ABSTRACT
The African media carry contradictions which have roots in the colonial period, when newspapers and broadcasting mainly served the needs of the colonial administrators. These media, together with other colonial social and cultural institutions, constituted a colonial public sphere. In opposition to this, the anti-colonial movements developed their counter public spheres, with an alternative media structure, which in many cases operated from exile. This was particularly the case in situations of armed struggle, as were the circumstances in Zimbabwe. At independence, the media then were linked either to the inheritance of an authoritarian colonial state or to a liberation movement with a political agenda that often implied a contradictory attitude to fundamental democratic values. On the one hand the movements professed and had fought for liberation and independence and egalitarian and democratic ideals, but on the other they had often done this on the basis of at least partly authoritarian marxist ideologies uncritically inspired by Eastern Europe, China or North Korea. In few places was this contradiction clearer than in Zimbabwe.
