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I suppose the unschooled, but monied were supposed to simply rush to newspaper stalls, hotly grab a copy and then get disappointed soon after. By which time their precious dollar would have gone into the newspaper kitty anyway.

Such are the devious ways of newspaper business, so dear consumer, simply beware! Isn’t a newspaper like some attractively guided, spent suitor? You won’t know how useless the suitor is until it is too late! I am myself used to such furious, filling signifiers of mighty nothings.

But that one got me tearfully thinking about this profession called journalism which I am — pity me — so sworn to. If you had been parachuted from Mars on the very morning of the earth-shattering headline, you would, with calmness, deduce that in the small garden called Zimbabwe is a Prime Minister lazily called PM, and a title-less, solicitous man called Mugabe. Then your curiosity would force you to buy the paper to find out what request this title-less Mugabe had made to this title-ful PM in the first place, had made to this PM wielding such god-like powers to magisterially dispose of what mere men would have so plaintively proposed.

Possibly to find out why this omnipotent PM would have said No. To find out, too, who this Mugabe is anyway. All these questions if you were straight from Mars. Not knowing how many “utils” denizens of Mars require before they are deemed satisfied, I cannot quite say how fulfilled you would have been by the actual story as given!

Bureau-crazy
If you are from Zimbabwe — like I am — you would, quite naturally, hurry past those elementary questions vexing the man or woman from planet Mars. Straight on you would seek to know, possibly without even losing your precious “one Obama”, why and how some executives in the Government of Zimbabwe deserve to be referred to by their official titles which others are suitably, but perhaps inappropriately denied.

You know very well that one hallmark of any bureaucracy is its senseless fascination with titles, turgid labels. As with dogs in the village, none in the bureaucracy goes without a funny name, funnier title. Oh bureau-crazy! Leering over an array of spread-out, competing titles, you would obtusely steal a glance at the actual “intro” of the story to judge the worth of the screaming headline, yes to gauge whether or not this is not another case of a giant, robbing headline hanging loosely on a dwarfish thief of a story.

Falsely leering like a serious buyer! You would seek to know — without losing your dollar — whether the GPA has been renegotiated the night before while you slept, all to redistribute executive powers in Government anew and in a way that made midgets of former giants, and giants of former midgets.

The man who interns
Your own knowledge would tell you Mugabe is no nonentity, is in fact the President of Zimbabwe, indeed the man who swore in some man called Morgan Tsvangirai so Tsvangirai becomes a Prime Minister, becomes lazily a “PM” that he now is called in newsrooms. Whether reckoned by age, role, status or education, you certainly would know that Mugabe is certainly the better man, bigger leader, whichever way you look at it. After all, barely a week before, the PM of headline fame had loudly admitted while the whole world listened that he and his party are being interned or apprenticed by the President, by the same Mugabe of bare  headline!

This was at a party meeting and thus at a place, a moment and a setting where no holds were barred. He was being honest, defining his junior role, expressing his gratitude to his superior.
He addresses President Mugabe as “chef”, by the way! How would you then ever get it wrong? And the rules, the flow of knowledge is quite clear: from higher concentration down to zones of lower or nil concentration. So why this reverse flow, or suggestions of it? Why this topsy-turvy?

Going deeper on naming
And of course if you are a local media analyst — again like I am — you would be even more penetrating in your questions. What is the naming editorial policy of the publication? What power matrix does that naming philosophy suggest, both descriptively and by the wish and yearn of its editor, its publisher? What politics does that naming pattern suggest?

Equipped with a bit of sociolinguistic knowledge, you would go deeper, profounder. You would recall an area of study in sociolinguistics called “power semantics”. That subject reminds you that interlocution proceeds in an environment of defined or unfolding and negotiated power relations between speakers. The resolution of such a definition of power will in turn decide who gets addressed honorifically, who in bare, powerless terms. It is the tu/vu thesis in sociolinguistics, themselves terminological shorthands from the French language.

Colonial legacy through the tongue
The theory goes much further. That area of study tells you that even the selection of language — “code” if you want to deploy the terminology of linguistics — for the conversation, is itself a marker of power and assertion as exercised by and between speakers, between interlocutors.

So English as a code will always be deployed to either suggest a certain good learning, itself a marker of superior power, superior status and even better means for the one discussant eloquent in using it. Shona, Ndebele as codes of condescending politeness where these are  used by an educated person on the native Other, or as markers of elementary status where these are the only codes, and thus codes of necessity, for the other interlocutor.
They are markers of powerlessness, of inferiority in a dialogue of unequals. This is the colonial legacy as it relates to our tongues!

Into the hierarchy of languages, identity of naming
Of course matters get more complex when languages are mixed in a dialogue, a linguistic practice known as code-switching which from the narrow angle of Halliday might simply suggest a language user maximising on his/her linguistic resources, but which to a sociolinguist might suggest more complex and ever-changing relations between interlocutors and respective speech communities they hail from.

Whichever way one views the whole matter, there is near-consensus among language students that through use and users, languages do enjoy hierarchies which are themselves a reflection of power relations in larger society. This is why Beinstein correctly argues that code (language) and social class mutually reveal, mutually reflect and mutually symbolise.
And of course if you push the whole thing to cultural studies, principally post-colonial cultural studies, you readily know the place that “naming” occupies in defining and controlling reality, indeed in giving reality a certain identity or signification you prefer or desire as the privileged namer. All names are signifiers. To name is to exercise power and control over reality. A whole crowd of powerful scholars whose names fill all the letters of the alphabet, would solicitously come in to fortify your understanding of this perspective.

Where no man names the son of another
So, too, would village knowledge, itself far deeper fount of knowledge than all professors plus those ever to come, put together. The village knows that no man names another man’s child, without express permission, without being granted delegated naming powers. Even then you have to have some relationship of affection or of blood affinities with those that bore the child you seek to name. You cannot just name anyone’s child. That child has a father who has a family which has a totem, a father who sent mooing cows to his in-laws, indeed a husband who bought a womb that bears him his scion.

You don’t just name another man’s son. To do so would have a dire meaning. Any village elders would readily tell you, tell you with eyes anticipating great fear and terror, that such an abomination creates graves, finishes a whole lineage. Such an abomination creates deaths in the village, yields cadavers which no one would want to touch, let alone bury.

It is not done, is never done, elders will say, with creased foreheads. Unless that child issued from your own loin, why would you name him/her? By what right, the whole village would ask.

Names, our first identity cards
To name another man’s son is to usurp paternity. And African villages do whisper! Our names at birth are always our paternity stamps, our first identity cards, and barring paternity disputes, our life-long markers. Our names could straightforwardly issue from ancestry, thereby providing a tying cord between generations, across nodes in a vast, timeless lineage.

Or more complexly amount to compressed, compendious sentences recording wishes, or recording travails faced or suffered by those, or one of those, who bore us.
Kuchemedza mbudzi yaambhuya ndoozvinei, in English “why-make-your-mother-law’s-goat-cry”, could be one hell of such a statement-name, so limpingly heavy, so creaking with signification! Or simply VaDenguremhosva, a real name slatted some fat, pilfering woman from my village caught in the middle of a rich farmer’s field with a huge basket full of pumpkins! Whichever way, the identity stamp gets that emphatic through names, through naming. And like the camel to an Arab, this practice is so obvious, too commonplace to be noticed, yet so potent and explosive if offended against.

This country of disputed paternity
So too, dear reader, would the knowledge of your country. A great stone architectural civilisation once upon a time, to this day your country, my country, our country together bears that stamp in its name — Zimbabwe. Contiguous to a militarily stronger Nguni culture once upon a time, our Zimbabwe still carries that martial stamp, that Nguni naming tradition to this day, starting with koBulawayo kumaNdevere ukoo-o!

An estate of a corporate body called the British South Africa Company once upon a time, Zimbabwe to this day bears names we cannot trace from our broad, many-branched native lineage which you and I identify with. Selous, Allan Wilson, Churchill, Mountbatten, Rhodes, Borrowdale, El Gray, Milton, the list is endless, the list, too is very much alive, to this hour of writing if it is  me, to this very hour of reading if it is you, dear reader.

None of those names is traceable to the Shona or Ndebele naming tradition.
And because we are still in the middle of a long colonialism, still a very vibrant British neo-colony for all we call ourselves, these names of Caucasian or Afrikaner tradition remain implacably fastened on the forehead of our country, occasionally faintly challenged by a few, odd African names like Burombo, Munhumutapa, to name almost all.

Phonetic monstrosities
Even where indigenous names stubbornly fought on, gallantly fought through the whole colonial and neo-colonial era, they only survived as traces, survived as phonetic monstrosities so severely mangled to obey the phonetic orders of the English of colonial superiors: Buhera for Vuhera; Sebakwe for Zivagwe; Belingwe for Mberengwa.

Just the way our country is — by names that call it, and by names that call its places — clearly show we remain that doubtful son named by the man next door, a creature of contested paternity, which is why the village whispers. Whose son or daughter we shall be in the end will very much depend on present struggles, including the one I choose to talk about in this piece. Hopefully this tussle will not give us more graves, as it normally does.

A charge man who gets rigged!
I hope I have made it clear that names, titles: how they are accorded or won, given or denied, upheld or challenged, that all these practices relate to power in the sense of who wields it, needs it, seeks it, losses it or wishes it, whether for himself/herself or for others who might exercise it to his/her great benefit.

And in keeping with media illusion or pretensions to neutrality, you notice that most house styles dispense with titles, or seek to award them evenly, descriptively shorn of all power connotations. So when a headline says “PM says no to Mugabe”, a lot can be adduced by astute students of communication and politics.

A lot beyond the denotative side of journalism. Clearly the editorial policy of a publishing house whence issues such a headline is decidedly and unashamedly partial, one-sidedly slop-sided. It does not recognize Presidency or does not want the present incumbent whom it ousts, of course to the extent that newsroom power can achieve that. It over-recognises Premiership, in fact gets overawed by it’s incumbent to the extent of panegyrizing him.

Beyond all else, the headline was meant to project the PM as a no-nonsense man! The same way that another sponsored story again involving the person of the Prime Minister claims he is taking charge of all electoral processes. A man in charge, a man on the spot.
One day we shall use that headline to ask how a man on the spot, a man in charge can reject election results on claims of vote rigging!

Editors as unpaid commissars
So Tsvangirai becomes known by the official bureaucratic nomenclature of “PM”, while Robert Mugabe — his constitutional superior whose official bureaucratic nomenclature is “President” — gets stripped bare to a mere, title-less “Mugabe”.

What does all this editorial obligation say of the paper and the political party that owns the PM? Is the paper being merely polite obeying an obligation? Even-handed politeness would have required that each is accorded their bureaucratic title, surely? So why this selective naming?
Dear reader, we are now in the domain of newspaper in politics, editors as extensions of political commissars. After all, no political party stays in the newsroom to comb through headlines of the day, to enforce daily compliance with its messages.

Much of that work is done by dutiful gatekeepers we politely call editors, who are strategically placed to ensure the newspaper creates a synthetic world of wished-for power relations.
The head that does not have a line
But clever parties recruit clever ideologues to do their dirty work. Not those handling the headline I referred to in the beginning. Or a similar one which ran a few weeks ago: “Kunonga, Go Now!”
As any school of journalism will teach you, active words belong to actors in a story, never to headlines attributable to a newspaper.

That is so elementary. The same school will also teach you that an uneven inclusion or removal of titles to opposed actors in a story creates an unjustifiable bias in the world of news, indeed points to editorial support or aversion, as the case might be.
That does not give the world journalism; it gives the world political pamphleteering. That school will teach you more. It will tell you that headlines and actual  stories are relational, with headlines being whole stories compressed.

Headlines must never mislead; they must be good guides. The “PM says No to Mugabe” headline suggests a direct, acrimonious encounter between the two: one wielding an important title, the other just a bare man. An encounter between unequals.
Yet the actual story was about the recently sworn team tasked to complete work on the draft constitution! Neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai are in that committee, much as they authored it. And they created it as principals acting in unison.
And they created the committee to reconcile the divergent views from the Second Stakeholders Conference.

The final tier that can’t be torn
Just how disagreements within that committee amount to an encounter between a PM and a mere Mugabe, one cannot quite say. How disagreement within a committee set up to reconcile positions which emerged from the Second Stakeholder Conference (not parties anymore!) can themselves be interpreted as a conflict between principals who are themselves recipients of the end-product in whatever form by the committee, one honestly cannot say.

We are talking of disagreements within a lower tier in the decision-making process here.
We are wishing a stand-off in the highest tier in the decision continuum, a tier which ironically enough is eagerly waiting for an outcome from its bickering lower tier. Indeed we are talking about a final tier which will decide the way forward, whatever recommendations might come from below it.
Political equals who are unequals in law

Much more, we are talking of a final tier comprising much more than “Mugabe” and “PM”. It includes Arthur Mutambara and Welshman Ncube, both of whom will have inputs to make alongside the other two. What is more, we are talking of a tier of political equals who are in reality constitutional unequals. One, ironically the belittled Mugabe, wields a battery of constitutional powers which may be legitimately and lawfully invoked to break the deadlock should consensus fail.

This is quite a far cry from the asymmetrical power relations implied by the headline under examination, power relations that imply that this man honorifically called “PM” has the power to cast a deciding No. So it is a stupid headline from a stupid editor who serves his party of choice so poorly. Much worse, a stupid editor whose editorial aggressiveness is only matched by the boldness of his ignorance.

When the small man emerges bigger, biggest
Let us help him. One cannot quite say there are disagreements in the newly created committee. It is more plausible to say there are matters which are still pending, still outstanding, indeed matters still to be resolved.

More important, it should be borne in mind the committee was created not to disagree; it was created to reconcile divergent views from the Second Stakeholders Conference. It can only fail in its mandate. But its failure can’t decide matters.

It is an ad-hoc penultimate point, never the final point. And assuming it fails, its only recourse is to send a report to the Principals who are its superiors, who are its taskmasters.
I happen to know that the Principals are now impatient, ready and eager to receive whatever the committee has accomplished, or failed to accomplish.

This is why Monday,  24th December, may be its last day. The real story is not the feigned No from the “PM”. It is the failed consensus that might be emerging from the deliberations of the committee, a failure which will give the Principals the very role the two MDCs have been too coy to acknowledge! Slowly debate on the role of Principals is resolving itself, Professor Madhuku gradually getting vindicated.

In the unlikely event that Principals too fail to resolve the matter, then the full powers of the small man in the headline — Mugabe — shall be shown,  seen and even suffered. And I notice Deputy Prime Minister Mutambara has weighed in to tell the new American Ambassador that Zimbabwe does not have a constitutional vacuum, adding Lancaster is happily there to provide fissure.

The ground that shifted
If our shrill editor usefully interacted with the thinking in the party he thinks he is editorialising for, he thinks he is serving, he would have long known that its commitment to the next election under a new constitution has been gradually waning, changing to a new position of elections under Lancaster. Equally, virtually all except one country in SADC are already reconciled to the next elections under Lancaster. If Zimbabwe can have elections under a new constitution, well and good.

If not, it’s not quite a tragedy. That is the new thinking, and the odd country remains so because its appreciation of developments here is yet to get well nuanced. Soon it shall join the rest.
The ground has shifted, leaving our editor behind. A new constitution is no longer the marker, the same way that next elections are no longer an issue for some in the MDCs.

Vexatious Mangaung
Lastly, I notice our befuddled and bedraggled commentators from MDC formations do not seem to know how to make use of Mangaung. An incumbent has been retained, something not quite inspirational to these our power-eager local political outsiders. And the incumbent was not a media favorite, once more underlining limits to what seemingly power-brokering headlines and newsrooms can achieve.

Thirdly, in the ANC, democracy has been vindicated not by a leadership change, but by the spectacular defeat of the aspirant. Again, not too helpful a thesis. Fourthly, the Zuma-Ramaphosa team imply neat, scheduled and graduated change within same bottle-skins.
Not a rupture as wished for by the two MDCs. By and large politics of liberation continuity is what Mangaung stresses. And hey, did anyone here Zuma’s opening address before the whitewash? South Africa has the biggest economy on the continent and outsiders would want to control the party running the biggest economy in order to control that biggest economy, he said! He went further.

A transformation was coming that would change the lot of the black South African, he promised! Now, who is zat? I wonder. And the story of leaders who cling to power, leaders who will not be challenged? What a superficial reading of politics! What self-hurting line? Will Morgan make way within the MDC for the sake of intra-party democracy? The same Morgan who today says he will call it quits if defeated, only to sharply retract on the morrow? Leadership change by a party that prevents primaries, that stretches all political experience by inventing what they now term confirmatory referendum for sitting MPs? What’s zat? How reality can be quite refractory, can so stubbornly sit at odds with a propaganda wish. Icho!

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