Through over 80% of the 20th century, the southern tip of the African continent existed under the direct political and economic apartheid[i] rule of violent minorities of white settlers, including Zimbabwe, which was then named after Cecil Rhodes, an English native who framed a portrait of a mass hanging of Africans in his office (Horne, 50). Famed United States General SLA Marshall (of the vaunted Marshall Plan) compared Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence with that of his country’s 1776 document, defending the apartheid regime by reminding listeners that “The Declaration of Independence did not free one Negro slave nor save the life of… one local Indian… The United States started as a white autocracy” (Horne, 16). Marshall was defending US support of an outright racist nation in front of a Congress that was beginning to restore civil rights to Black people in America, but his line of reasoning continues to dominate Western press reporting on Zimbabwe well into the 21st century.
After decades of struggle in the region, Zimbabwe won independence in 1980 with Robert Mugabe who led the country for 37 years as alternating president or prime minister (“Zimbabwe”). One of the more controversial and effective ways Zimbabwe sought to wrest control from the settlers was by land reform, where Indigenous Africans would take back land that, on paper, belonged to the white minority. Since Mugabe fast-tracked the people’s reforms, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States have laid brutal sanctions on Zimbabwe, leading to crushing poverty and inflation. Zimbabwe’s land reforms and the reaction of the West highlight how Western countries racially demonize and attack African countries that resist White rule. They also demonstrate how Western mainstream press racially justifies and minimalizes Western brutality while downplaying the positive aspects of African nations.
I admit my ignorance of the southern African state here. Shortly after Mugabe was deposed, Western media remembered him as a brutal dictator. But since they gave the same coverage to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, I had suspicions that only grew after seeing images of Zimbabwe that seemed to contradict the distributed narrative. When, half a decade later, the Biden administration renewed sanctions on it for not disowning Moscow (and thus risk losing a good trade partner) after the NATO/Ukraine/Russia War started, I figured it was time to do a media cross-analysis on the media coverage of Zimbabwe and the economic blockade against it. In keeping with the Herman & Chomsky and Parenti models of media analysis, I will be focusing on experts, funding, context, and diction as means of understanding how the media manipulates and invents reality in order to — as Chomsky puts it — manufacture consent.
The mainstream press reports for this study, ranging from the BBC, Washington Post, and the Council on Foreign Relations, minimize the effect of the decades of heavy sanctions, claiming the economic restrictions do not target common citizens but only eighty-five individuals and their companies. In downplaying the breath of the sanctions to those individuals and their businesses, these reporters knowingly omit the importance of those businesses to the economic well-being of Zimbabwe as a country and its people. They also distance the land reforms as a cause of the sanctions, instead arguing that ‘corruption’ and lack of ‘freedom’ resulted in the sanctions and the poor economic conditions. The MSM reports rarely outline how these are connected, let alone what Zimbabwe does differently than, for instance, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, or Israel, very repressive states that nevertheless are not African-ruled, so do not receive the dubious title of “corrupt.”
The alternative press reports studied — from the Black Agenda Report and Liberation News — put the land reform and the sanctions in context to show the connections and the effects of both. Akuruma Ngonda notes that in the year of national liberation, 1980, a mere 4,100 white invaders owned 70% of the best land while tens of millions of Indigenous Africans lacked access to property. Ngonda demonstrates a direct correlation between land reforms and economic stability as access to land “includes access to markets, credit, training and access to social, developmental and economic amenities… [enhancing] agricultural productivity.”
Harold Green contrasts Mugabe’s successful but compulsory land reform with South Africa’s unsuccessful, voluntary one. He outlines how South Africa’s did not functionally recover from apartheid as of course the white settlers did not seek to part with their ill-gotten gains. The weakness of the land reform partially explains the massive poverty among Indigenous Africans there. Nefta Freeman draws the correlation from the successes of the land reform leading to the punishing sanctions — beginning with Britain — even as the nation still struggled with the lingering effects of colonialism and apartheid.
Non-native (white) think-tankers wrote two of the three mainstream pieces, and it is highly doubtful that the editors for the third piece are native Zimbabweans or working for African uplift. Think Tanks are corporate-and-government funded institutions directed to generate policy and justifications for often some of the most atrocious practices to benefit the funders, with the Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil, and Finance being the primary payers and beneficiaries. Consider the ultra-conservative Koch Brothers seeding the Federalist Society, American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and Americans for Prosperity, all of which have racist policies at their center, have pushed the Republicans to the very far right, and have helped to spur political policies harmful to the majority of American Workers.
John Temin hails from Freedom House; Alexander Noyes works for the Rand Corporation; Mark Bellamy writes for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); and Michelle Gavin is part of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Rand receives substantial funding from the US government (“How We Are Funded”). According to Influence Watch, “Freedom House is primarily funded by the United States government but also receives funding from private grantmaking foundations including the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation” (“Freedom House”). The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) discloses that their biggest funders include the American and Japanese governments, big banks, oil companies, and weapons manufacturers such as Northrop Gunman, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics (“Our Donors”). While the US government does not primarily finance the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), it is endowed by large corporations and their foundations — like Ford and Rockefeller — with the aim of a more international and bipartisan approach to US policy that favors their monied interests. CFR’s Board is a revolving door between the political and financial/industrial world; executives and presidents include US Secretaries of Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security, assistants to presidents, and other high-profile government aids as well as CEOs of American Express, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Google, Bank of America, Citi, and ExxonMobil (“Council on Foreign Relations”).
In contrast, Working Class activists, whether Zimbabweans such as Freeman or US-based Pan Africans like Ngonda and Green, wrote the alternative media pieces. No government or multinational agency pays for their writing, nor are the outlets they write for heavily commercialized or funded.
Gavin, Temin, Noyes, Bellamy, and the BBC: Reality Check Team (“Zimbabwe Sanctions”) employ several buzzwords frequently associated with African nations, specifically terms such as “brutal,” “dictator,” “corrupt,” and perhaps most tellingly “mismanaged.” All three headlines exude patronizing tones, such as the Post title, “Sorry, But the West Isn’t Responsible for Zimbabwe’s Continuing Economic Collapse” or Gavin’s CFR title referencing a “smokescreen.” Such verbiage implies the African nation is relying on simple tricks for simple minds. Gavin specifically talks a lot about ‘grave human rights abuses’ and a ‘descent into dictatorship and despair.’ However, she refuses to use that language to describe sanctions that functionally starve citizens and deny them access to medicines and medical care in addition to being internationally illegal. The tone that alternative writers take is more assertive, showing agency for the nation and its people with revolutionary terms associated with both. While still maintaining some criticism for Zimbabwe’s government, most negativity was geared toward the European and American powers.
It is painfully obvious that most liberal Americans will claim that the mass media is the most reputable source of information when these same sources routinely not only omit but lie about their subjects as long as their liberation and well-being are aligned against USAmerican capitalist interests. These same mainstream journalists will employ anti-Black mythologies to do so, such as they regularly do with regard to Haiti and Zimbabwe.
Works Cited
“Council on Foreign Relations.” Influence Watch, https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/council-on-foreign-relations/. Retrieved on 11 Oct. 2022.
Freeman, Netfa. “Clearing the Smoke and Mirrors Around Zimbabwe.” Black Agenda Report, https://blackagendareport.com/clearing-smoke-and-mirrors-around-zimbabwe
Gavin, Michelle. “Zimbabwe’s Sanctions Smokescreen.” Council on Foreign Relations, 22 Sept 2022, https://www.cfr.org/blog/zimbabwes-sanctions-smokescreen.
Green, Harold. “South Africa and Zimbabwe: A Tale of Two Land Reforms.” Black Agenda Report, 18 Dec. 2013, https://blackagendareport.com/content/south-africa-and-zimbabwe-tale-two-land-reforms.
Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon, 2002.
Horne, Gerald. White Supremacy Confronted. International Publishers, 2019.
“How We Are Funded.” Rand Corporation, https://www.rand.org/about/how-we-are-funded.html. Retrieved on 11 Oct. 2022.
“Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity.” Amnesty International, 1 Feb 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/.
Ngonda, Akufuna. “U.S. Ambassador Threatens More Sanctions against Zimbabwe.” Liberation News, 11 Apr. 2009, https://www.liberationnews.org/09-04-11-us-ambassador-threatens-more-s-html/
“Our Donors.” CSIS: Center for Strategic & International Studies, https://www.csis.org/programs/support/our-donors. Retrieved on 11 Oct. 2022.
Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media. St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Temin, John, Alexander Noyes, and Mark Bellamy. “Sorry, But the West Isn’t Responsible for Zimbabwe’s Continuing Economic Collapse.” Washington Post, 24 Oct. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/24/sorry-west-isnt-responsible-zimbabwes-continuing-economic-collapse/.
Zimbabwe. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe. Retrieved 11 Oct. 2022.
“Zimbabwe Sanctions: Who Is Being Targeted?” BBC News: The Reality Check Team, 25 Oct 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-50169598.
[i] Amnesty International, in reference to Israeli crimes against Palestinians, defines apartheid as a crime against humanity: “A system of apartheid is an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination by one racial group over another. It is a serious human rights violation which is prohibited in public international law… [Apartheid is enforced] through laws, policies and practices which ensure their prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment.
In international criminal law, specific unlawful acts which are committed within a system of oppression and domination, with the intention of maintaining it, constitute the crime against humanity of apartheid. These acts are set out in the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute, and include unlawful killing, torture, forcible transfer, and the denial of basic rights and freedoms.”
One can only wonder when the treatment of Indigenous and African-descended peoples by the United States will earn the government with that designation.
