No abstract

This chapter interrogates the appropriation of music by a marginalized minority tribe to challenge political authority in Zimbabwe. It examines how music is used to arouse the people's nationalistic feelings; exploit their grievances through memory, collective identity, and emotions; and spur them to action against their local colonialists. Using cultural memory and subaltern public sphere theories, it examines how Majaivana's music is utilized by the Ndebeles in post-colonial Zimbabwe to challenge authority and assert their minority, collective identity. Although this chapter does a critical discourse analysis of the IsiNdebele language protest music as a socio-political commentary and “weapon of the weak” for the Ndebeles in Zimbabwe, lessons drawn therefrom can be extrapolated to other countries in Africa where minority groups face the authoritarian force of the majority tribe in power.

No abstract

This article interrogates the extent to which ethnic minority media acts as tools for preserving minority cultures and identities and as counter-hegemonic to mainstream media’s representations of migrants in South Africa. It also discusses how diasporic ethnic media function as agents of participation for diasporic communities that are struggling to find a ‘home’ away from home. Mainstream media in South Africa, particularly tabloids, tend to represent the diasporic communities as petty criminals, prostitutes, robbers and accuse them of stealing the locals’ jobs. Most of these communities comprised by people of Asian descent – Pakistan, India – and the majority from African countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ethiopic, Nigeria, Somalia and Mozambique. Migrants are often labelled as ‘aliens’, and the entrepreneurship associated with these minority migrants is rarely reported by South Africa’s mainstream media. The article deploys the digital public sphere theory and the four models of alternative journalism. Using textual analysis of purposively selected stories and programmes of an online radio station, Radio Mthwakazi, this article concludes that ethnic minority media in South Africa challenges the hegemonic tendencies of mainstream media and, in the process, constructs multi-ethnic subaltern public spheres and acts as agents of participation.

No abstract