Gay or queer relationships in Zimbabwe remain a site of discursive contestation. The rise in human rights advocacy has re/located the subject within the human rights premise, shifting the discussions away but not disconnected from the religious, political and cultural representations. This paper examined the societal constructions and attitudes toward homosexuality by analyzing Twitter exchanges that followed the disclosure on the 21st of September 2018, by a teacher (Neal Hovelmeier) of St John’s College in Zimbabwe, that he was gay. The disclosure prompted substantial online and offline debates on gay and queer relationships (what is popularly known as homosexuality in Zimbabwe) and produced two discursive divisions. The first division was against homosexuality and galvanized support across cultural, political, traditional, religious and social constructions. Though less popular, the other division found support from within the gay or queer community itself, the global North diplomatic missions resident in Zimbabwe, liberal left-leaning and some civil society organizations. The former’s key feature is societal resistance to homosexuality which is constructed by way of inferences to Christianity and traditional belief systems about binary gender and sex categories and sexual relations. The latter has constructed homosexuality from the premise of human rights, acceptance and tolerance.

This paper examines the coverage and re/presentation of the coronavirus pandemic by two mainstream newspapers in the Kingdom of Eswatini, namely, the Times of Eswatini and the Eswatini Observer between January and June 2020. Framing and discourse analyses are used in the examination of news stories. The key to this study is how the coverage and re/presentation evolved as ‘new facts’ about the virus emerged. From being re/presented in a distanciated form to becoming a localised scare, the travelling of the virus in space and time and its profile in the newspapers are examined. When the virus began to enjoy widespread coverage, news stories focused on virus incidence and later started paying attention to the internal evolution of the virus and how the government was responding to it. The analysis shows that political indexing sustained the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to political and official indexing, media coverage largely reproduced the views of those in power, especially the construction of lockdown regulations as rational and legitimate. The government and security officials characterised the coronavirus as an invading enemy that could only be defeated through ‘war’. The news media reproduced the war language of the government and security officials, and thus legitimised the lockdowns and security surveillance. In addition to regulatory interventions, the results reveal that the government and civil society initiated prayer and fasting sessions as part of response interventions. This paper concludes that health journalism pays less attention to health scares that are seen to be happening ‘elsewhere’. However, once the problems become local, the news value of proximity enables journalists to provide extensive coverage. In addition, the coverage of pandemics begins with increased coverage and panic, followed by constant attention and after some time, the stories leave front pages as journalism fatigue kicks in.