By Percy Zvomuya
Africa is a country | August 12th, 2013
In 2008 or so, I registered for a Masters degree at Wits University
with a rather interesting research component that I never got to finish.
My thesis was to be an examination of the coverage of Zimbabwe in South
Africa’s Sunday Times; the use of the prism of Zimbabwe to debate local issues. The idea was to look at opinion and comment pieces on the Times’
pages and show these as not really examining Zimbabwe but using the
country to the north as a touchstone to critique the local.
Words like “Zanufication” and “Zimbabwe”; phrases like “go the way of
Zimbabwe” and even stock ones such as “bread basket to basket case” are
handy tools in this exercise. They are, in fact, not meant to shoot
down whatever is wrong about Zimbabwe but, instead, to bend the barrel
of the gun and target it at the self, right at South Africa.
When I conducted some of this research, Thabo Mbeki was president and
his battle with Jacob Zuma couldn’t have been more toxic. Among other
issues Mbeki, it was argued, was too soft on Zimbabwe; he was stifling
debate in the liberation movement; he was going to commit the cardinal
Mugabe sin- seeking a third term as ANC president. (If Mugabe finishes
his term, he would have been in power for 38 years.)
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