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.

v

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

vi

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.

vii

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.

viii

‘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)

ix

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.

x

Table of Contents

LIST OF FIGURES XIII

Chapter One: Introduction .......................................................................................1Constructing Unhu ..........................................................................................4Contribution ....................................................................................................5

Chapter Two: Literature Review ...........................................................................14Conceptualizing Unhu ..................................................................................18

Historical Overview .............................................................................18Media frameworks, ethics and unhu ....................................................23

Conceptualizing the Digital ..........................................................................24The Digital Divide and Access ............................................................24Critical Digital Studies .........................................................................26Immaterial Labor in critical digital scholarship ...................................29Immaterial labor in the global south ....................................................33Alternative legacies in Critical Digital Studies ....................................35

Chapter Three: Methodology .................................................................................40Data Sources .................................................................................................41Research Approach and Questions ...............................................................42

Self-Reflexivity ....................................................................................42Participant and Direct Observation ......................................................44Informants ............................................................................................46Interviewing Process ............................................................................47Analysis 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 .......................................54Mobile Film Units: Precursors to Digital Unhu ...................................56From Rhodesian to Zimbabwean Media ..............................................57Post Independence Transition ..............................................................59ZANU PF media restrictions ...............................................................64Digital Access to Alternative Narratives .............................................69

xi

The Rise of Digital Connectivity .........................................................72“They use propaganda”: Reading the news while mobile ...................75Baba Jukwa ..........................................................................................80#ThisFlag .............................................................................................81Conclusion ...........................................................................................84

Chapter Five: The digital unhu in ICAPA Trust and its website ..........................88Introducing ICAPA ..............................................................................91Icapatrust.org .......................................................................................93Unhu in ICAPA ...................................................................................94Unhu on icapatrust.org .........................................................................95Unhu in the film Kare Kare Zvako (2005) ...........................................97Unhu in the International Images Film Festival ................................101Unhu in March to #BringBackOurGirls (2014) .................................104Finding the funds ...............................................................................106Unhu and Human Rights ....................................................................112Robert Mugabe and unhu ...................................................................116Larger debates: Immaterial labor, immaterial products .....................117Conclusion .........................................................................................120

Chapter Six: The Digital and Unhu: Ubuntu Linux in two Zimbabwean projects124Ongoing Discussions: The global south and new technologies .........127Zim.doc: a cross-platform documentary project ................................133Wild Forrest Ranch ............................................................................138Land, Marxism and Cultural Practices ...............................................143Digital analogies, market integration, and Ubuntu Linux ..................146Collaborative 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 .................................................................................161Pixelated ubuntu/unhu .......................................................................165The presence of the past and strategies of mobility ...........................170The Book Café’s liberation roots .......................................................174Somewhere in Harare .........................................................................176The work of digital unhu ....................................................................180

xii

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

xiii

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

1

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

2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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,’

6

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.

7

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

8

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

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

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

13

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.

14

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

15

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

16

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

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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,

18

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

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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

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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

21

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'

22

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.

23

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

24

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

25

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).

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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.

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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

28

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

29

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

30

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

31

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

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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.

33

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,

34

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.

35

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

36

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

37

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

38

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

39

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.

40

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

41

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

42

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

43

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.

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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,

45

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

46

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

47

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

48

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?

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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

50

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

51

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.

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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

53

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

54

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

55

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

56

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

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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

58

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

59

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,

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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.

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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

62

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

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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,

64

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

65

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

66

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

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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

68

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

69

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,

70

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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" (Flecketal.,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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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).

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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(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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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,

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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,

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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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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.

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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/

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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,

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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

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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

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[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

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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-

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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).

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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.

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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

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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

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(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

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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)

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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‘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

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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

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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

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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

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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),

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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” (“MasimbaHwati-TheArtist|

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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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‘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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

206

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).

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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