African countries where democracy and majority rule came about through negotiated transitions are often conflicted polities in which elements of the new order exist uneasily with strong currents of the ancien regime. The media in these ‘transitioning’ societies naturally find themselves at the forefront of interpreting and representing these contradictions through deploying both ‘old’ journalistic frames and creating new narratives. In doing so, African journalists mediating this initial phase of the postcolonial transition negotiate a complex terrain: fielding pressures from an array of power centres including the new political elite transforming itself from a liberation movement into a democratic government, corporate hierarchies with strong links to the past, advertisers and media owners. They are also confronted with a plethora of expectations of how they should represent the new order, in part based on who they are, in terms of race, gender and class. This article focuses on the journalism-politics nexus within the first decade of democracy in Zimbabwe, identifying key moments and sites where the matrix of influences (and contradictions) played itself out. It does so through archival research, including selected biographies published by journalists who lived through the contested transition. The results suggest that in Zimbabwe, the structural factors shaping journalism practice rested to a large extent on a set of expectations of a ‘collaborative’ media by the new political elite, which adopted an aggressive stick and carrot approach to enforcing journalistic collaboration. At the same time, it is also clear that journalists were able, from time to time, to subvert or manoeuvre within the ‘system’ to assert their agency, although this was in cases few and far between.

中文翻译：

---

津巴布韦：独立前十年新闻与政治的冲突关系

通过谈判过渡实现民主和多数人统治的非洲国家往往是相互冲突的政体，其中新秩序的元素在旧政权的强大潮流中不安地存在。这些“转型”社会中的媒体通过部署“旧”新闻框架和创造新叙事，自然而然地发现自己处于解释和表现这些矛盾的最前沿。在这样做的过程中，调解后殖民过渡初期阶段的非洲记者在一个复杂的领域进行谈判：应对来自一系列权力中心的压力，包括新的政治精英将自己从解放运动转变为民主政府、与社会有密切联系的企业等级制度。过去，广告商和媒体所有者。他们还面临着对他们应该如何代表新秩序的过多期望，部分基于他们是谁，在种族、性别和阶级方面。本文重点关注津巴布韦民主最初十年内的新闻与政治关系，确定影响（和矛盾）矩阵发挥作用的关键时刻和地点。它通过档案研究来做到这一点，包括由经历过有争议的过渡的记者出版的精选传记。结果表明，在津巴布韦，影响新闻实践的结构性因素在很大程度上取决于新政治精英对“合作”媒体的一系列期望，他们采用激进的大棒和胡萝卜的方法来加强新闻合作。同时，