This article examines the use of blogs to mediate the experiences of citizens during a violent election in Zimbabwe. It focuses specifically on how people disseminated and shared information about their tribulations under a regime that used coercive measures in the face of its crumbling hegemonic edifice. The article frames these practices within theories of alternative media and citizen journalism and argues that digitization has occasioned new counter-hegemonic spaces and new forms of journalism that are deinstitutionalized and deprofessionalized, and whose radicalism is reflected in both form and content. I argue that this radicalism in part articulates a postmodern philosophy and style as seen in its rejection of the elaborate codes and conventions of mainstream journalism. The internet is seen as certainly enhancing the people’s right to communicate, but only to a limited extent because of access disparities on the one hand, and its appropriation by liberal social movements whose configuration is elitist, on the other. I conclude by arguing that the alternative media in Zimbabwe, as reflected by Kubatana’s bloggers, lack the capacity to envision alternative social and political orders outside the neoliberal framework. This, I contend, is partly because of the political economy of both blogging as a social practice and alternative media as subaltern spaces. Just as the bloggers are embedded to Kubatana’s virtual space to self-publish, Kubatana is likewise embedded to a neoliberal discourse that is traceable to its funding and financing systems.
The inundated area of a wetland is characterised by annual and interannual variability. This paper presents remotely-sensed imagery in order to better understand the spatial and temporal patterns of flooding within the floodplain wetland of the Nyl River, Limpopo Province. A detailed understanding of the hydrological characteristics of these flood events is essential in order to develop sustainable ecological and hydrological management plans for the area. From the results, flooding is shown to occur in 2 distinct phases. The initial phase is characterised by water ponding on the floodplain. The later phase is characterised by the input of water from tributaries to the north (e.g. Andriesspruit and Tobiasspriut) and southwest (e.g. Klein Nyl and Groot Nyl). This distinction may relate to the increasingly widespread practice of agricultural irrigation within adjacent tributary catchments. The methodology described in this study could yield valuable results when applied to other wetland systems in southern Africa.
The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South "This very interesting and potentially controversial book begs for a robust and honest discussion in media and communication studies. It argues for the decolonization of the field through what Last Moyo refers to as the decolonial turn, a turn he argues, should bring about cognitive justice in the field and relocate the project of theory building from Western universalism to decolonial multiculturalism emerging from the decolonial thinking of media scholars in both the Global North and the Global South. A very powerful and no holds barred critique."
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