See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil? The press, violence and hooliganism at the ‘Battle of Zimbabwe’

Abstract

Matches between Zimbabwean Premier Soccer League teams Dynamos FC and Highlanders FC are popular but controversial. In 2004, Robson Sharuko, senior sports editor of The Herald newspaper, dubbed this game the ‘battle of Zimbabwe’. The fixture usually explodes into ugly scenes of violence. Such incidents hardly evade the eyes of the mass media. However, growing scholarship on Zimbabwean football has under-theorized this violence. The essay deploys the framing theory and Foucauldian discourse to analyse the framing of selected episodes of violence at the ‘battle of Zimbabwe’ by two state-controlled newspapers – The Herald and the Chronicle, which fall under the Zimbabwe Newspapers (Zimpapers) stable. The study shows that contrary to the common perception that The Herald and the Chronicle provide monolithic accounts on events, they furnish heterogeneous narratives on violence at this fixture. This heterogeneity is influenced by ethnic tensions between two dominant ethnic groups in Zimbabwe – the Shona and the Ndebele.