Journal of African Media Studies - Current Issue

The premise of this article is that popular music was a critical space for enforcing hegemonic dominance of ZANU-PF during the first decade of its rule, as perhaps in other eras. When it assumed power in 1980, ZANU-PF did not hide its intention to establish single-party rule, which was then popular across Africa. Top among competing priorities for the new regime was removing all centres of political opposition or resistance. But PF-ZAPU, ZANU-PF’s erstwhile liberation war rival, threatened this vision in south-western Zimbabwe, where it enjoyed significant support. We analyse music that promoted ZANU-PF hegemony in the context of the Gukurahundi ‘genocide’ in the early 1980s, a campaign that was part of the desire for complete dominance of Zimbabwe. The music contained a celebratory discourse spreading fear and emotional violence, thus censoring and suffocating competing narratives about the new state.

This article aims to empirically analyse and theoretically reflect on how the appropriation of new information and communication technologies in everyday life interrelates with continuous renegotiations of contemporary social and family relations in Kenya. Various changes in the locally specific communication ecologies in Kenya occur simultaneously with similar important societal changes related to migration, wage labour, marketization and increased access to education. Consequently, people’s basic living conditions in everyday life have changed in terms of connectivity, knowledge, power, time and space, with traditional family relations being challenged, re-bargained and re-established in a complex synthesis between continuity and change. Taking theoretical reflections on patriarchy, power and communication ecologies as its point of departure, the article conducts empirical analyses grounded in semi-structured ethnographic interviews and observations. The article presents an account of how the new diverse communication ecologies interrelate with continuous negotiations of family relations in a re-bargaining of patriarchy.

This study fills a gap in research by examining how the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare structural and systemic gender inequities in Nigeria. In particular, women and girls are at increased risk of gender-based violence (GBV). We analysed a corpus of 361 articles on GBV published between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020 by Daily Trust, The Guardian, Leadership, The Punch and Vanguard, to determine how effectively Nigerian media reported on GBV during the pandemic. Analysis centred on five phases of reporting during those 24 months: (1) pre-lockdown; (2) early lockdown period, 29 March–26 May; (3) response to a rise in GBV, 26 May–30 July; (4) easing of lockdown and (5) sixteen days of activism against GBV, 25 November–10 December 2020. Key themes emerging in the media coverage include the shadow pandemic of GBV in Nigeria, response to the rise in GBV, NGOs combating GBV and calls for improved legislation.

The coronavirus befell the world in late 2019 resulting in the World Health Organisation declaring a global pandemic in March 2020. As governments and health authorities around the world struggled to control the pandemic, key components of their efforts include the publicizing of their services, informing citizens of good hygiene practices, keeping the nation informed of the spread of the virus and generally keeping citizens in a positive and focused frame of mind. These efforts fall within the definition of health marketing which applies marketing principles and theories combined with health strategies to promote people’s health. These efforts also draw on both traditional and new digital channels, including online and social media, to carry across the health-marketing message to citizens. Zimbabwe is no different. The Ministry of Health and Child Care in Zimbabwe is the public authority responsible for healthcare in the country. This study reviews the three main digital channels used by the Ministry to communicate with Zimbabwean citizens, namely, their website, Facebook and Twitter. The review involves a longitudinal dissection of the communications shared across these three channels for the period from May to August 2020 and uses both content and thematic analysis to understand and critique the health communications being put out by the Ministry to its citizens. The review also takes into consideration the public comments on these communications to present a critical review of the effectiveness of these communications from a health-marketing perspective. The findings provide useful insight into the positive aspects and shortcomings of these communications and contribute to a conceptual framework for managing health-marketing communications in a time of crisis.

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic demanded ongoing media coverage unprecedented in its scope and reach. As a result, the pandemic dominated global and national news headlines for an extended period of time. Science and health journalists, and their colleagues covering other journalistic beats, were called upon to report on various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and many journalists found themselves in unchartered waters. To investigate the effects of the pandemic on journalists in South Africa, we adopted a qualitative approach and conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with twenty science, health and environmental journalists. We explored the challenges and demands that they faced, as well as how the pandemic changed science journalism in South Africa. This study highlights journalists’ capacity-building needs as identified during the pandemic and suggests ways to strengthen science journalism in the country.