By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
ON July 8 2023, independent pan-Africanist intellectual Chacha Gicheni told me of the persistence or resurgence of collective African habits of the dariro in the treatment of film and television in East Africa.
The first African petty middle class to acquire television sets did so as a way of showing off their new status.
They treated television programmes and Hollywood films as new media phenomena to watch and follow seriously, despite attempts by political groups such as the Non-Aligned Movement to reject the media consumption status of the global South through such efforts as the 1978 UNESCO Declaration which culminated in the call for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO).
The North Atlantic States’ acceptance of a supposed US-led unipolar system in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union led to the donor-led sanctioning and neo-liberalisation of UNESCO as well as the apparent defeat of NWICO which, in Africa, was followed by organised journalists’ acceptance of a donor-sponsored and donor-inspired Windhoek Declaration in 1991.
In Zimbabwe, these changes created a paradoxical situation.
The African liberation media, which defeated Rhodesian war propaganda, had gone as far as making Nehanda a household name despite the Christian churches’ view of that spirit medium as the demon of a witch to be exorcised from society.
The result is that Nehanda’s monument, as a liberation icon, occupies its place at the National Heroes Acre and has even been installed at the intersection of what used to be Kingsway and Jameson Avenue in Rhodesia.
That spot is also adjacent to the old Rhodesian headquarters of Anglo-American Corporation.
Yet, despite all these changes in the popular perception and iconography of Mbuya Nehanda, there are no films of Nehanda yet — 43 years after independence.
This paradox demonstrates the yawning gap between the existing media industry in Zimbabwe and the legacy of the African liberation media that defeated Rhodesian propaganda.
Such a gap needs to be addressed seriously by all media institutions in Zimbabwe.
African liberation media and pungwe as dariro
The resurgence of neo-liberalism in the media, represented by the apparent defeat of NWICO and the launch of the 1991 Windhoek Declaration , marked a temporary setback for African liberation media and pungwe philosophy.
One big blunder the sponsors of the Windhoek Declaration (1991) made was their failure to recognise that the space they used to pronounce this neo-liberal view of African media had just been opened up for them by revolutionary African liberation movements assisted by Cuban forces at Cuito Cuanavale, in Angola, in 1987.
Indeed, the same journalists still refuse to notice the paradox that despite the promulgation of the Windhoek Declaration in 1991 and its endorsement and adoption by the UN in 1993, the neo-colonial media in Rwanda were used to fuel the 1994 genocide in that country, only three years after Windhoek and only a year after the UN endorsement and adoption of the same declaration.
Now, in the new space opened up by movements such as BRICS and the defeat of NATO in Afghanistan, the on-going African grassroots resistance to Western media hegemony is being noticed again.
In Zimbabwe, it has gone as far as bringing Nehanda face-to-face with the former headquarters of the successor to the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and as far as erecting and hosting the Museum of African Liberation in Harare.
In Tanzania, and to some extent in Kenya, the resistance to the hegemony of Hollywood, CNN and BBC is taking a pungwe-like shape.
The film text and the television broadcast are no longer for watching in isolation as such and definitely no longer the focus for creative attention.
Rather cinema and TV texts are localised to become contributory features in a communal process of communication in which the ultimate media text is a melding of what has been shown with participatory and context-based responses from those who have looked at them (in relation to many other texts) and those who have not even ‘watched’ them.
This is similar to how African liberation media were created via the pungwe process during the Second Chimurenga in Zimbabwe. In the pungwe process, a Rhodesia Broadcasting Service story, a BBC World News story, an SABC story, a page from The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, a quote from Kwame Nkrumah and a Ndau or Karanga song just recently composed would all be brought together to produce a local conscientisation text quite resonant and potent in the circumstances facing the community at the time. This was the liberation media strategist’s take on inclusivity.
The discussion group (dariro or cell) served as a human firewall which guaranteed deliberate participation instead of the intended passivity of linear communication as consumption
which would result if there had been no contextual melding of the apparently disparate pieces of media.
The pungwe of the Second Chimurenga in Zimbabwe was led by a new generation of freedom fighters; but its history was ancient. Likewise, the new grassroots NWICO emerging in East Africa in the wake of BRICS is led by youths who reject the passive role of staying glued to the screen in isolation, watching Western-selected spectacles and mimicking Hollywood celebrities.
Several millennia ago, African ancestors invented the intellectual and philosophical structure, called dariro in Shona, for the purpose of generating and managing all genres of discourse ranging from the children’s performing arts festival ‘Jenaguru’ to the Chief’s Court, called ‘Dare raMambo’, or the mid-wife’s shrine called ‘Dumba ra Mbuya Nyamukuta’.
The contributory texts produced by self-organising participants in each of these dariro-based arenas were as different, one from another, as oranges from bananas or mangoes. But they were all subject to the discursive rules of dariro. In performed texts, the structure is referred to as kushaura nekutsinhira (call and response). In disputation it is called kuparura nekupindura.
In the Chief’s Court, the Chief might call the dare’s attention to the outline of the case and then allow the Plaintiff, the Defence and witnesses for both sides to take turns before inviting community assessors to propose and arrive at a judgment which would do justice to the accuser and accused while guaranteeing the interests and peace of the entire community.
The final judgment (text) was not the Chief’s judgement, although he or she might be asked to help deliver and enforce it. Today’s jury system is a pale remnant from that dariro system.
This relational process of generating a living text from various contributions is indeed one of the features of what is called African living law. In the wake of digitisation and the Internet, there is need for African living media outside the straight-jacket of Western-derived neo-liberal models still trying to follow the Windhoek Declaration.
Today’s media struggles
The aesthetics and politics of the text have been intensified because of the impact of digital communications technologies. On one hand, media and information imperialism, aided by neo-liberal capital, have reduced the objective of communication to the mere delivery of service, in the form of a text, via a marked and controlled point of sale.
Through this linear process, the movie theatre or TV set has to be reduced to another neutralised site or point of sale.
Large Language Models of AI now also ensure that creative ownership of the delivered text is anonymous.
It is the corporate giant behind the delivery who now claims ownership.
The screen, as the final point of delivery, has been diced or decentralised at the receiver’s end, so that a PC computer, an iPhone, a tablet or a giant-screen theatre may all receive the same feed separately and simultaneously.
The effect is to subject isolated watchers or receivers to similar or the same content simultaneously while minimising chances of an organised community response.
The dariro approach presents the exact opposite approach or process: reduce the singular text to just one of the background texts availed to the cell or group, while maximising the power of a participatory context to juxtapose and meld into a new form; ‘the community’s deliberate deconstruction of the various texts competing for local impact’.
The real hazards of watching, consuming texts in isolation
In the wake of the aggressive marketing of the products of ChatGPT, BARD and other large language models (LLMs), the risks which the new dariro-based response to television and film is seeking to minimise are real.
For instance, according to Stephen Pastis’ report in Fortune magazine, July 3 2023, author Janelle Shane is warning education institutions, trainers and publishers not to use AI-based systems to vet anything really important.
Janelle says LLMs tend to clear and vouch for texts by other LLMs as authentic while rejecting as fake and illegitimate those created by humans. This tendency can prove to be disastrous when used to vet students’ applications or theses or examination scripts. LLMs can perpetrate injustice if used to vet profiles of suspects caught near scenes of crime.
Not only are the media carrying and issuing millions of fake texts but now their gadgets are certifying one another’s fake texts as the truly authentic ones while rejecting those created by real humans and human teams.
Likewise, Yuval Noah Harari was reported by Hannah Devlin as telling the UN’s AI for Good Summit in Geneva that: “AI firms should face prison over their creation of fake humans.” According to The Guardian newspaper of July 6 2023, Harari said:
“Now it’s possible, for the first time in history, to create fake people — billions of fake people…If this is allowed to happen, it will do to society what fake money threatened to do to the financial system. If you can’t know who is a real human (as opposed to a mere chatbot), trust will collapse..”
Indeed the point of sale-based isolation being marketed by AI firms as guaranteeing the perfect service, privacy and autonomy will ensure that most consumers of media won’t be able to tell the difference between chasing an aggressive cyber troll and carrying on a fruitful debate with a real person.
In that situation, the youths in East Africa are way ahead of the game, when they apply the dariro concept of inclusivity by treating each text as just one of a myriad of texts to be subjected to a dariro process in the quest for a revolutionary, community-based synthesis. That was the pungwe approach in Zimbabwe’s Second Chimurenga. And it helped defeat Rhodesian propaganda which was heavily supported by Western imperialist and white South African media
