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Chapter 3 Censoring and Censuring the political film in Zimbabwe
‘Every film is political inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it’(Comolli and Narboni, 1976:22).
Introduction
This chapter explores the manifestations of political censorship in four films from and on Zimbabwe. Cry Freedom(1987), Flame(1996), Gukurahundi: A Moment of Madness(2007) and The Interpreters(2005) are considered representative of the different ways through which the notion of political censorship is embedded in the film narratives. The range of censorship attitudes which form possible reactions by authorities can be banning, prior restraint; subsequent punishment, manner restrictions, allow and protect. The other important form of political censorship considered in this chapter is state denial that there is political persecution of artists in Zimbabwe. The response to these forms of political censorship by those whose work is being censored can engender the tendency to endorse or not endorse censorship, which is a function of how those who are being censored are constructed in the dominant discourses. I demonstrate that Cry Freedom was a state project authorised to recall the Pan African nationalist sensibilities of the 1980s in Southern Africa; that the film is politically censored from the point of its production, and then that the contradictions that Cry Freedom is not allowed to enunciate are captured in Flame. Here, I show that political censorship of Flame was largely manifested through organized protests by some disgruntled freedom fighters who felt the film distorted their authorised version of the Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. The banality of political censorship is captured in allegations by Zenzele Ndebele that State agents attempted to silence his film, Gukurahundi: A moment of madness through threats of abduction to eliminate him. Finally, I show that the hostile reception of the film, The Interpreters(2005) and its subsequent banning from circulating in Zimbabwe reveal how the Zimbabwean state successfully mobilised its own intellectuals and critics to impose political censorship of the film through sustained negative critical evaluation.
Understanding the political in film and the film in the political
The political in the film manifests through restrictions, banning, prohibitions or control of film by state machineries of censorship. To ban film images, arrest and intimidate film-makers forms part of coercive power that a state can deploy as it exercises its political power over producers of film images. McCoy(1993) points out that sometimes political censorship of film images is arbitrary where officials just operate outside the provisions of the censorship laws to impose sanctions to films that do not project the ideology of the ruling elite class. For example, the film Flame(1996) was subjected to a priori censorship for denting official historiography about the liberation struggle when the film included a rape scene in its narrative. The political in film can also infiltrate the film director’s sensibility that may encourage a narrow political imagery that channelises audiences towards predetermined goals set by the state. This way, the political in film produces constrictive ‘realities’ so that the power of those who control film images is viewed through a prism of a single, naturalized and essentialised mode of language codification. Louis Althusser proffers the concept of ‘interpellation’ to argue that every person’s concept of self or identity is determined and produced by the dominant powers (Chincholkar-Mandelia, 2005). Althusser goes further to assert that when a person easily identifies with film’s verbal and audio-visual language[s], and gets pleasure out of it, the process of ‘interpellation’ would have taken place as the person is seduced into blind conformity by the formal and ideological powers of the image.
In its ambivalence, power has the capacity to co-opt, abuse and appropriate the language of the film image in order to rob filmmakers the chance to produce counter-cultures (Gilroy, 1993). At the same time, political power cannot be understood clearly by thinking exclusively in terms of force or coercion; power also seduces, solicits support, induces forms of pleasure and pain and wins consent even from those that are subjected to power’s restrictions or prohibitions. In Zimbabwe, state control and prohibitions imposed on sensual and seductive film images can be demonstrated through a analysis of the dangers of political messages in Cry Freedom(1987), Flame(1996), Gukurahundi: A moment of madness(2007) and The Interpreters(2005).
The dialectic of film in the political is subtly captured in the book Political Film: The dialectics of Third Cinema by Wayne (2001: 1) who contends that, ‘All films are political, but films are not all political in the same way’. The different shades of ‘politicalness’ hinted by Wayne (2001) derive from film’s ability to deploy its verbal and audio-visual narratives to challenge the political status quo. Also, the ‘politicalness’ of film images can be reflected through a film’s ‘silence’ on ubiquitous political injustices. In this formulation, a film says more from what it does not say than from what it is authorised to speak. Griffiths (1994) complicates the notion that it is always the ruling class who can prevent a film from saying what it ought to say than what it ends up saying. For Griffiths (1994), there is no guarantee that even when a film is directed by members of the subaltern it will necessarily portray the world view of the lower classes. This is possible because the subaltern filmmaker can be spoken to by the discursive space he/she occupies in the larger creative economy.
Fortunately, when a film becomes ‘silent’ about critical issues, this can force audiences to seek out the truth about the forces that make filmmakers to lose their voice. In other words, ‘silence’ becomes a form of language that points to the degree to which a film is allowed to certain things, and yet disallowed to say out things that are viewed by the state as subversive. Apart from the issue of funding that influences the way the political is narrativised, the director of Media for Development Trust (2012) suggested in a written response to my questionnaire interviews that the tense political mood in the country is the most active factor that discourages a proliferation of open political films in Zimbabwe. Individual filmmakers are not free to discuss the specific details of their experiences with political censorship for fear of victimisation.
Legislature and political censorship
As argued in chapter two, at independence in 1980, Zimbabwe inherited a plethora of legislation aimed to censor printed material, and moving images that were deemed subversive by the Rhodesian government. The content of what was considered a threat to the authorities was defined vaguely in terms such as obscene, undesirable and morally objectionable. The ambiguity of the terms objectionable means many things to many people. D.W Lardner – Burke who was the minister of Law and Order believed that the colonial “government cannot permit the prized ideal of press freedom to be used for spreading subversion when all are engaged in fighting a cruel enemy” (quoted in Drag, 1993:43). His speech would suggest a case for banning materials such as film thus demonstrating a form of open censorship. Hungwe notes that in the 1960s, the colonial government “sought to counter African nationalism with a vigorous propaganda campaign that included taking over the broadcasting services, banning newspapers sympathetic to African aspirations and introducing draconian censorship regulations. Of particular interest to the history of film was the banning of a Michael Raeburn’s film, Rhodesia Countdown(1969), which satirized white attitudes and racism against Africans”(2005:85).
These Rhodesian-style state restrictions on media were adopted by the new government of Zimbabwe to curb dissenting voices. Zimbabwe’s new leadership imposed a series of media laws for ideological control but disguised as ‘national interests’, ‘national security’ and ‘national sovereignty’ (Moyo, 2004:12).The Censorship and Entertainments Control Act of 1996, chapter 10, sections 11 and 27 describes as, ‘undesirable, offensive or harmful to the public morals’ a publication deemed to be contrary to the interests of defense, public safety, public order, the economic interests of the State or public health. Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) enacted in 2001 was introduced in the context of a political and economic crisis to silence a critical media. The aggravating effects of AIPPA are evident in the closure of the Daily News and its sister weekly, the Daily News on Sunday in September 2003. The weekly Tribune suffered a similar fate in May 2004. The Public Order and Security Act (POSA) Act No. 18 followed in 2002, and attempted to instill in the public minds a ‘narrativised ideology through a formulaic articulation and naturalization of the discourse of the nation, so as to frame nationalism as the answer to the Zimbabwean crisis’ (Moyo, 2010:117). POSA criminalises the ‘publication of false statements prejudicial to the state (Section 15), but mild criticism can easily pass for a prejudicial statement, resulting in criminal prosecution of the individuals or organisations concerned’ (Moyo ,2010: 98).
Metonymic allegory in Cry Freedom(1987)
After a successful liberation struggle (1970-1979) Zimbabwe saw itself as a centre of revolutionary thought. This narrative of nationalism is immortalized in the film, Cry Freedom(1987). The film was directed by Richard Attenborough and set in the late 1970s, during the apartheid era in South Africa. The film was primarily shot on location in Zimbabwe due to political turmoil in South Africa at the time of production. The narrative of Cry Freedom(1987) was motivated by the need to chronicle the political achievements of the black activist Steve Biko. He was the founder of Black Consciousness Movement whose major goal was to fight apartheid for the liberation of black people in South Africa. According to Hungwe (2005), Cry Freedom(2005) delves into the ideas of discrimination, political corruption and the repercussions of violence in apartheid South Africa. In the film, Steve Biko is arrested, tortured and murdered while in police custody. The production of the film induced a strong sense of solidarity among African countries that were still struggling under the colonial systems of oppression. The high-water mark of the film narration is when the film’s epilogue displays a graphic image detailing a long list of anti-apartheid activists who died under suspicious circumstances while imprisoned by the government.
Here, the producers of the film allow it to pass for an allegory understood by Jameson (1981) as a story of the misfortunes of one country that represents the suffering of people in all Third world countries. Such a preferred interpretation by the state allowed Zimbabwean authorities to consolidate their power in the 1980s by reminding people of the bonds of solidarity that should prevail not only in Zimbabwe but in Africa. By co-funding the production of the film Cry Freedom, Zimbabwe saw itself as the champion of African struggle and renaissance. However, this historically positive self appointed role and the dominant narrative that Zimbabwe authorised through Cry Freedom also contained some paradoxes and contradictions in that there were some meanings embedded in the Cry Freedom that amounted to half disclosure of the film’s ideological intentions. These undeclared intentions or silences can be interpreted in ways that bring out the dimension of embedded political censorship.
Suppression of ‘Gukurahundi’ narratives as a form of political censorship in Cry Freedom
In order to get to these absented meanings we must consider the concept of time of narration and narrated time. Time of narration relates to the time the story is told and in Cry Freedom the ‘time of narration’ is 1985 when the film was produced, when Zimbabwe was embroiled in a civil war although this war is not thematised or mentioned at all. The authorities chose to highlight the threat posed by apartheid and not the contradictions in the new Zimbabwe. This diversionary tactic within focalization is a form of political censorship.
In Cry Freedom ‘narrated time’ is the 1980s when apartheid was the main enemy of blacks in South Africa. Cry Freedom was meant to limit what audience should know about Zimbabwe’s own liberation struggle and the internecine war in Matabeleland and the Midlands. If the act of narrativizing gives “moral authority without which the notion of a specifically social reality would be unthinkable”(1996:284), as White argues, then, Universal Pictures and the Zimbabwean authorities imposed hidden political censorship on the range of possible meanings of Cry Freedom by controlling the process that turns “knowing into telling”(ibid, 276). These co-producers aimed to represent the events displayed in their film with “the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (ibid, 273). In reality the narratives deliberately left out point to an alternative version of Zimbabwe that the audiences were prevented from accessing under the guise of promoting the spirit of Pan Africanism.
Diversion, ‘silence’ and historical amnesia as forms of political censorship in Cry Freedom
The production of Cry Freedom (1987) imposed historical amnesia about Gukurahundi atrocities in Matabeleland and Midlands province in Zimbabwe. This historical amnesia is a result of failure to constantly speak through the power of the image about the history of post independence Zimbabwe. While ‘silence’ born out of officially imposed forgetfulness can be viewed as an absence of communication, silence is a communicative act in itself (Sheriff, 2000; Weingarten, 2004). As a politically motivated form of forgetfulness, ‘silence’ was used to censor a collective remembering about Gukurahundi atrocities by focalising on South African history. In other words, an officially imposed amnesia was manipulated by the Zimbabwe’s ruling elites to muzzle alternative histories and memories of what could be said or remembered through film about the narratives of Guhurahundi. The act of assisting to narrate South African history is described by Mhiripiri(2008:40) as ‘political diversion’ which is a conscious act that involves giving focus to something of less importance while being ‘silent’ about pertinent issues. Diversion, silence and officially imposed amnesia are therefore the forms of political censorship used in Cry Freedom to conceal by postponing engagement with the contradictions within the Zimbabwean liberation struggles. However, what is redeeming is to know that in wanting to oppress the reality of Gukurahundi by diverting people’s memories, the government actually cultivated curiosity in people to want to unearth and interrogate the hideous narratives of post independent Zimbabwe. One Zimbabwe film critic, Nyasha Mboti argues that in co-producing Cry Freedom the government of Zimbabwe saw an opportunity to project its official narrative as the only construction through which people of Southern Africa could understand what was happening in South Africa and not in Zimbabwe:
Question: Would you agree with the view that although Cry Freedom was produced with the participation and some form of cooperation from the government of Zimbabwe, it represents the State’s capacity to control the meanings that the audiences get to decipher?
Answer: Yes, the state participated in the production of Cry Freedom because it saw itself as a stakeholder in the whole process—as all governments tend to be. And, of course, the government would not have been so keen on the project had it not felt able to re-package Cry Freedom for its own ends. (Questionnaire Interview with Nyasha Mboti, 29 January 2012 16: 46).
For Mboti(2012) one of the ‘ends’, would suggest that the Zimbabwean government got involved into the production of Cry Freedom to promote the spirit of Pan-Africanism hitherto started by the late Ghanaian president and Nationalist Kwame Nkrumah. The other possible ideological ‘end’ for the government’s involvement in the production of the film that Mboti(2012) suggest with the phrase “re-package Cry Freedom for its own ends” was the need to politically divert Zimbabweans from questioning the [im]morality of a government that committed massacres in its own backyard, and yet the same government was championing itself as the custodian of revolutionary practice. However, as Madsen (1992) reminds us, metaphorical allegory is inherently fractured despite attempts to present itself as coherent. We shall see in this chapter how Cry Freedom’s Pan African nationalist narrative is subverted by some political films emerging from Zimbabwe.
The myth of homogeneity in the narratives of black struggle in Cry Freedom
The production of Cry Freedom in 1987 was a positive gesture to African nations in that the film seeded the spirit of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism. However, while it was pertinent to depict the ruthlessness of Apartheid, the phenomenon of black –on-black violence in the townships such as Soweto, Thembisa, Soshanguve and Mamelodi in South Africa in the 1980s is conveniently occluded in Cry Freedom to give a sense of cohesion to nationalist forces during decolonisation at a time these forces were also fractured from within. The leading African National Congress (ANC) party was marred with internal frictions and contradictions that tended to undercut its effort to fight the Apartheid regime. Some members of Inkata Freedom Party (IFP) sold out to the forces of Apartheid leading to the arrest and persecution of young African nationalists who were mobilising people to fight against the evil system of Apartheid. This valuable piece of history is censored through occlusion or over-shadowing which is a process where one piece of history is emphasised at the expense of the other. The contradictions within the Zimbabwean liberation struggle that Cry Freedom was not allowed to surface are captured in the film Flame.
Flame(1996) and engendering fractured memories of Zimbabwe’s armed struggle
Flame (1996) is centred on a relationship between Florence(comrade Flame) and Nyasha(comrade Liberty)—two fifteen year old girls living in a small village in Rhodesia. It is 1975 and the war is at its peak. The pretty Florence’s aim is to get married to a man who takes care of her—while Nyasha, the educated of the two, wants a job in the city. One night a group of freedom fights arrive in the village to ask for volunteers who can join them. In return, the comrades promise scholarships, military training and the glory of fighting for black freedom. But the promises that initially touched the hearts of the two young girls were later to be challenged by the realities of the armed struggle and the contradictions of post war Zimbabwe.
Flame and the interrogation of the official version of the armed struggle
In Flame the rape scene allowed the filmmaker to stage a symbolical ‘overthrow’of the authorities’ romantic narrative of the armed struggle. The depiction of two young women crossing into Mozambique alone, unaccompanied by men is a point that one does not see in male narratives. The treatment of female narratives at the camps as mothers and couriers is another fact that undermines the representation of women imaged as brave fighters at the front. The poverty that afflicts female ex-combatants that the film reveals at the end of the war undermines the certitude that the armed struggle brought economic benefits to all who participated in it. Furthermore, the gathering of ex-combatants in the film, in their own different physical space as opposed to the celebrations at the Heroes Acre patronised by politicians that the film juxtaposes, reveal that in future, ex-combatants will command the potential to create their own ideological space where they can authorise values different from the master narrative of official nationalism that emphasises the telos of war, peace and progress for all in Zimbabwe.
Flame (1996) is an alternative voice that underlines the need to uncover and confront the shadowy side of the liberation struggle. Drawing attention to the dark side of the liberation does not deny the genuinely heroic and courageous sacrifices of many African nationalists and ordinary citizens. That political censorship was imposed on the reception of Flame is because the film introduces the process of narrating the nation by voices from below. Flame rekindled diverse curiosities in the ordinary people that resulted in them questioning how a liberation a war fought in the name of ‘mass participation’ was manipulated by authorities when they told one side of the story. Flame(1996) suggests that the ‘nation’ as a narrative construct is marked with continual slippages in meanings so that the nation is not a ‘totalised or finished entity’ but that, it is always in a flux or in a ‘state of becoming’(Zegeye and Vambe, 2009:16). The subversive meanings authorised in Flame also contest patriarchal power expressed through African orality.
Political Censorship and the struggle to deconstruct African orality in Flame (1996)
Flame deconstructs the notion that African orality only can represent as ‘authentic’ African cultural values (Vambe, 2004). In the film, the Shona song, ‘Nyika Yedu Yababa’ (Our Fatherland) insists on the gendered constructions of nation. The metaphor implied in ‘yedu’ meaning ‘ours’ sits uncomfortably with the patriarchal association of the nation with the term ‘yababa’. ‘Yababa’ is not simply a rhetorical expression, but has connotations of men who have power to control the new nation. In ‘Tinofa tichienda (We’ll die going to Zimbabwe), freedom fighters derive spiritual energy from the figure of Nehanda, the legendary woman who defied white colonisation, yet in the film as in real life women such as Flame or Florence have no jobs, and after the war these women still have to defer to obscurantist cultural practices upheld by men. Chikowero(2010: 137) reminds us that when song is deployed through the discourses of Flame(1996) it is cogent to ask: ‘Whose versions of the songs get to be remembered? Whose memories are privileged and what locus of ideological understanding of the liberation struggle is being promoted?’ Popular Shona songs are used to police the boundary of what female combatants say or how women can act in front of men. After the war, comrade Liberty (Nyasha) is employed as secretary to a male boss who only knows the language of reprimands and commands, while comrade Flame (Florence) ekes out a precarious existence in the rural areas. Her husband, comrade Danger is a drunk who does not care about the welfare of his family. When Danger is confronted by his wife for his apparent lack of concern, he slaps her and shouts, ‘You think I’m a woman’. Eventually, Florence runs away from Danger and joins her friend Nyasha who works in the city. In Flame, comrade Liberty asserts her need for unfettered freedom when she says, ‘I had to make it alone in a men’s world. You know what they are saying? They say we are prostitutes’.
Silencing and censoring of Flame’s political narratives
Flame (1996) encountered its public life in a controversial way. In attempting to confront and expose political censorship of narratives of war, the film’s reception was met by some freedom fighters who accused the filmmaker for distorting the nationalist war narrative. The central scene of the film where a male comrade rapes a female comrade sparked the protests among war veterans who read that the narratives of Flame had the effect of undercutting the liberation cause.
The above shot taken from the film Flame(1996)shows Comrade Che forcing comrade Flame to be intimate with him. The resultant rape scene angered some members of the war veteran association who then demonstrate against Flame(1996) accusing it of rubbishing the liberation struggle. Following the demonstration by members of war veteran association, the film Flame was subjected to a priori censorship by the Zimbabwe Censorship Board. A priori censorship which is preventive restriction was applied to the images of Flame so that by the time the film entered the public domain it had lost most of its raw or ‘uncensored’ material focusing on the narratives that reveal the abuse of some female combatants during the war of liberation struggle.
When I interviewed Nyasha Mboti to make a clear distinction of who exactly was involved in scuppering the reception of Flame, he provided a subjective response:
Question: There is controversy over whether or not it was ex-combatants or government officials who attempted to scupper the reception of Flame. Can you separate the two in this debate. And, also apart from the famed rape incident in the film what other aspects would you think rendered Flame objectionable?
Answer: I have already partly addressed the Flame issue above. Anyhow, Flame may also have been objectionable to the government for the reason that the government felt that since it was the (self appointed) custodian of the official liberation war narrative, Raeburn had no right to dare to attempt to animate it into a type of film over whose meanings they had little or no control. While Flame itself is an average film in terms of dramatic appeal, one imagines that it would still have been embraced by the powers that be if it had left some space in its script for key official slogans pertaining to war. (Questionnaire Interview with Nyasha Mboti, 29 January 2012 16: 46)
It appears that government is not comfortable with narratives that are constructed by people with no liberation war credentials, and worse still, white filmmakers. The idea of anticipating the liberation war narratives to come from war veterans is selective, constrictive and above all, segragatory of the alternative stories that the ‘masses’ can tell about their experiences of the liberation war. The filmmakers of Flame had their own way ahead of the government in creating a film based on the liberation war. In response to my question as to why the government of Zimbabwe had failed to produce a classic liberation war film, Mboti(2012) offered a number of reasons:
Question: In your opinion, what made the Zimbabwean government fail to produce a classic film about the liberation struggle, even when such a possibility would have produced a film that reflects what Rangerdescribes as ‘patriotic history’(2005:220)?
Answer: There might be a number of differing reasons, of course. One obvious factor is investment in just such an idea. Epic costs—in terms of conceptual scope and money. Film is currently not seen as a core industry in Zimbabwe and no one would like to invest in what might prove to a waste. Remember the government did attempt, in the 1980s, to build the local film industry through attracting co-production and foreign productions into the country (King Solomon’s Mines; Cry Freedom)—but reportedly made some spectacular losses. That would have been a good base—but the losses turned off the state players. That gap was promptly filled in by the NGOs, to the apparent detriment of the local industry.
A second factor is the type of hegemonic, official Text preferred in Zimbabwe currently. In my PhD I studied the ZTV broadcasting gaze and made observation that those who manage the public media in Zimbabwe are still to move away from the over-used tactic of constant repetition and iterative sloganeering, to a much more nuanced national ideological template. Of course, such ‘classics’ would have to be propagandistic, and propaganda is difficult to sell if it’s not clothed in everyday clothes. The public media managers in Zimbabwe would have to learn to package propaganda in nuance. Look at Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin—the classic of the Russian Revolution. It is a piece of socialist propaganda, but still astounding in its cinematic effects and overall subtlety. Even Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the will—a sinister Nazi idea that still comes to life as documentary—as does Griffith’s racist classic Birth of a Nation and other celebrated Hollywood titles such as How the West was Won and Ben Hur, among others. (Questionnaire Interview with Nyasha Mboti, 29 January 2012 16: 46)
Costs of productions, and lack of ideological nuance in creating a film narrative that can compete with independent productions are cited as possible reasons why the governments resents filmmakers who produce alternative versions of the history of the war of liberation. This response partly addresses why when Flame was produced, the authorities responded quickly by imposing a prior censorship which is a preventive form of restriction that was meant to block the film from being released into the public domain.
The Herald newspaper of 19 January 1996 reports that: ‘Police in Harare seized negatives of film Flame basing on the argument that it contained subversive information and that some of its parts were pornographic. The police sought assistance of the Censorship Board to determine whether Flame contains and undesirable scenes or not’ (Zimmedia, 2010: 1). After the law failed to justify criminal charges on Flame(1996) regarding ‘pornography’ and ‘subversive information’, the Herald newspaper on 20 January reports that, ‘Police cleared the makers of the feature film Flame of obscenity allegations and returned rough prints seized last week saying there was no basis for laying a charge of obscenity’(Zimmedia, 2010:1). Even when Flame was cleared of the charges on ‘pornography’ the fact that the government and war veterans initially responded to the film in negative ways reveals the official narrative that resents uncomfortable questions being raised about the role of women in that struggle. In its response to Flame the government invoked the provisions of legal statutes. The official narrative used vague terms such as ‘undesirable scenes’ to censor the film. This lends credibility to the fact that apart from physical banning of a film, the state resorted to other ideological apparatus and the most readily one available was the legal language.
