WINDHOEK – Foreign media possess the power to serve as a lethal weapon for assaulting weaker nations and their people, hence the need for African media to crawl out of their cocoons and defend the continent’s values and perspectives.
This is according to Zimbabwe’s Deputy Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, Supa Mandiwanzira, who was in Namibia this week as part of 10th anniversary celebrations of The Southern Times.
Foreign media have upped their tempo in propagating viewpoints and values contrary to Africa’s, charged the minister, and there is a need for African media to defend the continent and its cause through Pan-Africanist reporting.
“The world of communication has always been a world of power and dominance, a cacophony in which the trophy goes to the loudest, longest yell,” Mandiwanzira said.
“Ask us, Zimbabweans, who have been hurt before.”
Zimbabwe has been a target of the sharp pens of the international media following government’s land redistribution program that left many white farmers without land.
The country continues to feel the pinch of sanctions imposed on it by the West, designed to punish the country for its radical land policy.
“The media is a lethal weapon for assaulting a people, for maligning a nation, quite often might’s way of subduing right,” the information deputy minister said.
“Much worse, the media are a precursor to physical aggression. After all, it is an old-age view that you give the dog a bad name in order to hang it.”
Mandiwanzira said no one can claim to know African values and perspectives better than Africans themselves who shaped their identity through bloody and arduous liberation struggles.
“We are the one who know and should know. That means we are the ones who should narrativise those values, that perspective.”
The Southern Times was launched to carry African stories from an African perspective, informed by African values as evolved over time, Mandiwanzira said.
“Our liberation struggles have inserted into our societies a freedom reflex which is so inconvenient to imperialism. Imperialism would want that reflex expunged.”
Speaking at the same gala dinner in Windhoek, Namibia’s Minister of Information and Communication Technology, Joel Kaapanda, hailed Namibia’s excellent relations with Zimbabwe which led to the establishment of The Southern Times.
The weekly newspaper, launched in 2004, is co-funded by the Namibian and Zimbabwean governments, through a company they co-own named NamZim.
Kaapanda said The Southern Times has fulfilled its mandate for the past ten years. “The newspaper has filled the gap, which the dominant international media have always tended to ignore – that is to celebrate successes in African countries from an African dimension without the usual prejudices that tend to characterise the reportage by the Western media.”