural connection to land, by placing prevalence on digital connectivity and unhu. In particular, ICAPA Trust members seek to keep their organization alive as they attempt to promote access to needed skills for survival under economic and political instability. As Capurro (2007) suggests, understanding the relevance of digital technologies in Southern Africa requires engaging with the land-based metaphors of inclusion, exclusion, violence and incorporation. These historical contexts are important for recognizing the nuanced and particular characteristics of Zimbabwean digital practices.
During the months I spent at ICAPA trust, Derek Bauer, and Tafazwa Mano, key members of the organization, reported that they depended increasingly on open source software for the work they did at ICAPA. As Bauer admits, "At one point I had a dream of becoming a resource center or let's say it more trendy, a hub, for the open source movement here. [I] still haven’t given up yet” (Bauer Interview, 2013). Following the
Zim.doc initiative, Bauer began to make even more use of software available on Ubuntu
151 Linux, as he explains, the shift towards open source was necessary to stay abreast of technological innovations while working with a limited budget.
We have been using Ubuntu as an operating system for all our office computers
except for the two MiniMacs for graphics and video (editing and conversion). For
video-editing, we have started working with Lightworks on Ubuntu, which is not
entirely open source, but the basic application package is free, and it runs on all
OSs, that means Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu (Bauer Interview, 2013).
While it is tempting to suggest that ICAPA and its workers’ extensive use of open source along with the integration of Twitter and Facebook on its website are an example of absorption into flexible global markets, the work of the organization intimates a nuanced use of these technologies. Useful in understanding these distinctions is Capurrro's (2007) suggestion that we recognize contemporary conditions of exclusion and inclusion within the larger framework of historical lineages. Following these suggestions highlights the ways that incorporation is typically understood as a process, which recognizes the participation of cultural innovators in commodifying procedures. As a variation on this theme, Terranova (2001) suggests that collective labor in the digital economy has not just been appropriated, but has been channeled and structured within capitalist business practices. Similar to Capurro (2007), Terranova (2004a) writes, “The digital economy is in this way, not a new phenomenon but a new phase of this longer history of participation and experimentation”(53). In addition to recognizing this dialogue between involvement and experimentation, the efforts of members of ICAPA to participate in these practices promote characteristics that are unique to the particulars of cultural legacies and localized 152 histories. In this way, the grid-like edifices of technology's digital infrastructures, though imbalanced regarding traffic flow and ownership, when considered in the context of a
Zimbabwean-based organization are characterized by particular uses that speak to their conditions. Much like the regulation of land use under colonial systems of surveillance and imposed order, Capurro (2007) suggests that a similar relationship to information technologies engages with the same fraught play of power and resistance.xxvi
Mano’s embrace of digital hardware and software with the goal of skill sharing in farming techniques and his institutional connection to ICAPA Trust promotes access to the digital in a way that engages with the loaded subject of land, a subject within which unhu finds its grounding and roots. This engagement between the digital and land is evident in the historical connections Capurro (2007) discusses in his speech on digital ethics and Ubuntu, and in the assemblage of elements on Mano’s website for
Zimbabwean populations. These characteristics include a centralization of land, which finds expression in a mix of digital labor, farming strategies and the goal to provide free access to ‘best practices’ for the digitally and agriculturally inclined.
In contrast to Zim.doc with its emphasis on non-linear and communal story- telling, WFR, along with the overarching concerns of ICAPA, encourages communal practices, while simultaneously emphasizing the acquisition of skills that enable the production of crops under conditions of extreme economic and political instability. This mix of agricultural and digital labor economies and the ambition to share knowledge of farming practices, as outlined in the sections above, suggest that these practices have a long precedence. As Ceraso and Pruchnic (2011) suggest, the characteristics of Mano and 153 ICAPA’s digital artifacts reflect the ways that “aesthetic production processes are by necessity influenced by the dominant structure of commodity production”(Ceraso et al.
2011:353). In the case of Zimbabwe, these aesthetics are deeply integrated with the urgent need to provide sustenance, skills and information provided for the capacity, not to enjoy microtopias of hypothetical collaborative productivity, but to enable the operation of the unregulated markets that sustain the vast majority of Zimbabweans. That is, the skills for survival under economic and institutional collapse. Additionally, cultivating agricultural skills on a website produced for Zimbabweans has a particular political relevancy. On WFR, the community-based practice of unhu with its emphasis on land, and the ability to survive despite the obstacles imposed by corrupt regimes, whether colonial or post-colonial, overlays the voluntarily produced, community-oriented, web space, enabled by an open-source software platform, aptly named ‘Ubuntu Linux.’
Conclusion
This chapter explores the construction of the digital and unhu at the level of the experimental documentary Zim.doc, and at the level of Wild Forrest Ranch, both affiliated with the Zimbabwean organization ICAPA Trust. Specifically, this chapter conceptualizes digital technologies within the context of the uses of and incorporates the framing device of open source aesthetics (Ceraso and Pruchnic, 2011) to point to the political goals of the project Zim.doc. This chapter argues that these political aims, as these aesthetics embody these goals, did not adhere readily to the objectives and ambitions of ICAPA trust, as evidenced by their lack of inclusion of the project on their website. In contrast, I point to the site WFR that makes use of the open source platform 154 Ubuntu Linux and promotes best practices in farming through the exhibition of agricultural information. WFR and ICAPA are less interested in performing the tightening feedback loop between production, consumption, and distribution, labeled open source aesthetics, and staged in the non-linear experimental film Zim.doc. Rather than establishing ‘microtopias' performed through a staged cooperation of audience with digital technologies (as shown in the project Zim.doc), WFR makes use of open source to promote agricultural skills and cattle ranching. Specifically, these skills account for the agricultural-based population of Zimbabwe, its history of violent land appropriation, and forced migration into urban environments. Additionally, it points to the current conditions of extreme political and economic instability under which the vast majority of
Zimbabweans survive, where lack of employment and food scarcity has required many to resort to subsistence-level land cultivation and trade in unregulated markets.
This chapter hopes to outline how the political projects read through the aesthetics of the digital artifact WFR, promote an opening for another way of reading open source, and its history. In this analysis, the digital is conceptualized through the framework of open source and examines its uses from the perspective of the Zimbabwean creative organization ICAPA and its former web-designer to develop an alternative understanding of standard narratives of open source history and political projects. Following Capurro’s
(2007) lead and responding to the work of Aouragh and Chakravartty (2016), I suggest that this type of localized and regionally based inquiry helps to elucidate digital media in the global south.
155 In the cases I examine, the uses of open source seek to serve the needs of the organization ICAPA Trust, an organization whose economic instability depends on the ability to make use of open source software strategically. Likewise, open source in the case of WFR responds to the contemporary needs of Zimbabweans struggling under conditions of extreme political and economic insecurity. While performing these strategies through digital integration, in both these cases, the historical context of the colonial era continues to influence these products as the strategies honed under colonial rule are put to use under contemporary ZANU-PF rule. The ongoing salience of the concept ubuntu/unhu evidences these influences, with its emphasis on collaboration, its connectivity to land, and its role in promoting strategies of survival under oppressive conditions.
156 Chapter Seven: Localized and Global Expressions of digital unhu: Pixilated Ubuntu/unhu and the dissolution of the Book Café1
This chapter asks the questions: How is the role of digital media constructed in the venue of the Book Café, and how is the role of unhu constructed in this same venue? In addition, I ask, what is the role of digital media in the visual artifacts shown at the
Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale? What is the role of unhu in these same creative artifacts? These questions are answered at the level of the Book Café venue, and the events that the organization performs. Likewise, these questions are answered at the level of the Venice Biennale event, and at the level of Zimbabwean pavilion as well as the specific creative artifacts produced by the three artists who participated in this event. In contrast to the previous two chapters, which give an account of the construction of the digital and unhu within a particular Zimbabwean creative organization, and the following chapter that focuses the research questions in on specific projects produced and performed by this organization, this chapter looks at two venues, one affiliated with ICAPA Trust, and the other, held at a globally renown event. I compare and contrast the findings between these two sites of inquiry, locating similarities in characteristics and identifying patterns. Specifically, I locate these questions, and this inquiry in two different locations, one global, and one local. In comparing these two sites,
I found similarities and differences in content and characteristics, as Zimbabwean artists
1 McClune, Caitlin (2017) Digital unhu: Mobile connectivity and immaterial labor in Zimbabwean artistic expression. New Media & Society
157 produce creative artifacts tailored to different audiences. I put an emphasis on the similarities and patterns discernable across these disperate venues in order to draw conclusions about the uses of digital media in cultural artifacts and organizations.
On the 25th of February 2015, the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 56th Venice
Biennale hosted a show called “Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu - Exploring the Social and
Cultural Identities of the 21st Century.” When asked about his Biennale contribution,
Zimbabwean artist, Masimba Hwati described his work as an investigation of the evolution of indigenous knowledge systems. “I’m looking at how these systems co-exist with current paradigms - the idea of ‘Harmonic Incongruence’: and the juxtaposition of esoteric cultural elements with modern, mainstream symbolism (…)” (Hwati, 2015). In other words, the exhibition’s pairing of ‘pixels’ with ‘unhu’ in the show’s title addressed how over a strikingly short amount of time, Zimbabwean cultural expression has become enmeshed with digital technologies, a phenomenon also made apparent in the trajectory of the Book Café, a popular venue and artistic hub located in downtown Harare. The same year as the 56th Venice Biennale, The Book Café closed down under economic strife and much pressure from Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF party. Despite the fact that the Book Café no longer has a central headquarters, the organization’s coordinators continue to plan, advertise and arrange pop-up events featuring local artists and musicians through Facebook and Twitter promotion accessed primarily through mobile phones.
This chapter conceptualizes “the digital” within the remarkable rise in internet connectivity acquired in Zimbabwean populations through the rise of mobile phones. 158 Additionally, this chapter considers how this rise in connectivity is contiguous to the increase in digital, immaterial labor in the Zimbabwean region. Similar to the last chapter, this chapter seeks to expose the emergence of particular aesthetics as they are routed and guided through communication technologies, specifically through mobile devices. In contrast to the previous chapters, the digital and unhu are expressed in two different venues, the Book Café and the 2015 Venice Biennale, giving a very localized account of digital unhu and comparing this to an expression of digital unhu as it manifests in a global arts venue. Distinct from the previous chapters, this one gives specific attention to the strategies of mobility that are extended and intensified through the uses of mobile technology, directly addressing the third intermediary question: how are Zimbabwean creative communities and artists constructing the role of digital media and of unhu strategically in efforts to contend with conditions of economic and political hardship?
Network activity through mobile devices is not typically understood as a form of work, but the scrolling, posting, forwarding, extending and keeping track of online networks is at the heart of immaterial labor. In addition, the framework of immaterial labor helps account for the affective drives sustaining digital networks such as to connect, to extend one’s social network, and to build identity within community. In one case study, I consider the use of digital networks accessed through mobile devices as a central practice of the organization’s capacity to organize, promote and arrange cultural events, despite the restrictions and intimidation of the ZANU-PF government. In the second, I examine artistic representations that comment on, and actively investigate the role these 159 mobile devices play in the merging of new technologies with the Zimbabwean cultural landscape. I draw from this second case study in order to sketch out thematic parallels that were apparent in the pavilions of the 2015 Biennale, curated by Nigerian-based artist
Okwui Enwezor. In both cases, looking at the role of digital media and unhu in these events and artifacts helps to clarify the particular ways Zimbabwean artistic communities have adapted digital technologies and practices of mobility to political, economic and creative life in Harare. Illuminating the phenomena in these case studies, digital unhu is defined by three major components including 1) the integration of cultural history and practices with new technologies, 2) an emphasis on inter-subjectivity or the centrality of community, and 3) the strategies of mobility in contending with economic and political limitations. In addition to countering economic and cultural overgeneralizations in research conclusions that assume homogeneous uses of mobile phones in the global south, this chapter seeks to contextualize Zimbabwean uses of mobile phones by introducing little-known Zimbabwean artists who are compellingly engaged with the ways that digital networks are influencing their cultural conditions. This sketches out a
Zimbabwean-inflected account for how immaterial labor is manifesting in creative, collaborative and mobile conditions.
In the next section, I situate the case studies of this chapter in larger debates on mobile phone adoption in the global south, aligning myself with several authors who produce work that considers cultural as well as economic factors in the patterns of cellphone use. In the second and third sections, I introduce the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale and examine the ways that the artists represented express the 160 fusion of new technologies with cultural traditions. In addition, I use the artwork exhibited at the Biennale to explore the historical legacies and continuities between historically grounded cultural practices and contemporary Zimbabwean artistic expression. In the fourth section, I introduce the Book Café, and describe the organization's connection to Zimbabwe's liberation movement, while in the fifth, I describe the strategies of mobility Book Café organizers, artists and audiences invoke in their performances. In the final section, I consider the ambivalence of digital unhu as corporate platforms shape and inform potential marketing strategies, while pointing to the characteristics of resistance legible in Zimbabwean mobile phone practices.
Ongoing debates
This chapter analyzes the interplay of localized culture and history as they interact with the influx of digital devices, and seeks to account for economic processes while distinguishing itself from economically determinist scholarship. In this way, the concept of digital unhu narrates localized accounts of mobile phone use while engaging with the unwieldy category of ‘immaterial labor,’ as it has expanded to include work done on digital and social networks: texting, emailing, posting, linking and scrolling. In particular, immaterial labor follows up on the tension between the cultural exchanges that circulate through digital networks and corporate attempts to commercialize online interactions identified in Miller and Slater's (2000) foundational ethnography on uses of the Internet among populations from Trinidad. This formative ethnographic study on internet connectivity in the global south shows how internet practices are embedded within
161 technological infrastructures and global markets, underscoring the tension between the internet as a system of gift exchange and the attempts of the corporate world to commercialize online interaction. This previous work helps to foreground digital unhu and the ‘work' done on mobile phones as well as the drives that sustain these activities. I engage with these scholars to understand how new technologies, the economy, culture, history, and community are channeled through the reproduction of Zimbabwean contemporary social structures as they enmesh with the digital networks accessed through mobile phones.
As already outlined in chapter one, immaterial labor became a familiar concept through Hardt and Negri (2000). The first form of immaterial labor refers to cerebral or conceptual work like problem-solving, symbolic, and analytical tasks. This type of work is often found in the technological sector of the culture industry and includes public relations, media production, and web design. What is important is that production has shifted from the material realm of the factory to the symbolic production of ideas. The second component includes the production of affects. Affective labor refers to those forms which manipulate “a feeling of ease, well, being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Hardt and Negri 2004:108). As already mentioned in the first chapter, this type of work has historically been unpaid and is often thought of as ‘women’s work,’ typically including services or care through the body and emotions (Hardt and Negri 2000:293).
Scholarship that focuses on the production of immaterial labor seeks to highlight how communication, subjectivity, and consumption, have become powerful articulations of capitalist production. However, while accounting for these processes, this article aligns 162 with Mark Coté and Jennifer Prybus (2007) who emphasize modes of resistance in the ambivalence of immaterial labor. In particular, the practices of ‘digital unhu' show that the affective drives sustaining networked communities produced in these case studies are subject to monetization. However, what this study highlights are the strategic uses of these technologies, which are extended and built upon through various forms of mobility, and further intensified through the use of mobile phones. In this way, digital unhu takes into account the ambivalent incorporation of these devices into Zimbabwean communities, though likewise points to emerging characteristics of digital practices in the region. These characteristics retain the three components of fusing cultural practices with technologies, an emphasis on collaboration and community, and the strategies of mobility.
Additionally, Digital Unhu is useful for analyzing Zimbabwean networked communication, as it draws from scholarship that calls for historically specific and locally nuanced research on the uses of mobile devices. As already discussed in chapter three, research on the rise of digital connectivity has fallen into several categories, including scholarship that focuses on the determinants of mobile adoption, the impacts of mobile integration and the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users
(Donner, 2008). Research on mobile phone impacts on communities, while historically associated with media imperialism debates, has recently been connected to scholarship that suggests mobile phones help to alleviate poverty (Jenson, 2007). Countering the ways that the conclusions from these findings are selectively chosen to justify the policies of large-scale development-based agencies such as the World Bank, their work suggests a 163 ‘prices plus' framework that takes into account locally and culturally specific uses of mobile phones.xxvii While these scholars do not deny that leveraging prices through mobile phones has been useful or economically uplifting for individual communities, they object to the ways that these findings have developed into ‘accepted truths,' that obscure the heterogeneous ways these devices enfold into already existing networks
(Burrell and Oreglia, 2015). Notably, these authors suggest that these ‘accepted truths' are used to justify the building of market information systems. In addition, their research points to how reaching too easily toward ‘accepted truths’ promotes simplified strategies for alleviating poverty, letting the global community avoid considering the possibility of redistribution to address the extreme disparities of wealth that continue to rise.
To counter unexamined and ‘accepted truths’ Burrell and Oreglia’s (2015) research falls under Donner’s (2008) third identifiable trajectory of mobile phone research, which emphasizes the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users.
Their work is aligned with authors who map out the interplay between technologies and localized culture. They address how mobile phones influence the organization of gender
(Archambault, 2011; Araba, 2011; Tenhunen, 2014; Burrell, 2014); or the expression of national affiliation in distinct communities, (Uimonen; 2009, Daniel Miller and Don
Slater; 2000). In alliance with these scholars, digital unhu takes into account the economic forces influencing mobile adoption, though likewise emphasizes the historical and cultural specificity of digital practices in Zimbabwe.
In addition to responding to the call for scholarship that endorses a ‘prices-plus' outlook through the framework of ‘immaterial labor,' this chapter intervenes in the gaps 164 of the literature by addressing the understudied cell phone boom in Southern Africa. The
Book Café is an important venue for scholarly attention because of the central role it has played in preserving a space for the creative expression of Zimbabwean culture in the decades since independence. Likewise, the ‘Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu’ pavilion evidences the tenacity of digital unhu’s characteristics, even while being displayed at a globally renowned event. This chapter provides an opportunity for understanding some of the transitions creative communities have undergone in Zimbabwe, from pan-African and regional black-liberation struggles to development funded organizations, often with the goal of maneuvering around the constraints of a stubborn dictator. While all of the characteristics that make up ‘digital unhu,' have long established legacies, they find new forms of expression in digitally networked cultural and artistic communities in
Zimbabwe.
Pixelated ubuntu/unhu
During the month of May in 2015, the Zimbabwean pavilion, “Pixels of Ubuntu/ Unhu” was held in Venice, Italy. Despite the fact that Zimbabwe's 2015 exhibition marked only the third time the nation attended the event, the Biennale has a comparatively long history. Since its inauguration in 1895, the Venice Biennale has become a large-scale, international exhibition that provides a venue for participating nations to establish themselves in the contemporary global art market. African presence has been minimal in
Biennales over the years. Despite this scarcity, Nigerian-based Okwui Enwezor was elected head curator for the 2015 Biennale, organizing the numerous pavilions under the
165 theme of "imagining multiple desires and futures" (Artwolf, 2015). Against the backdrop of this European-based event curated by Enwezor, the ‘Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu’ pavilion directly referenced a Southern African philosophy and the ways that it is ‘pixelated’ through the capacities of communication technologies.
Considering its economic condition, Zimbabwe has had the unlikely role of being the only Southern African nation in attendance with a six-room pavilion that featured
Zimbabwean artists who have spent varying lengths of time in the diaspora. Much as the title suggests, these artists reflected on exchanges between regionally integrated philosophies and the technologies of mobile communication, locating digital space as one of convergence where mobile, and digitized fragments of the Southern African philosophy are capable of connecting in unlikely combinations. Proposing questions rather than providing answers, head curator of the Zimbabwean Pavilion, Raphael
Chikukwa asked, "How does the general process of acceleration and diversification play out in the current era of social reconstruction? The current education system and
Ubuntuism/Unhuism asks us to rethink about ourselves in a more critical manner as we embrace new technology" (Chikukwa, 2015). Reflective of Chikukwa's statements, the installations and visual art shown in the Zimbabwean pavilion explored how unhu's community oriented philosophy is articulated to the rise of mobile phones in Zimbabwe.
The weather begins to warm up in Venice during the month of May, marking tourist season as well as the surging crowds that descend upon the city during the time of year when the world's most renowned art exhibition takes place. A short walk from the
Arsenal's central location of the exhibition, a mid-18th century Catholic Church named
166 Santa Maria Della Pietà stands on the river Degli Schiavoni with tall, white columns, a small cross at its peak, and two filigreed round windows on either side of a massive forest-green wooden door. It was in this church that the Zimbabwean pavilion, “Pixels of Ubuntu/ Unhu” was held in 2015, curated by Raphael Chikukwa, assistant curator Tafadzwa Gwetai, and Commissioner Doreen Sibanda. The main room of the pavilion is a long hall, at the end of which tall windows illuminate the white walls that reflect the changing daylight on visual artist Masimba Hwati's large-scale self-portraits. Six smaller rooms diverged off of the main hall, in which the works of visual artists Chikonzero Chuzunguza and Gareth Nyandoro were on display. Functioning in its third year in a row and as the only representative of Southern Africa, the Zimbabwean pavilion's pieces reverberated with the overall strains of Enwezor's larger intervention during the 56th Biennale, centralizing the interconnections of culture in the ‘postcolonial constellation’ (Enwezor, 2015). Nestled in the larger identified themes of artistic collaboration, reframed history, and the multiplication of labor, the Zimbabwean pavilion was named: "Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu." This conjured mobile, and digitized fragments of the Southern African philosophy, capable of mutating as it articulates to communication technologies, identified as the driving force behind immaterial labor.
The main room of the pavilion housed the work of Masimba Hwati, who is better known for working with found objects, which he infuses with the energy of indigenous beliefs and practices giving them a visceral quality. His series titled "Urban Totems" contained several self-portraits of the artist wearing glasses emblazoned with the symbols of global consumerism: including the icons of social media platforms such as Whatsapp,
Twitter, and Google+. A common conclusion drawn from these images repeats the refrains from media imperialism debates, assuming that these icons of consumerism are
167 symbols of global corporate power that negatively affect young populations by destroying indigenous and traditional ways of life (IAM Team, 2015). However, by Hwati's admission, the ‘Urban Totems' series seeks to question "whether technology's pixelating of Ubuntu/Unhu has enhanced or distorted our humanity" (Biennial Foundation, 2015), suggesting a more enigmatic relationship to both corporate presence and technological devices. Hwati's referencing of ‘totems' signals an ongoing engagement with the historical and social organization of Shona populations in the assignment of totems, which includes spiritual practices linked to the ancestors, animal, and land affiliation.xxviii
Figure 7: Screen Hwati, Masimba. ‘Urban Totems’ 2015, Mixed medium Pixels of
Ubuntu/Unhu – Zimbabwe Pavilion. Venice, Italy.
In this way, these ‘urban totems' invoke the history of Shona network affiliation and spiritual practices, as these social systems graph onto contemporary techniques of association and networking, such as twitter, and Google+. As suggested, the representation of these icons as frames of glasses indicates the intensification or, potential obstruction, promoted through the ubiquitous presences of these technologies and corporate forces.
A self-identified “interrogator of postcolonial hangover cultures” (Hwati, 2015),
168 Hwati puts himself in dialogue with new technologies, suggesting the uncertainty he feels towards these significant forces. Equivocality reappears in an interview where he discloses that despite his overarching concerns for the degradation of indigenous traditions, his role model is Strive Masiyiwa, the founder of Econet Wireless, and listed by Fortune Magazine as one of the 50 most influential business leaders in the world. "He has so much influence and financially he has managed to spread the mobile network all over Africa, and he is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and other stock exchanges worldwide." Hwati deepens his embrace of digital technologies as an artist as it relates to financial gain by his stated inspiration in Damien Hurst, known for his membership in the 90s conceived Young British Artists group. Hwati admits that he admires Hurst for breaking the myth that “most fine artists live a bohemian lifestyle, which is that they don’t do well financially (…) He has gone out to invest his money and is doing well financially and commands a lot of respect” (“Masimba Hwati - The Artist |
POVO,” n.d.).
Foregrounding "continuous search of new material and ideologies that define contemporary Zimbabwean art,”(Hwati, 2013,) in his artist’s statement, he writes, “My work is constantly being directed towards becoming a search and a suggestive mold and antidote for some of technical and ideological challenges that face post modernistic Africa, in this case Zimbabwe"(Hwati, 2013). He writes, "In this ‘new found' penance and separation I have developed defining lines such as ‘paint on canvas is for wimps in this part of the world.' this has brought about a radical disengagement from conventional patterns of art"(Hwati, 2013). Hwati’s embrace of digital technologies, from the integration of its icons into the materiality of his work, to his verbal embrace of Strive Masiyiwa, his use of cultural symbols, and above all his suggestion that ‘paint on canvas is not enough’ for the part of the world that he comes from helps to introduce the 169 following artists as they likewise exhibit the characteristics of digital integration, cultural practices, and the strategies of survival.
The presence of the past and strategies of mobility
Reflective of the exhibition’s title, Chikonzero Chazunguza’s series ‘The Presence of the
Past,’ contemplated the aesthetics of digital mobility, as they ascribe to efforts at restaging historical events. His series included pieces infused with the visual characteristics of digital devices; archival images reproduced in photographic likeness appeared to flow across his canvases. In particular, his print ‘Portrait of Nehanda’ combined and represented the themes of colonial history, forms of resistance, and indigenous survival through the visual devices of repetition, mutation, and flow. Nehanda has particular cultural significance for Zimbabweans, as her story has repeatedly been told over the eras of British and Rhodesian rule, the liberation movement and independence (Charumbira, 2015). An ancestor who is channeled through spirit mediums, she is known as a ‘rain maker’ of the Zezuru Shona people, whose medium was executed by the British in 1897 for her role in the Shona and Ndebele uprising of
1896 (King Chung, 2006). Her presence reappeared during the guerrilla war of the liberation movement as the medium who channeled her spirit, provided advice and guidance during the late 1960s and 1970s. She resurfaces again in contemporary
Zimbabwean landmarks and cultural sites, serving as a short hand for unfaltering resistance to western imperialism, devotion to indigenous belief systems, and loyalty to black populations. Her dying words were, “My bones will rise again” (Charumbira,
2008). 170 The figure of Nehanda not only recalls the legacies of spiritual practices based on land fertility rituals and the complex relationships between chiefs, spirit mediums, and long-deceased ancestors, but she likewise invokes a need for strategic mobility in efforts to organize and resist colonial land dispossession.xxix The structure of mobile networks during the build up to the liberation movement depended on young peasants in rural villages. Liberation fighters inducted these young individuals into the role of mujiba,xxx part of a 50,000, or more, network of agents who acted as intermediaries between the guerrillas and the adults who remained in the villages. These young messengers carried information, supplies and spied on enemies, sometimes traveling across the borders of neighboring countries (Lan, 1985; Chung, 2006). In addition to these young messengers on the move, the mediums that channeled ancestors such as Nehanda were also required to be mobile, traveling with guerilla fighters across borders and hiding in the landscape.
Rhodesian forces put a priority on targeting spirit mediums for capture as they were considered to be the life-blood of the resistance movement.
The mobility of all types did not cease to be necessary after black liberation fighters won independence. In the aftermath of the liberation war, following Mugabe's presidential nomination, the evolution toward national consolidation was often perilous.xxxi In the decades following independence, violence and intimidation kept
Zimbabwe's aging ruler in power. Post-independence Zimbabwe witnessed a mismanagement of funds, cronyism, extreme political corruption, harassment, and the
2000 Fast Track Land Reform endorsed by the ZANU PF party. In 2008, the global financial crisis hit Zimbabwe's economy hard, resulting in a rapid decline in GDP. A 171 shaky agricultural industry in conjunction with international sanctions devastated the economy, culminating in an official 80 percent unemployment rate, spawning mass migrations and a vast informal sector that grew in its place (Mutasa, 2015).
This mobilization of people across national borders resulted in one-third of
Zimbabwe's population moving into the diaspora, as individuals flow across borders in search of survival, all the while maintaining frequent contact with old and new networks through the aid of mobile phones (McGregor & Primorac, 2010). Artist Chikonzero
Chazunguza is one of the many who has lived in the Zimbabwean diaspora. After earning his liberal arts degree in Eastern Europe, he returned to Zimbabwe, only to travel abroad again, because of the political nature of his work. In his series "The Presence of the Past" shown at the Biennale, he visually links these contemporary conditions of mobility to the liberation movement in his ‘Portrait of Nehanda.' The long history of communing with spirits, of community collaboration and the resistant strategy of mobility is suffused with the indexes of new technologies as her replicated image flows across the canvas, from right to left in layered colors of red and black. As such, the resilience and resistance of an anti-colonial indigenous ‘rain-maker' combine in ‘harmonic incongruence' with the markers of replication, mutation, mass-communicability and movement necessary under contemporary Zimbabwean political and economic conditions.xxxii
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Figure 8: Chazunguza, Chikonzero. ‘Portrait of Nehanda’ 2015, Mixed medium Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu – Zimbabwe Pavilion. Venice, Italy
Directly addressing these strategies of mobility in the form of unregulated commercial gatherings, Gareth Nyandoro's series of collages, prints, and paintings titled
"Paper Cut," focused on depicting Harare’s mobile marketplaces through large-scale canvases accompanied by recorded audio of these moveable markets. Centralizing the imperative for maneuverability and subterfuge, several of his pieces incorporated objects placed on brightly colored cloth, referencing the need to move quickly at the arrival of police. With titles such as Auya matissue Akachipa akasimba! (Cheap and strong toilet tissue mobile shop), or, ‘Set Up Shop' depicting a young man with his commodities attached to his back, his pieces directly reference the collaborative need for strategies of mobility under contemporary Zimbabwean conditions, where economic collapse has given rise to thriving informal markets that are criminalized by the state.
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Figure 9: Nyandoro, Gareth,“Cheap And Strong Toilet Tissue Mobile Shop” 2015,
Mixed medium Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu – Zimbabwe Pavilion. Venice, Italy.
The Book Café’s liberation roots
The Book Café is another mobile venue that evidences some of the same characteristics depicted at the Biennale. The same year that the ‘Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu’ exhibit opened its doors to the patrons of the Venice Biennale the Book Café was forced to shut down due to government pressure and lack of funds. On its Facebook page, the Book Café wrote, “It is with deepest regret that we have to advise that as of the first of June 2015, the Book Café closed its door. The Book Café [has] treated audiences to nearly two decades of memorable live music, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, film screenings, discussions and more” (Book Café, 2016). Similar to the ethereal replications of Nehanda in Chazunguza’s portrait, the Book Café has roots that go back to the liberation era, extending beyond the years it has operated as a performance space.
In several ways, the Book Café’s trajectory parallels the development of unhu as a philosophy, which gained traction during the African liberation movements of the 1960s, and drew fortification during Zimbabwe’s armed anti-colonial struggle. The founder of 174 the café, Paul Brickhill, one of the few white liberation war veterans of Zimbabwe grew up in Harare during an intensification of the liberation war. Brickhill refused enforced conscription in the Rhodesian army, and instead left the country to join the liberation struggle by uniting with ZAPU in 1976.xxxiii Following independence in 1980, he founded the country's first progressive bookshop, Grassroots Books, in 1981, and its associated publishing company, Anvil Press. Working with colleagues in other African countries, he co-founded the two major African publishing organizations – the African Publishers
Network (APNET) and the Pan-African Booksellers Association. During the first decades of the organization, Brickhill and his brother Jeremy played a significant role in supporting South Africa's ANC, and Umkhono we Sizwe (the armed wing of South
Africa’s African National Congress ANC), providing avenues for operations to be launched from inside Zimbabwe.
A decade later, Grassroots Books began to take a development-oriented stance in combining with the NGO Pamberi Trust, evolving into The Book Café. According to
Brickhill, receiving funding through an initiative of the Belgian Development
Cooperation, Africalia, provided money and resources, as well as strategies for increasing revenue. In directing the organization’s orientation towards development-based initiatives tied to donor funding, Brickhill was able to procure the capital necessary for sustaining the Book Café, whose performance and exhibition of Zimbabwean music, literature and poetry increased in 2011 to 950 at the rate of 17 events a week (Africalia, 2011). Besides providing the most well-known and active performance space in Zimbabwe, the Book
Café is also known for having revived the popularity of the mbira, an indigenous musical 175 instrument deeply associated with resistance to colonial resettlement (Hancock-Barnett,
2012). The Book Cafe often played mbira music, reviving interest in the region’s
Chimurenga music. Chimurenga is a Shona word that roughly translates to "revolutionary struggle" and Chimurenga music, particularly, pieces played by the musician Thomas
Mapfumo during the liberation era has remained popular in the decades since independence. Part of the Book Café's role in this resurgence has been the provision of the venue for artists like Hope Masike, a Harare-based musician, famous for uniting mbira with the elements of jazz, gospel, and rock. Despite the resurrection of music associated with the liberation war, the Book Café has had to deal with extensive government repression.
Somewhere in Harare
Much like the mobile vendors represented in the paintings of Nyandoro, the Book Café has had to find ways of mobilizing to avoid state-repression. During interviews, Book
Café founder Paul Brickhill stated that he and members of the organization had been
“Punished by arrest, detention, threat, threat of arrest” at the hands of the ZANU PF government (Stories from Africa, 2013). As Zimbabwean artist Samm Farai described in an interview taken in 2011, “If you’ve got the guts to say what you want to say and spit it out in a poem, you can do it, but you don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s the joke we’ve got in Zimbabwe, you’ve got freedom of expression, but you don’t have freedom after expression” (Africalia, 2011). A well-known comedian, poet, musician and
176 actor in Zimbabwe, Farai’s observations highlight the real fears and risks that come with artistic expression under Mugabe’s regime.
Just before shutting down, the Book Café began to increase its on-line presence as members and coordinators of the venue recognized the potential role mobile technologies could play in supporting the performance space. During interviews held by Netherlands- based development organization Hivos, one participant claimed, "I follow the Book Café every day on Facebook. I get information on list serve from Pamberi Trust. I get the annual report as part of the list-serve … you can't use the physical space to measure its
[the Book Café's] impact because it goes beyond. We get the content. We discuss elsewhere" (“book_cafe_report_0.pdf,”n.d.). Other interviewees were more explicit about the role of mobile phones in sustaining the organization.
When we look at the statistics, ZBC ‘casts to almost about 32% of the entire
population of the country and the most-watched program is the news. The most
listened-to radio station is Radio Zimbabwe, which “casts to almost at 78% ... For
mobile, they say there are almost between 4.8-5.3 million people that have 3G
connectivity. So we see we have a major courier that we are not making use of
(Guzha, 2014).
Soon after this study's findings were published, the Book Café began to organize events by posting and regularly updating their Facebook and Twitter sites with announcements of upcoming performance lineups, and locations. At the time of this study, the Book
Café’s Facebook page has at least 9,000 followers, and at least 9,100 followers on 177 Twitter. Both sites’ amalgamations of photos provide grids and scrolls of images depicting colorful advertisements for performances with lists of entertainers, as well as snapshots of live events, portraits of artists and attending audiences.
Figure 10: Screen Capture from the Book Café Facebook Feed 10/15. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/bookcafeharare/
In October 2015 only a handful of months after the Book Café had shut down its doors, a post on the organization's Facebook page urged followers to save the date of November
7th in anticipation of a ‘pop-up' event set to occur ‘Somewhere in Harare.' On that
Saturday, at the Ambassador Hotel on Kwame Nkrumah Ave, Zimbabwean band Jam
Signal played its signature fusion rock. The band, Mokoomba sang in their traditional
Tonga language, songs that often include rap, Soukous and Afro-Cuban rhythms.xxxiv As the music animated the audience of the Book Café’s first pop-up event, Zimbabwean blogger Larry Kwirirayi, author of 3-mob.com, recorded an interview with Paul
Brickhill’s son, Thomas. In the recorded interview, over background music, he says, "We are here next to the Ministry of Defense and across the road from the Supreme Court, and yet, here we are with a vibrant arts scene" (Brickhill, 2015). Thomas’ words underscore the organization’s survival, despite government efforts at closure and likewise highlight
178 the Zimbabwean communities capacity to thrive despite these pressures. Since this first pop-up event, the book café has held at least twenty others.
After Brickhill's death in 2015 and in the wake of pressure from the ZANU PF government, the café's building closed its doors to become an affiliation of artists whose performances emerge in venues across the city. This dissolution of the physical space into an ephemeral network of artists and audiences was part of a larger process of digitization witnessed over the course of my fieldwork. During my first visit to the café in 2013, I accessed the internet through a purchasable card inscribed with code for time-limited use.
By December 2015, the café had a free internet connection, and the back patio was full of young men who bent over laptops and cellphones plugged into the charging sockets made available through extension cords; every device and every seat filled. The evolution of the technologically infiltrated space of the Book Café shifted to an immaterial organization, as events requiring the digital connectivity of performers and audience members continued to emerge across the city's landscape. Social media websites promoted these pop-up events, where thousands of followers found the locations and details of events held. In this way, the social media accounts of the now ephemeral Book
Café were central to the events they held, as well as to the digitally driven youth who accessed them.
The Book Café has gone through multiple structural changes as its goals and ambitions have adjusted to the political and economic demands of the decades following
Zimbabwean independence. Historical connection to the liberation war combines with the organization's aim to promote cultural performances demonstrating the theme of 179 community and collaboration across the various iterations of the organization. This theme of community collaboration has intensified in the integration of mobile phones and the social networks accessed on these devices, as the organization is now reliant on the ability to be mobile. Despite cultural and historical specificities, during the early 2000s,
Brickhill recognized the need to collaborate with European-based donor agencies to secure the funding for the organization. Obtaining backing from the Belgium-based
Africalia, along with the technological innovations that sustain the Book Café suggests a level of ambiguity inherent in the practice of digital unhu.
The work of digital unhu
Extending Hardt and Negri’s accounts of immaterial labor, Coté and Pybus (2007) consider the affective charge of network connectivity, now easily accessed on mobile devices, while pointing to corporate ambitions to mine the trends, demographic information, and content produced by users who seek these affective returns. Building from Dallas W. Smythe's (1981) fundamental theories on the audience as a commodity and its work, Coté and Pybus (2007) consider the ways that we ‘work’ as our lives interface with ICTs, especially since we construct our digital identities in collaboration with others. In considering the cultural specificities of these affective drives, it bears repeating that Zimbabwean Shona culture has heavily emphasized the role of community in subjectivity, an emphasis that echoed throughout the work of Hwati, Chazunguza, and
Nyandoro. In their work, the shape of totems, spiritual mediums, and guiding ancestors, are connected to histories of collaborative networking, and strategic maneuvering that
180 overturned colonial and minority rule. As scholars of immaterial labor insist, affective drives animate the pull of digital networks particularly because of the intensely gratifying component of community affiliation that is built into forms of digital connectivity, allowing users to feel part of something larger than themselves (Terranova, 2004; Coté and Pybus, 2007). These drives channeled through mobile phones, and their corporate shadows are contemplated by Zimbabwean visual artists at the Biennale as they wrestle with the role these new technologies play in mediating culture that is enmeshing rapidly with global markets.
In line with this framework of affective laboring, the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu/unhu sutures well to digital networks. Specifically, unhu's principle of subjective production through community resonates with online networks in which identities are embedded in and produced through the flux and flow of their online connections. This is not to say that this is the only form of labor in Zimbabwe but instead points to rising tendencies of digital practices in the small nation, where affective drives are channeled through the activities and devices motivating what Coté and Pybus (2007) call capital's cultural and subjective turn.
In Zimbabwe's sudden rise in connectivity by mobile phones, by participating in the production of ‘digital bodies’ (boyd, 2007) that interact with each other and the circulating commodities found on the web, these virtual interactions are captured as a source of potential economic value in several ways.xxxv Ongoing communication through digital technologies produces evolving online subjectivities that interact with others, promoting new desires, fantasies, and ambitions that are capitalized on. Networked 181 communication happening through mobile devices encourage an evolving consolidation of tastes, preferences, and cultural trends susceptible to corporate mining or selling of user- generated content. This does not mean that the majority of Zimbabweans are participating in the same form of high-consumerism dependent on the immaterial labor experienced in certain regions where late capitalist societies are functioning. While there is a small minority of Zimbabweans who can afford to participate in these lifestyles, in
Zimbabwe, most are still restricted by extreme economic insecurity. However, as
Terranova (2004) points out, cultural expression on digital networks, including historically resonant affective drives towards community, are part of an ongoing
“economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect” (Terranova, 2004:15). In other words, the evolution of desires and ambitions, longing and memory, and participating in building these phenomena in digital spaces create potential markets in the expanding youth culture of Southern Africa.
Additionally, the skills honed through immaterial labor promote the type of work prioritized in the 21st century, where advanced technological and digital knowledge is highly valued. Digital connectivity plays a role in preparing for, or inducing participation in the global economy as some of the skills obtained through this type of labor include the entrepreneurial skills of establishing large networks as well as communicating across social boundaries. Likewise, the work of connecting through mobile phones happens through collective networks that are constantly evolving requiring users to be attentive to innovations in the new forms of communication that express developing needs, desires, and tastes (Lazzarato, 1996). Including the work of keeping up innovations promoted on 182 these sites, the dissemination of these devices and their uses and practices, help to develop what Terranova (2004) has called ‘virtual labor,' or communities that in the future can be more easily subsumed into the expanding infrastructure of digital work.
In the cases of the artists of the Zimbabwean Biennale exhibit and the artists, organizers, and audiences of the Book Café, their performances and products are certainly in conversation with larger trends in monetizing affect and culture. The work of updating and posting on websites, as well as digital event promotion is necessary for the organization's capacity to survive. Also, the organization must retain a vigilant attentiveness to the desires and tastes of local Zimbabwean audiences, which express and consolidate these tastes and desires in part through the scrolling and sharing of cultural content on these sites and their phones. In other words, Brickhill’s ambition was to build sustainable forms of remuneration for a population starved for revenue generating labor.
Much of Brickhill’s language in describing the vision he had for the space reflects emerging trends in the changing conditions of labor and markets and the need to integrate new technologies in efforts to produce income. These technologies, according to
Brickhill, helped the organization evolve into a “hybrid of an overall development structure, and a revenue generating enterprise, which was also an arts center” (Africalia,
2012). During interviews, he outlined efforts to create an environment that promoted the collision of ideas in the hopes of engendering innovation and creative collaboration, notions that have become market axioms under the rise of cognitive labor, flexible markets and in attempts at the economic capture of culture, knowledge and affect across the globe (Ceraso and Pruchnic, 2011). In line with these premises, he states, “[The Book 183 Café] corresponds to what I would call the value chain in the cultural sector. It starts in the area of concept and creative production: where do ideas come from? Where is the synergy, […]? This is what, today, we might call the arts factory" (Africalia, 2012). In other words, The Book Café, as it was guided by European Donor initiatives, echoed the premises of the subjective turn of capital as it attempts to monetize affective ties to particular forms of cultural expression. Zimbabwean artists working collaboratively performed this work while promoting participation through the digital networks of these artists and their audiences.
In addition, the Zimbabwean artists supported at the Venice Biennale exhibited artwork that, while culturally significant and historically specific, were participating in larger conversations about aesthetic preferences, modes, and conceptual trends. As a global event who had over half a million visitors in 2015 and whose goal has always been to establish new markets for contemporary art, the creative works presented at the
Biennale were embedded in a massive infrastructure of critics, cultural brokers, curators, patrons, art gallery owners, dealers, and agents.
Despite evidence of monetization in both cases, the uses of digital networks and mobile phones in the Book Café, and the narratives of how these devices affect
Zimbabwean communities depicted at the Biennale, likewise signal practices of resistance. Importantly, these practices are not entirely new. Instead, the artistic performances examined in these case studies show how these strategies of mobility have been part of strategies for survival in Zimbabwean for over a century. Resonances between this history and current manifestations of digital networks are expressed, 184 particularly in the work of the Biennale in Chazunguza’s resurrected figure of Nehanda, and in Nyandoro’s representation of mobile markets. It is likewise present in the functioning of the Book Café, who, despite the threat of violence stages pop-up events that allow the performance of Zimbabwean culture primarily organized through the digital networks of mobile phones. Both organizations promote digital unhu, demonstrating the fusion of cultural practices with these technologies, promoting collaborative practices, or unhu, and strategic mobility. Access to the internet through mobile phones accelerates network connectivity, where these characteristics of communal participation intensify mobility and cultural integration, as these communities seek to flourish under dire political and economic conditions.
Conclusion
According to a report by the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of
Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), the country’s mobile penetration increased at the end of 2015, reaching the level of 95.4 percent. These mobile technologies determine the majority of
Zimbabwean internet access and contributes to 97.46 percent of all connections registered nationally (Gambanga, 2016). These numbers do not account for shared lines, and communal uses of cell phones, which would put the rate at an even higher number. It is with these percentages in mind that Donner (2011) remarked upon the cellphone boom in the global south. Likewise, it is against this backdrop of rapid integration of mobile communication technologies in Zimbabwe that I examine uses of digital media in the organization and performances attributed to the Book Café. In addition, this radical shift
185 in digital and mobile connectivity is expressed in the creative artifacts of the
Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
In this chapter, I examine the art exhibit “Pixelated Ubuntu/Unhu” and the performance space of The Book Café to illustrate practices of ‘digital unhu’ through interviews, visual texts, and qualitative analysis based on observation and participation in artistic organizations.
This phenomenon draws from scholarship that explores the rise of immaterial labor and the changing parameters of social production as digital networks, economics, consumption and cultural expression converge. Specifically, immaterial labor helps to account for the cognitive efforts and affective drives that sustain these digital networks, such as the desire to connect, extend one’s social network, and to build identity within community. Drawing from this framework, I propose the concept ‘digital unhu,’ and use two case studies to elucidate its three defining components including, the fusion of digital technologies with culture practices, an emphasis on collaboration and community, and the strategies of mobility.
This chapter hopes to be in conversation with scholarship that describes heterogeneous uses of mobile phones in communities outside of the west through close examination of two case studies that evidence the ways that local history and culture influence the forms, practices, and content of immaterial production in digital networks.
However, digital unhu evidences a kind of ambivalence as digital platforms channel these practices, while seeking to find forms of capital extraction. Scholars such as Coté and
Pybus (2007) point to the ways that digital networks promote the monetization of 186 consolidated desires, tastes, and opinions. However, these networks likewise allow for the forms of opposition or the characteristics and tendencies that resist enclosure. In alliance with their work, I locate strategies of resistance in digital practices and expression in Zimbabwean creative products, particularly in the strategies of mobility.
While the examples I provide in this article illuminate some of the ways
Zimbabwean artists and communities are creatively navigating their circumstances through cultural memory, community alliance, and strategies of mobility, I acknowledge the very dire conditions that Zimbabweans find themselves in on a daily basis, particularly those who continue to express any form of descent in their creative expression. The masses of people forced to leave Zimbabwe because of starvation, lack of work, or political repression highlight mobility as a very literal strategy of survival. In addition, mobility organizes the flow of remittances across borders from those working in
Europe, the US, or in Southern African countries. It likewise emerges in the creativity born of survival, such as the mobile market places of Harare, as communities manage to carve out a living despite the phenomenally high rate of unemployment. Likewise, it emerges in the flow of images, music and artistic renderings, particularly in the stubborn endurance of unhu as it emerges in communities of digitally networked artists who continue to perform despite the threat of physical harm or jail. Notwithstanding these circumstances, this article sought to examine these socio-political and economic limitations through a framework that acknowledges the varied uses of mobile networks in the hopes of sketching out ways communities of Zimbabwe are skillfully surviving under dire conditions. In this way, this chapter contributes to scholarship that investigates the 187 distinct inflections of immaterial labor in Africa and aspires to encourage further inquiry in a highly understudied region whose young and digitally mobilized populations continue to grow.
***
The subsumption of relational aesthetics into the hegemonic structuring of global capitalism, as Paolo Virno (2003) suggests, intimates the neutralization of collective innovation's political potential. What is perhaps more interesting about the reproduction of ‘open source aesthetics' is its ubiquity as it appears in all aspects of life, from raising money to pay for film projects, to diagnosing illnesses, to building houses. While open- source practices become normalized, artistic work continues to strive towards expressing a ‘sensibility as a form of the possible,' while likewise enabling a self-conscious contemplation of the past, which allows for reflection on conditions in the present. A particular emergent tendency in African art reveals a self-reflexive recalibration of history to understand contemporary global conditions. The Zimbabwean pavilion in the
2015 Venice Biennale promoted a self-awareness of how the conditions of slavery, colonialism, export extraction and the uneven excesses of market capitalism have contributed to the contemporary moment of global interconnectivity. In particular, through the use of digital and open source aesthetics, Zimbabwean artists, as well as artists from the African diaspora underscored the salience of a Zimbabwean-inflected unhu as it manifests within national and global market constraints at the 2015 Venice
Biennale.
188 According to Enwezor (2015), under contemporary global conditions, the concept of ‘unfolding’ and a garden in disarray best represents the “disorder in global geopolitics, environment and economics” (Enwezor, 2015). With this untidiness in mind, Enwezor orchestrated an event that reflected these conditions, where a “ramshackle assemblage of pavilions is the ultimate site of a disordered world, of national conflicts, as well as territorial and geopolitical disfigurations” (Enwezor 2015, Statement). In contrast to the requests for order enforced during the modern era, “All the World’s Futures” seeks to express global conditions better described as a complex network of financial, cultural and political interdependence. But, likewise several of the pavilions showed the untidiness of survival in labor practices that are often menial, unregulated, and even criminalized. In this way, the Biennale was expressing the areas of capital organization that are unregulated by the state or official markets, and are often overlain and even organized by the voluntary labor performed through digital technologies. While creating potential markets, these technologies likewise help populations to adjust to, move within, and survive their conditions.
In the next chapter, I offer some final statements about the rise of digital connectivity in
Zimbabwe. In addition to reestablishing some of the central arguments for this project, I make some suggestions for further research.
189 Chapter Eight: Conclusion
In this project, I seek to answer the broader research question: How do creative organizations in Zimbabwe construct what I call digital unhu? I follow this more extensive inquiry with the intermediary questions: 1) How do these organizations create the role of digital technologies in their work? 2) How do these organizations construct the role of unhu in their work? 3) How is digital unhu in Zimbabwean digital art used strategically in the midst of economic and political hardship? One of the interventions of this project is to give an intensive case study of the digital, broadly defined, as it is used and produced locally in Zimbabwe. Another important intervention is to investigate the rapid changes in labor that are happening across the globe, as this has been understood more succinctly in the framework of immaterial labor, and as this manifests in the material and local conditions of Zimbabwe. I perform this intervention through the proposed concept ‘digital unhu,’ which seeks to revise immaterial labor, and address critiques of the term’s vagueness and eurocentrism by providing needed specificity from the global South. In addition, Terranova (2001) describes immaterial labor as more evident in heavily developed parts of the globe, where post-industrial conditions have been in the works for several decades. In contrast, this project examining the contours and constraints of immaterial labor as it manifests in an agriculturally based country, relegated to the margins of the global economy.
Chapter one introduces the subject, provides significance and justification for the study, after which chapter two provides a literature review and the research questions.
Chapter three outlines the methodologies implemented, including research approaches 190 and questions and strategies of interpretation. Chapter four seeks to provide historical grounding to this project by narrating the historical evolution of media adoption in the nation, specifically giving attention to the rapid integration of mobile technologies within populations contending with extremely precarious social, political and economic conditions. The fifth chapter gives specific attention to the organization ICAPA Trust and its website icapatrust.org. The sixth chapter looks at a particular event/project of the organization and compares this to the voluntary work of the organization's former web designer Tafadzwa Mano. The seventh chapter compares a local organization in Harare, its practices, and products, to the larger, global event of the 2015 Venice Biennale, and the Zimbabwean pavilion "Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu."
In this final chapter, I explain how I've conceptualized the digital across the case studies I examine, followed by an explanation of how I conceptualize unhu across the cases explored. In the following section, I give an overview of the creative integration of digital media with unhu to produce the concept ‘digital unhu.' I suggest the relevance of the concept to larger conversations being had about digital media integration, and outline characteristics attributable to local specificities evidenced in the case studies' findings. In addition, I point to the work of scholars who have questioned assumptions and generalizations made about the impact of digital media in the global south, and who suggest locally grounded and in-depth understanding of particular regions needs to coincide with analysis of digital technologies in the global south. In the following section, I suggest that the framework of ‘immaterial labor' is a useful tool for culture as well as economic incorporation, by allowing scholars to theorize the practices and 191 experimentation that happens with new technologies as these are integrated into communities. The theory of immaterial labor helps to comprehend the ways that new technologies consolidate markets and extract capital by leveraging mass communication trends, though likewise point to the capacity to enable creative or critical expression by virtue of digitally produced cultural products that do not respond directly to markets. The next section outlines the significance of this research on a larger scale, citing the growing populist movements across the western world, largely understood as developing from the dramatic changes in labor, specifically the outsourcing, automation, and precariousness of labor in the rapid integration of digital technologies at all strata of the economy. The final section outlines the potential for future research, giving specific attention to an increase in African presence in global art exhibitions which I suggest should be examined for the ways that curators and artists based in the global south articulate and envision alternatives to contemporary global, social and economic organization.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE DIGITAL
The digital is a complicated concept, and in this project I imagine the digital broadly, giving specific points of focus through case studies. Chapter three takes the broader research questions and directs them to the organization ICAPA Trust, its website, and the cultural artifacts located on the site. In addition to the attention I give to the internet site of ICAPA Trust, I compile a history of the organization, gathered from participatory and observational research while interning at the organization in the Summer of 2013. I provide this background to contextualize the organization’s website and as a way to
192 evidence ICAPA’s incorporation of new technologies in its creative productivity. An important theme in this chapter, particularly in considering the larger body of work produced by ICAPA founder Tsitsi Dangarembga, are the ways that donor institutions originating in the west and intent on pushing particular development agendas have influenced cultural production in places like Zimbabwe. Ultimately, I show in this chapter that the incorporation of digital technologies has enabled greater freedom of expression, though are required to work within the parameters of funding and censorship.
In this chapter, I conclude that individual narratives found on the ICAPA website, such as the short videos March for Isabelle (2014) and #BringBackOurGirls (2014), have characteristics and narrative devices that parallel Dangarembga’s film Kare Kare Zvako
(2005). These narratives exceed the parameters of development policy such as the vocabulary of rights based initiatives, and its complicated connection to colonialism.
Likewise, these narratives evidence allegorical resistance to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.
In chapter four, I conceive of the digital from the perspective of the open source operating system Ubuntu Linux in the organization ICAPA. The digital is explored at the level of the event and experimental documentary Zim.doc funded and organized through
Spain-based Talatala Filmmakers and in collusion with Women Filmmakers of
Zimbabwe (WFOZ). Both of these projects were web-based, and relied heavily on access to open source holdings, specifically through the OS Ubuntu Linux. Because of this connection, I ask, how is the role of the digital constructed in the use of Ubuntu Linux in both Zim.doc and Wild Forrest Ranch? I conclude at the end of the chapter that the aesthetics described by Ceraso and Pruchnic (2011) as ‘open source aesthetics,’ which 193 sought to stage the performance of ‘micro-topias,’ did not resonate with ICAPA’s overarching goals and tendencies. Instead, I point to the project done by the organization’s former web designer Tafadzwa Mano, with its ambition to share best practices in farming and cattle ranching. I draw connections between the narrative of this site, with its goal to provide information freely, and Zimbabwe’s long history and contemporary centralizing of land and agriculture.
Chapter five conceptualizes the digital within the remarkable rise in internet connectivity acquired in Zimbabwean populations through the incorporation of mobile phones on a massive scale. Similar to the last chapter, Chapter 5 exposes the emergence of particular aesthetics as they are routed and guided through communication technologies, specifically through mobile devices. In contrast to the previous chapters, the digital is analyzed within two different venues, the Book Café and the 2015 Venice
Biennale, giving a very localized account of digital unhu and comparing this to an expression of digital unhu as it manifests in a global arts venue. Across all three chapters, the characteristics of collaborative work, the recalibration of cultural practices to newer technologies, and an emphasis on agility, or mobility, are evident.
Throughout this project, I conceptualize the digital through the integration of websites in a specific organization, the use of websites and open source holdings in a particular project of the organization, and through access to social networking platforms via mobile cellular phones. Arguably, these are different mediums, and because of the convenience snowball sampling of ICAPA Trust, its members, and artists affiliated with this organization, the findings are limited to this small group of artists and associated 194 communities. However, I discern patterns across these different case studies, such as the recalibration of cultural practices as they articulate to the internet, open source, and mobile phones. Additionally, an emphasis on acquiring skills and the implementation of strategies of mobility accelerate through these technologies in ways that are useful for populations operating under the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. Ultimately, I recognize an alternative orientation towards these technologies that, due to radically different historical contexts and economic, social conditions, differs from the creative products produced by the centers of global capitalism, as described by scholars such as Ceraso and
Pruchnich (2011). Additionally, I use these case studies to push back against the prevailing notion that Zimbabweans do not have access to digital media or are suffering from a digital divide, and hope to complicate the ‘accepted truth’ that access to these devices translates to the uniform and predictable improvement economic conditions.
CONCEPTUALIZING UNHU
Throughout chapters three, four and five, unhu is another organizing principle. Being a philosophy that originates in the southern region of Africa, I use the concept ground the case studies historically. Across all three chapters, unhu is understood through the complex and detailed historical accounts of Zimbabwean strategies for community building, and resistance to regimes of corruption from British colonization, to Ian Smith's
Rhodesia, to Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF. Specifically, as I locate unhu within the alternative social organization of communities heavily influenced by a Marxist critique of colonial imposition, I suggest that unhu, as a flexible concept, helps to understand the
195 ways that Zimbabweans have had to organize to resist their conditions. With this historically grounded framework, organizations, venues, and projects construct unhu in a way that contends with contemporary constraints of economic collapse as well as extra- national funding that favors particular development agendas.
In the third chapter, I locate unhu specifically in the work of ICAPA founder
Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose creative products overtly centralize unhu thematically. Unhu is an explicit organizing premise in her novel Nervous Conditions (1988), and in a less explicit way in her experimental film Kare Kare Zvako (2005), a film that is centralized on the website icapatrust.org. In chapter four, I identify unhu in the way that web- designer Tafadzwa Mano constructs his website Wild Forrest Ranch. This website shows connections between the centralization of land on his site, his reliance on open source holdings and the parallels that can be drawn between this type of digital commons as it links back to the commons associated with ‘returning land to the landless peasant.’
In chapter five, the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale explicitly refers to unhu in the exhibition's title "Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu." I locate the aesthetics of this expression of unhu in the reproduced image of Nehanda, the famous spiritual medium, and anti-colonial figure, deeply connected to land and fertility rituals, as well as Marxist- liberation soldiers who allied with her during the war for independence. Additionally, I locate unhu in the mobility of these resistance figures as this is connected to the mobility of the members of the Book Café, as these participants continue to produce cultural artifacts and performance despite the strong arm of the ZANU-PF state.
196 ‘DIGITAL UNHU’
Digital Unhu is a concept that merges a philosophy with pre-colonial, African-socialist, and nationalist roots with the influx of digital media. In this way, digital unhu provides what Christian Fuchs (2017) recognizes as an alternative tradition in the history of digital technologies. This alternative tradition contrasts to the growing sense of digital technologies as inherent drivers of market expansion and extraction. In the collective characteristics of crowdsourcing, free software and what some scholars call the digital commons, communistic-characteristics line up with unhu’s premises of identity in community, and collective action.
Additionally, as outlined in chapter two, I consider how digital unhu is a
Zimbabwean-grounded and inflected understanding of immaterial labor. I make this argument by pointing to the ways that digital technologies, and cultural production have converged in Zimbabwean communities, exhibiting the changes in labor that immaterial labor seeks to map out, though with different effects and results as they converge in the localized history and material conditions of Zimbabwe. As knowledge work is increasingly gaining precedence in the structuring of global economies, and if knowledge work as this is channeled through creative, cultural modes of expression is perceived of as collaborative, responding to the tastes and desires of audiences, then the artists I consider in this project are performing immaterial labor by drawing from the reservoir of
Zimbabwean cultural trends and norms.
Because I understand the digital to be malleable I examine its merging with cultural narratives from different angles in the intensive case study put forth across the 197 examples I provide. Despite these specificities that crystalize in the interaction of rapidly integrating technologies within localized history and practices, I discern patterns and characteristics that enable recognition of digital unhu as Zimbabwean creative products and practices produce it. In other words, digital unhu, takes a very historically grounded look at the integration of digital technologies in the Southern African region, to understand the uses and production of web sites, open source and mobile digital access within groups of artists in Zimbabwe. Across these various manifestations of digital unhu, patterns arise within the strategic uses of history, the promotion of collaborative work, and the uses of technologies in efforts to maneuver around contemporary economic collapse and the political constraints of ZANU-PF.
Economic and Cultural Convergence in Immaterial Labor
As mentioned above, although there is considerable focus on the creative cultural output of artists in Zimbabwe, it is a point of this project to engage with economic forces as an important determining factor in analysis. However, as already asserted, economic conditions must be examined in the context of cultural specificities. In this way, this dissertation seeks to heed the call of Burrell and Oreglia (2015), who advocate for a framework that takes into account locally and culturally specific uses of mobile phones as well as the economic elements of market improvement or incorporation. I do not wish to advocate for a return to political economy as the sole and ultimate lens through which to view cultural production in Zimbabwe. Instead, Digital Unhu is useful for analyzing
Zimbabwean networked communication, as it draws from scholarship that calls for
198 historically specific and locally nuanced research on the uses of digital devices, shaped by economic forces at the local and global level.
As already mentioned in chapter seven, much research on mobile phone impacts on communities concludes that mobile phones alleviate poverty. One of the more commonly cited findings outlines the improvement of market performance in South
Indian Fisheries as a result of access to information retrieved through mobile phones as a basis for justifying particular policies (Jenson, 2007). Countering the ways that the conclusions from these findings are selectively chosen to justify the policies of large- scale development-based agencies such as the World Bank, Burrell and Oreglia (2015) critique the overgeneralization of Robert Jenson's (2007) findings. These scholars suggest that these selectively chosen results are used as the basis for particular policies justify the building of market information systems that adhere to the principles of larger market strategies that link new technologies to the successful functioning of liberal capitalism.
I do not deny that access to mobile phones has improved market transactions in
Zimbabwe. However, in alliance with Burrell and Oreglia (2015), I object to the ways that these findings have developed into ‘accepted truths,' and instead make a claim that the heterogeneous ways these devices enfold into already existing networks should be further scrutinized. Ultimately, again, in alliance with Burrell and Oreglia (2015), this project hopes to point to the ways that reaching too easily for the ‘accepted truths’ about the integration of digital technologies in the global south promotes simplified strategies for alleviating poverty. This lets the global community avoid considering the possibility
199 of redistribution to address the extreme disparities of wealth that continue to rise, disproportionately affecting black populations in the Southern African region.
Critical Studies of Digital Media in Zimbabwe
To counter unexamined and ‘accepted truths’ Burrell and Oreglia’s (2015) research falls under Donner’s (2008) third identifiable trajectory of mobile phone research, which emphasizes the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. Their work is aligned with authors who map out the interplay between technologies and localized culture. Digital unhu, as a locally based concept, seeks to map out this interplay by grounding localized historical trajectories in Zimbabwe. Critical analysis of these axioms is aided by the integration of immaterial labor as a guiding principle in this research, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the how the integration of these devices promotes both market-based strategies as well as localized conceptualizations of alternatives to liberal democracy as it currently manifests.
Immaterial labor, as a flexible, if, confounding principle, allows market capitalism to exist alongside the alternative principles of the gift economy. This promotes a more comprehensive understanding of the crisis-laden conditions we now find ourselves in on a global scale, what elsewhere is described as an information-based, post-industrial knowledge society. Many will claim that nothing has changed with the radical influx of digital technologies, with the integration of the web 2.0. Poverty in Zimbabwe remains rampant, though many now have access to alternative forms of knowledge, information, and culture, this has not changed the underlying dynamics of populations surviving under
200 a dictatorship in a fundamentally unequal global economy. However, there are others, and I align myself with them, who believe that it is useful to consider the localized uses of these technologies to reveal small but significant alterations in these grounded communities. The results of this study are partial, exploring these phenomena from the perspective of a small selection of educated and artists, who, compared to the vast majority of Zimbabweans, are well off. However, these findings provide insight into the relationship between the old and the new, and how this is manifesting differently in countries functioning under economic collapse and political violence.
Within the material elements of the examples I provide, developing phenomena are reflective of a dynamic process that nevertheless retains elements of continuity. In chapters five and six, in particular, I have shown how the ongoing legacies of colonialism, contemporary conditions of neoliberal structural adjustments, and the affiliated ideological constraints of rights-based frameworks imposed on Zimbabwe by donor and lending agencies show continuities of Western imperialism. However, these continuing legacies should not overshadow the dynamic process I’ve sought to sketch out under the provision of specific case studies.
While continuities of inequality are reproduced, existential challenges, such as the devastation of the global financial crisis of 2008 suggests that changes might be happening at a more fundamental level. In this dynamic time of proliferating crises, the larger significance of this study asks how to theorize new and old media critically. How is it that we should apply critical research to the examination of digital media? Often, as is the case with any new technology, uncritical analysis extolls the spread of technologies 201 and their non-hierarchic capacities. In contrast, digital media interacts seamlessly with capitalist interests, evidenced in the merging of social and digital media in business school curriculum. Although these business interests are not inherent in information and communication technologies themselves, the language of the new, and of tech entrepreneurialism is associated heavily with the tenants of neoliberal market expansion
(Fuchs, 2017). Scholarship, such as the work done by Tiziana Terranova (2001), approaches the nuanced play between market incorporation and experimentation with networked culture. However, as Aouragh and Chakravartty (2016) discuss in their work on new media and the global south, there is a notable silence on the role the centers of global capital play in the way these technologies are analyzed.
Engagement with critical digital studies, and specifically, with the organizing framework of immaterial labor, helps to denaturalize this coupling of market interests, the new, and new technologies by pointing to an alternative tradition in the study and practice of digital technologies. Additionally, the critical bent found in the framework of immaterial labor benefits from postcolonial scholarly traditions. This alliance provides a more comprehensive understanding of the circulation of free-software through the operating system Ubuntu Linux, the non-commercial nexus of publishing information, or expressions of the digital commons. I explore this alliance In chapter six, where Ubuntu
Linux, digital labor, and the digital commons converges with the present longing for the landed Commons in Zimbabwe, a longing that continues to persist.
202 Significance for the field of Media Scholarship
Communication is now increasingly being understood as socially processed information, which makes use of technologies that distribute content quickly among those with access.
Communication is more than a particular text, but embodies social and cultural processes of production and interpretation in political and economic contexts. Historically, cultural studies have contributed to communication scholarship through focusing on the analytical categories of meaning, representation, difference, identity, and resistance. Media studies have often been focused on the problem of hegemonic consensus and the ways in which struggles of negotiation, incorporation or resistance are waged through media production and content. The political dimensions of culture have been understood as rich sites within which opposition is waged against dominant meaning, sometimes through the tactics of identity formation though likewise in the form of increased, alternative representation.
With the integration of the digital components of the production, distribution, consumption, and participation of all aspects of culture, this project moves from exclusive attention to meaning, representation, and identity as the primary forms of politically engaged cultural participants.
Digital communication constitutes not only a space for reproduction of culture, but also the production of social relations in factories, homes, offices, and spaces in between. In this way, digital communication becomes a “common informational milieu open to the transformative potential of the political” (Terranova, 2000). It is the point of this project to illustrate some of the ways in which this integration of digital technologies exceeds the boundaries of cultural production to influence the social organization and 203 expression of artists and audiences living under the violent or neglectful state institutions of Zimbabwe.
As mentioned in the second chapter of this dissertation, in an interview with Sut
Jhally, Stuart Hall (2012) remarked on the absence of a rigorous critical economic analysis of culture, which, he perceived to be a weakness in cultural studies. As already established, I am not suggesting a return to foregrounding political, economic analysis.
Cultural artifacts or events matter to scholarly inquiry; they are part of, and express, changes in sensibility during a time saturated by collective communication, crowdsourcing, and algorithmic interaction. In other words, artistic production processes are by necessity influenced by the dominant structure of commodity production, and, simultaneously, comment on, critique and imagine alternatives to these dominant structures.
In the 2017 US election, we have seen the rise of American populist nationalism, racist and misogynist rhetoric entrenched at the highest levels of political office, anti- unionism, anti-immigrant policies, increased surveillance, the targeting and scapegoating of Muslims. Under neoliberal economic capitalism we have seen the hollowing out of whole communities that had previously been dependent on manufacturing industries while simultaneously, an authoritarian populist ideology calls for the lowering of taxes and the defunding of welfare institutions. Without making too much of a false equivalence, when I had initially begun my research in Zimbabwe, I hadn’t anticipated the parallels I would be able to draw between the aging president, Robert Mugabe and populist leadership in Western nations like the US. The 'strong man' or woman who 204 advocates for the rights of the destitute while carving out distinctions between those who belong and those who should be exorcised from authentic nationalist inclusion has been happening on a global scale. These populist surges are now happening across the globe, not just in the global south where authoritarianism was described as endemic. Brexit, the
US, and France are recent incarnations of disturbing populism rising in response to global economic shocks, the outsourcing of labor, wage stagnation, the financialization of the economy, and the precariousness of labor. The investment in computer technology plays a singular role in these conditions, as this promotes the rationalization, automation, crowdsourcing and outsourcing of labor, as well as the high-risk financial investments largely responsible for the instability of increasingly interrelated markets.
Massive investment in digital technologies and the precariousness of labor has led to the financialization of debt, and massive inequalities on a global scale. Under these political and economic conditions, researching communities in the more devastated regions of the globe, their strategies and tactics as this relates to digital technologies, and the alternative legacies associated with African socialism/communism, provide another avenue within which to consider the interconnected conditions we now find ourselves in.
Although we are just beginning to grasp how the confluence of economic structural changes and the destabilization of industries are affecting the centers of capital, labor has been scarce for some time in Zimbabwe. The unofficial motto of the country is to ‘make a plan' referencing the innumerable side-gigs, deals and other unregulated forms of exchange that keep the vast majority of the population alive. Additionally, labor has always been a contested and complicated issue in the postcolonial nation, where 205 historically, coercion was the norm, and labor integration intentionally sought to exploit black populations. In this way, digital technologies, their capacities to integrate the largely, youthful population of Southern Africans into digitally networked economies, and their potential to organize forms of resistance or survival, have histories and characteristics that manifest differently in ways that media studies would benefit from understanding.
FUTURE PROJECTS
Given the work done in this project, I have questions I would like to explore in future research building on critical digital studies in the global south. One project I continue to work on stems from my initial research into the 2015 Venice Biennale for chapter seven.
Titled “All Our World’s Futures,” and organized by Nigerian-based head curator Okwui
Enwezor this large-scale exhibition was identified as the most diverse Biennale to date.
The overlap and the inclusion of multiple nations and art forms did not bode well with all attendees of the exhibition. A refrain that emanated from art critics and their reviews was a leitmotif of overwhelm summed up by Adrian Searle who claimed that there were “too many voices in Enwezor’s choir – nearly 140 artists in total – the sheer quantity simply drowns out the artist with the more modest contributions." He continues, "You cannot curate an entire world or all its possible futures. That would be God's job, but Enwezor has hubris enough to try (…) All the World's Futures tells a different story, of a world too complex to submit to any single critique or system, even Marx's. I have seen the future, and I'm not going” (Searle, 2015).
206 In response, Enwezor claimed, “it is always fashionable for historically autistic
Western curators to mock that kind of broad-based curatorial teams, which they would call political correctness” ("Snapshot," http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mutualart/capital- and-contradiction n.d. Retrieved 6/28/16). The criticism of ‘too chaotic' draws attention to the genealogical roots of the exhibition traced back to world fairs that celebrated innovative technologies and design during the rise of the industrial era. Biennale exhibitions now house pavilions with porous borders of national categorization and are infiltrated by the technologies of the post-industrial era, one characterized by a multiplicity of voices and an ongoing sense of transition. These permeable borders disrupt the unity and order meticulously guarded during the modern era, whose decedents find expression in anxieties around the exhibition's perceived chaos. As Enwezor describes it, this "ramshackle assemblage of pavilions is the ultimate site of a disordered world, of national conflicts, as well as territorial and geopolitical disfigurations"
(Enwezor 2015, Statement). As this ‘disorder' was excoriated by critics of the exhibition, in contrast, Enwezor and the artists of the Zimbabwean Pavilion ‘Pixelated Ubuntu/Unhu' seek to elevate this chaos.
At the 2015 Venice Biennale, Tanzanian/British-born artist Christopher Ofili exhibited his work in the British Pavilion. Several of his paintings included the phrase:
#BlackLivesMatter, a Twitter hashtag that has grown to prominence in contemporary US digital connectivity and consciousness-raising. The words #BlackLivesMatter brings to the forefront of work produced by a British / Tanzanian artist, the resonance of social upheavals in the US due to the recent stream of video footage of black men being 207 murdered at the hands of police captured on iPhones and distributed through the digital networks from which we rarely log off of . Charles Esche, writer, curator, and organizer of several Biennales sees these horizontal modes of organization affiliated with collectives and, particularly with global and anti-racist networks and indicators of a new pragmatic politics seeking to mutate or critique institutions from the inside, rather than through wholesale upheaval. In the space of galleries, Esche points to how these modes of interaction evidence global trajectories of contemporary art, which invites artists and collectives "[to] activate a critical interface between local citizens and global processes"
(Papastergiadis, 2011). Or, to borrow Enwezor’s phrase, to activate the Biennale as a
‘space of encounter' for creative communities to develop alliances in the face of these processes.
My interest in visual art emanating from the African region culminates in this exhibition, where new technologies suffused the multiple pavilions in attendance. A historical grounding of these types of exhibitions with an exploration of contemporary events would build from this project looking at these events and their products through the frameworks of critical digital studies, and immaterial labor. This type of inquiry following these events will allow for insights on the ways that global artistic events reflect the challenges and changes of global connectivity, creative products, and economic forces. But especially, this would enable an exploration of the ways in which populations are communicating through these technologies in ways that resonate across national boundaries, that are critical of contemporary conditions, and that envision new forms of organization. 208 Endnotes
ii “We don’t need to ask whether history 1 is applicable to the Zimbabwean context or whether this history elides certain elements of History 2 because in the present conjuncture History 1 and 2 are entwined to the extent that they are no longer able to be perceived separately.” Dzamara is an activist and outspoken critic of Robert Mugabe. On 9 March 2015, he was forced into an unmarked vehicle and has not been heard from since. iii Morphologically, the word ubuntu consists of the prefix ubu- (indicating a general state of being) and the stem -ntu, meaning person, or the nodal point at which being assumes concrete form, such that ubu- and -ntu are mutually founding in the sense that they are two aspects of being, an indivisible wholeness (Ramose 2001, 1). iv Rising critique of the utopian strains associated with new media was leveled at what Richard Barbrook (1996) called the ‘California Ideology', or the neoliberal impulse to open-source everything. This analysis points to the rise of an entrepreneurial class in the tech industry that propagates the elements of individualism, libertarianism and neoliberal economics, specifically through publications such as Wired Magazine (Galloway, 2011). v Immaterial labor became a familiar concept through Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005, 2009). The first form of immaterial labor refers to cerebral or conceptual work like problem-solving, symbolic, and analytical tasks. These types of jobs are often found in the technological sector of the culture industry and include public relations, media production, and web design. What is important that production shifts from the material realm of the factory to the symbolic production of ideas. The second component includes the production of affects. Affective labor refers to those forms which manipulate “a feeling of ease, well, being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108). Historically, this labor has been unpaid and is often thought of as ‘women's work.' This type of work typically includes services or care of and through the body and emotions. The third characteristic of immaterial labor marks the ways that communication technology is incorporated into industrial production transforming (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293), labor into something that is mechanized and computerized. vi Ramose and Eze explore a more maneuverable definition of unhu associated with the concept of rheomode, derived from the Greek verb ‘rheo,’ meaning to flow. vii This shift to a sense of probability is based on a shift in dominant scientific modes from modernist physics to thermo-dynamics and statistics. This shift has led to a focus on the production of codes and probability based on the observation of patterns, where scientific operation is based as much on observation as it is on probability or the possibility of the virtual. viii See, Kalyan Sanyal, 2014; Couze Venn, 2006; Stefano Harney, 2010; Miguel Mellino, 2006. ix Terrence Ranger calls this phenomenon ‘patriotic journalism,’ a variation on his influential writing on what he calls ‘patriotic history.’ x In 1934, Merle Davis, the founder of the Bantu Education Kinema Experiment, revealed his assumptions that development based films helped uneducated and illiterate Africans adjust to Western capitalist society.It was with the establishment of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) that imperial ideology and cinema became intricately linked. Under the CFU, film was purportedly used to teach Africans to abandon practices conceived of as "primitive," and to familiarize them with Western forms of hygiene, agriculture, and
209 literacy. Other than the didactic films of the CFU, which later became the Central African Film Union (CAFU), CFU also exposed native Zimbabweans to B-grade cowboy films through the mobile film units that traveled across the nation's territory to villages removed from urban centers. xi Rhodesian Television was an entirely commercial undertaking, and its principal shareholders were the Argus group and Davenport and Meyer who were focused only on economically viable projects. The Argus group was a newspaper conglomerate owned and operated by white South Africans, evidencing the control of RTV by foreigners, but specifically, foreigners set to promote white settler colonialism and business interests in Southern Africa. Despite how different the political system in South Africa has become, a thread of continuity through the history of Zimbabwean television shows the influence South African media had on Zimbabwean television then and now. xii Webster Kotiwani Shamu is a Zimbabwean politician, who was previously Minister of State for Policy Implementation. He has had a history of promoting extralegal means to win elections and to support ZANU PF representatives. xiii During fieldwork, I observed that a large segment of media consumption came from the prolific Nollywood industry and the South African media industry. These two industries dominate the media content being sold in bootleg markets. However, another trend was the marketing of action films and martial arts films. These trends in foreign media consumption are out of the scope of this dissertation, though further research on the subject is warranted. xiv A proprietary cross-platform, encrypted, instant messaging app for smartphones. WhatsApp uses the internet to send text messages, documents, images, video, user location and audio messages through standard cellular mobile phone numbers. As of February 2016, WhatsApp had a base of one billion users, making it the most popular application for sending messages (Statt, 2016). xv On May 21st, 2016, Bulawayo held its first “Twitter Party,” thrown to bring the Twitter community to a live event. Despite efforts to increase Twitter use, it is still in its beginning stages of adoption. Popular hashtags such as #263Chat and #Twimbos consolidate a multiplicity of Twitter users and ongoing online conversations. xvi Although it is still unclear who was behind the blog, he is believed to be a part of the Vapanduki crew, translated as the "rebels" or "directors" team, a group of disgruntled ZANU-PF politicians, chiefs, and other civil servants. xvii Another popular protest started in 2014, launched by activist and journalist Itai Dzamara who orchestrated an Occupy protest at the center of the country's capital in Harare, in Unity Square, just around the corner from parliament, constitutional court, and Mugabe's office. He disappeared soon after he began his demonstrations. It is alleged that he has been abducted and killed by security agents of the state. His disappearance though frightening to others has not stopped public expression of discontent. His brother Patson continues to campaign for raised awareness about his abduction and small-scale protests were held throughout 2015, though many ended in violence at the hands of police. xix Tafadzwa Mano’s website WFR, as of March, 2017 has been taken down. Despite attempts to contact Mano for clarification, reasons for this removal are still unknown. xx Zimbabwe’s economic dependency on the export of crops didn’t preclude a rapid rise in urban populations as factory-based industries increased under Rhodesian rule when economic sanctions required domestic production and import-substitution. Rapid
210 increases in immigration from European countries, particularly after WWII, pushed more and more African populations onto smaller communal lands accelerating the shift of agrarian populations to urban development. xxi In contrast, Virno suggests that factory to desertion was “a transitory phase,” and, in fact, an extended metaphor for the mobility of cognitive capitalist workers “(European laborers worked in East Coast factories for a decade or two before moving on).” Unlike Hardt and Negri, for Virno, migration cannot be reduced to a beautiful myth, just as it never was an expression of 'the multitude' as conceived of by Hardt and Negri, for the mass of individuals that make up the vast migrations of Zimbabweans in search of both survival and better opportunities. xxii Several broad judicial decisions such as the Dole-Bayh Act of 1980 (the University– Small Business Patents Procedures Act), the Patent and Trade- mark Amendment Act of 1980, and the Economic Tax Recovery Act of 1981 marked these legislative changes. It also includes many judicial decisions stemming from the 1976 amendments to the Copyright Act (Raymond, 2001). xxiii Stallman is also known for his development of the concept copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to establish the right to modify, use and distribute free software. Most notably, Stallman began the GNU project (GNU's Not Unix) in 1984, primarily on his own to establish a nonproprietary computer operating system. His goal was to build programs that would be accessible to users, who would then examine the code and modify it as they saw fit. Stallman then organized the FSF, which advocated against the encroachment of intellectual property laws on software development. The FSF's innovation was the GNU General Public License (GPL), designed to prevent appropriation of public domain code by requiring that any use of GPL –licensed code utilized in a new program be accessible, modifiable, and replicable. xxiv Despite this standard historical narrative, as Ceraso and Pruchnic (2011) claim, this history doesn’t reflect the ongoing types of negotiation and incorporation of open source with global markets. Additional narratives have sprung up, including Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which narrates a more nuanced history of incorporation, open source conventions and conferences were organized in the efforts to define, and integrate open source into the growing and booming dot-com industry. Regardless of this more complicated history, the development of the licensing principles of free and open source software made clear that communities of programmers would voluntarily improve and fix code effectively without an affiliation with a firm, and often without monetary compensation. xxv Furthering this suggestion that open source parallels contemporary market functioning, James Surowiecki (2005) suggests that open source programing can promote an efficient model for market-based decentralization, while Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (2006), suggest that open source software programming and its practices can be successfully commissioned in almost any market context. In this way, neoliberal market strategies have embraced open source practices as ones that can improve the flexibility and reach of markets. xxvi During his address at the African Information Ethics Conference, Capurro refers to post-Fordism's increasing reliance on technological knowledge, suggesting that Southern Africans must learn new sets of skills, focused primarily on communication technologies. He posits that "the traditional "3Rs" (reading, writing, and arithmetic) [must be raised] to a higher standard that is referred to as "LNCI" or Literacy – reading and writing,
211
Numeracy – working with numbers, Communicacy – communicating effectively, Innovativeness/Initiative."(Capurro, 2007). xxvii Burrell and Oreglia (2015) critique the overgeneralization of Robert Jenson’s (2007) findings on the improvement of market performance in South Indian Fisheries as a result of access to information retrieved through mobile phones as a basis for justifying particular policies. xxviii See David Lan (1985). xxix David Lan's book Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (1985) describes a more detailed account of this careful balance. xxx Mujiba translates to messenger in English xxxi In the first decade of independence, Robert Mugabe used violence to intimidate a rival political faction sanctioning the mass-murder of the Ndebele minority population in an event now known as the Gukurahundi, which happened between January 1983 – December 1987. See Chung (2006) for more details on these developments. xxxii Everyday practices of survival depend on the establishment of networks and economic structures that operate outside state sanction, and which are required to be mobile in the face of political violence. xxxiii ZAPU was a militant Zimbabwean organization that fought for national liberation from its founding in 1961 until liberation fighters won independence in 1980. In contrast to ZANU, ZAPU aligned with the Soviet Union, whose ideology was to mobilize the urban workers. ZANU's strategy of mobilizing the rural peasantry was more in line with ideologies of the People's Republic of China. It merged with ZANU in 1987. xxxiv Soukous is a style of African popular music characterized by syncopated rhythms and intricate contrasting guitar melodies, originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. xxxv Additional scholarship on the effects of these remunerations would be beneficial but is out of the scope of this project.
212
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