When Art Is Captured, Culture Is under Siege: Analysing Zimbabwe’s Captured Media Space through Song

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse protest popular music representing and communicating the captured media space in Zimbabwe. The article argues that the media space in Zimbabwe in the post-1990 period has been constricted, projecting a silhouette of a public service communication and information system that has long been dysfunctional. Leonard Zhakata’s song Sakunatsa decries unequal treatment before the laws that regulate the media of the country and the impartiality of the regulatory system under the ZANU-PF government. The article adopts a qualitative research approach that is rich in description to analyse how music as a form of media represents and communicates captured communication space in a country where human rights such as freedom of expression and access to information have suffered still birth. The article argues that the government used the law as an instrument of coercion to advance its hegemony and thwart media democracy in Zimbabwe. The emerging patterns after the discussion in this article point to the fact that when communication is captured, culture is under siege and the upshot is a combination of (media) activism, spiral of silence and suffocation of the masses.