"I was guilty as charged"
Growing up in rural Zimbabwe I always wanted to be a journalist. I am not sure what made me want it so much, but I think it was because I only saw journalists on TV. I never saw any of them visiting my area to ask about the problems we faced. There were a lot of issues we wanted to talk about.: underdevelopment, poor roads, lack of clean drinking water. We used to fetch water from a dam where animals drink and even up to now people in my village do. I believed that if I became a journalist I was going to cover the plight of my people and be their voice.
Finally I began to work as a journalist in 2000, for a community radio initiative. What was interesting with this organisation, Radio Dialogue, was that it did not have a license to broadcast because of the strict media laws and it was advocating for one. The only State broadcaster, Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) owned four radio stations and one television channel. The Zimbabwe government had inherited the strict media laws from the colonial regime led by Ian Smith. The monopoly of ZBC remained until October 2000 when a commercial company, Capital Radio, challenged it in the Supreme Court and won. The victory was short lived, a few days later the government introduced a stricter law known as the Broadcasting services Act. The law made it impossible for anyone in Zimbabwe to start a radio station.There are alternative ways of communicating and our way to produce radio programmes was to package them on tape and cd:s and distribute them to residents. There were many challenges and some included physical harassment by state agents, police, war veterans and the ruling party Zanu pf supporters. I lost my first cell phone to the war veterans when they manhandled me and threatened to beat the hell out of me because I was working for the British who were trying to “re-colonise” Zimbabwe.
This was during the 2000 parliamentary elections and the situation was very volatile. The first experience was traumatic and for a moment I thought of quitting the profession. But it soon became part of my job. I had to lie a number of times, telling the authorities that I was working for the state media in order to get access to events or comments from government officials. We were not able to write well balanced stories because each time you phoned a minister and identified yourself, the minister would start preaching to you about patriotism or hang up the phone.
I was called to give statements at the local police a countless number of times. Each visit had the same questions. Who are you working for? Who is funding you? Don't you see you are being used by the British and the Americans to sell your own country? If working for the British meant talking about human rights abuses, violence during election, lack of freedom of expression, corruption, the poor working conditions and the high cost of living – then I was guilty as charged.
Zenzele NdebeleProduction Manager Radio Dialogue
Zimbabwe