One story, different renditions: The case of cartoonature on Zimbabwe’s post-2000 fast track land reform programme

Abstract

This study critically examined the framing of the Zimbabwe land issue through a cartoon each from The Herald, The Sunday Mail, The Zimbabwe Independent, The Daily News and Moto,representing government, private and church run print media voices. The Framing theory guided analyses of the selected cartoons. This paper problematises the land issue more as a site of contest; an emotive issue whose mootness depends on race, ideology, politics and economics. These frame the reception and rejection of the land discourse in Zimbabwe. Cartoonists are not the news foot soldiers, but are consumers of that news which they then comment on through their works of art: cartoons. An event occurs, a journalist deems it as newsworthy and covers it. This is then taken up by the cartoonist, who gives it his or her own artistic impression through a cartoon .The cartoonist re-creates, repackages and re-presents news in a defamiliarising fashion creating cartoonature in the process and forcing the reader to look at whatever subject is tackled anew, with awe. The recreation is done under the ambit of a particular newspaper frame or philosophy. What is interesting is that none of the newspapers openly talks about its partiality, hence our interest in how these supposedly neutral newspapers re-tell the story about land through the medium of cartoonature.The Herald and The Sunday Mail, it is shown, assume a pro-government stance in their approach to the land issue, defending it as a legitimate decolonisation issue. The Daily News and The Zimbabwe Independent, on the contrary, frame land repossession as ‘land grab’ or ‘land invasion’ while Moto, a church owned monthly newspaper, exhibits skepticism at the manner in which the land issue was tackled, characterising it as chaotic and ill-conceived. Through such techniques as hyperbole, burlesque and caricature, the chosen cartoonists fiercely defend their paymasters’ positions in the feverishly contested and partisan arena of land in Zimbabwe, in an effort to woo the readers to their interpretative camps. It would benefit the reader to sample from the news buffet offered to avoid information marasmus.