The glass fortress: Zimbabwe's cyber-guerrilla warfare.

• Author: Mavhunga, Clapperton
• Position: Report

Contrary to the gun battles we are accustomed to, we now have cyber-warfares fought from one's comfort zone, be it bedroom, office, swimming pool, etc., but with deadly effects.

--Dr. Olivier Muchena, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, Secretary for Science and Technology (1)

The Maxim gun and the Martini-Henry rifle ushered anglophone Africa into 20th century colonialism. The Cold War, in turn, presented a moment for black political elites to acquire weapons (the AK-47 in particular) with which to define and present themselves as African nationalists fighting--with all the material ramifications of this word--to end colonial rule. Could information technology--specifically radio, the Internet and cell phones--be the Martini-Henry, Maxim and AK-47 of the 21st century?

Zimbabwe offers an example of the way ordinary citizens in Africa are using these information technologies to express and demand genuine individual freedoms. Words and information are a kinetic process. To control words is to control mobility; when mobility is frozen, so too is information. This essay examines the technologies that enable and transform the mobility of words into weapons of resistance--by the state against its own citizens and by citizens against the state.

Using the lens of mobility of words (specifically those that contest state versions of truth and falsehood), this essay traverses the last ten years of newspaper, radio, computer, Internet, telephone and cellular technology in Zimbabwe. These technologies have enabled people to fortify their right to freedom of expression, to both minimize and maximize the value of their movements in search of better politics and to assemble resources and personnel to challenge the state. The state has responded with control mechanisms like surveillance, interception, physical violence and propaganda. Twenty-first century information technology has enabled individual citizens to become cyber-guerrillas, using their smart phones, laptops, and desktops to perforate the fortress of a ruler still caught up in the 20th century from their own homes, vehicles, rural villages, in the country or in the Zimbabwean diaspora.

Zimbabwean users have designed a new use for technologies of communication: to address the question of liberation and the tension between national freedom and personal freedom. The Internet, e-mail and radio waves have become instruments to challenge the late 20th century metanarrative of the so-called father figure who built the nation--that big man of courage who liberated his people--that anchors the dominant state-centric idea of Africa. (2) This status entitles him to rule the people permanently and rapaciously, whether they want him to or not--hence Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's proprietary (as opposed to patriotic) declaration that "Zimbabwe is mine.'" (3) It gives the fullest meaning to his rebuff to then British Prime Minister Tony Blair: "Keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe." (4)

According to Giorgio Agamben, the "fighting" and "loss of blood," the stuff that "liberating" is made of, was supposed to be a process of profanation--sacrificing or spilling blood to cleanse the country of the demon of white privilege so that the ordinary black person could decide on his of her government. Guns were supposed to clear the path to allow the pen of ballot to govern. Instead, the opposite happened in many African countries, including Zimbabwe. Many leaders of liberation struggles, once in power, used the sacrifice of spilled blood to elevate themselves to the status of gods. (5) The media--television, radio and newspapers--was used as a personal, party and state instrument for this transformation. In many states, a strict censorship system was installed to barricade any counternarrative--to filter what was heard, silence what might be said, and if necessary, shut the ears of those who might hear.

Interestingly, the pervasive power of the Internet and its use as an instrument of profanation--as an instrument to challenge the metanarrative of leaders who sacrifice their citizens and exploit the history of liberation for self-deification-mimics the dual capacity of the AK-47 to both install and challenge power. Yet there is one problem for these self-anointed gods: They cannot suppress the reality that the "liberated" people they dominate are not free.

While some Pan-Africanist scholars were busy using Mugabe to write a race-based narrative of liberation, the Zimbabwean people were writing their own narratives of liberation through their experience of the hardness of life. From the standpoint of these two "social imaginaries," Mugabe, Zimbabwe and liberation did not look, let alone feel, the same. (6) Yet the state and its defenders insist on one version of truth.

TRUTH AS FALSEHOOD AND FALSEHOOD AS TRUTH

Mugabe adopted heavy-handed Cold War tactics to confront the new challenges of the 21st century mobility of words. He lived in a rhetorical world where African countries could only be pro-West or pro-Soviet. The irony is that his lifestyle and lifetime mimicked that of the West--his eloquence in the English language, his designer suits, his wife's love for shopping, the Mercedes-Benz luxury cars and the colonial-era festivities for the opening of Parliament. Mugabe detested only one thing about the West: calls for democratic governance. Otherwise the West was his quiver, carrying a deadly rhetorical arrow--the much fabled but ultimately false claim that it was the British who postponed the resolution of the land question.

For Mugabe, the so-called truth (in Shona, chokwadi) was not merely "If I am right, you are lying," but something that must not be false or someone will die. Supposed falsehood (manyepo) was something that was ontologically true, but which must be false or else. To kill the mobility of falsehoods or dangerous information, the state sealed off the countryside using roadblocks and militia bases. To open what was sealed was called "terrorism." Reporting, or criticism, became aggressive combat. (7) The witnessing and feeling of violence by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) transformed the fight of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), into a battle for liberation.

The state broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), and the state newspaper stable Zimbabwe Newspapers (Zimpapers), specifically the Herald and Sunday Mail, were trusted with ensuring that only approved information was filtered to the public. Photographs became instruments for distortion and amplification of the state's supposed truth. The state photographer and editor skillfully juggled the zoom lens, producing close-up pictures to capture the odd white person or so in a sea of black faces. Through this process, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai's big rallies appeared as no more than a meeting of a handful of aggrieved, racist white farmers and confused black puppets--possibly the white farmer's workers who feared losing their jobs if they did not follow their boss. (8) On other occasions, Tsvangirai simply looked as if he was talking to himself. By contrast, ZBC cameras shot ZANU-PF and Mugabe's rallies from a distance so that the small crowd filled the lens, creating the impression of a multitude spread over a large area.

The state also sought to control the production and mobility of information. So-called independent newspapers with ZANU-PF sympathies mushroomed, publishing "thinly-disguised political puff-pieces." (9) Something similar happened in South Africa during the apartheid era; in Russia this is common as well. The state even wanted to control "regional truth" about Zimbabwe and defeat what it considered the reactionary falsehoods of South African weeklies like the Sunday Times and Mail & Guardian. (10)

MOBILITY: A DEMOCRATIC OPTION

Many Africans do not think that Mugabe's longevity in power lies in his own strength or calculations. These critics see the absence of physical confrontation as evidence that Mugabe is not resisted. They believe that either Zimbabweans are docile, or they are cowards expecting the world to come and liberate them while they do nothing. (11)

My interest lies in the subtle resistance of exercising democracy within an undemocratic space. Specifically, I examine the option of voting with one's feet when the ballot has failed. This process involves using mobility to recuse one's body and mind from an environment of political abuse and relocate it to a place that respects one's right to exist. This is a case where some would choose to relocate and keep up with the 21st century rather than follow Mugabe on his determined retreat into the Stone Age. (12)

Emigration has been a crippling brain drain on Zimbabwe. Unwilling to critique itself as the culpable brain-drainer, the state accused the Anglophone West-principally the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand--of...