ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the important connection between racial land segregation in Zimbabwe and presences and absences in the news. It looks at how racial spatialisation of the land into white/black areas, urban/rural intersected with the news episteme in the colonial despoliation, displacement, invisibilisation and incarceration of Africans in compounds defined by race, place, ethnicity and gender throughout the colonial period and after. The chapter discusses how the physical violence that accompanied colonial theft of African people’s land and their subsequent subjugation was mirrored and mutually reproduced and reinforced at a symbolic level, by media silence on the plight of the colonised, oppressed and racially discriminated. The landscapes of societies structured in dominance had to be internally partitioned and redrawn at the point of colonial conquest to give material effect to the racialised social hierarchies of emergent settler colonial capitalism in Rhodesia.
