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Melissa Wall Assistant Professor California State University - Northridge |
Masiye Pambili: An African township magazine across four decades. International Communication Association, San Francisco, May 1999. Beginning in 1964, African township administrators in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, began the country's first magazine for its township residents. Masiye Pambili was a part of an attempt to conceptually organize the townships, providing "models of command" for both white and later black elites to imagine Zimbabwean townships across four decades in the late 20th century. This paper explores those models of command, tracing their evolution from white rule through independence and the black majority government. This study seeks to move beyond merely repeating a cliched binary: The colonials were bad, the independent black government good. Rather, this analysis probes the relationship between the use of these categories by two different sets of elites. The research questions guiding this paper are: How did the conceptual categories articulated in Masiye Pambili attempt to create and limit the townships? Did the Africans who ran the post-independence government repeat and reinforce the same categories after independence, or did they reinterpret them or create their own new categories of control? |