Of COVID-19 and Zimbabwean Newspaper Cartoons: A Multimodal Approach

Abstract

129 Chapter 6 Of COVID-19 and Zimbabwean Newspaper Cartoons: A Multimodal Approach Tambawoga C. Muchena Abstract Having first been detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus (henceforth COVID-19) quickly spread across the world leaving a trail of destruction on people’s lives and sending social and economic shock waves. The rapid spread and the devastating effects of this respiratory disease resulted in the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring it a pandemic in March 2020. Zimbabwe has not been spared by this global pandemic as the virus continues to affect and infect its citizens instilling fear and shock amongst the populace. As the virus continues to spread, media has taken a leading communicative role in spreading news concerning the disease through its multi-modal tools at its disposal. Through the newspapers’ use of language resources to attract public attention and interest by the media, journalists, especially cartoonists, harness both linguistic and non-linguistic elements ingeniously and persuasively to create effect in a literary or dramatic passion and to evoke a particular response from readers (Sani, Abdullah, Abdullah and Ali, 2012). Newspaper cartoons have successfully constituted a distinct multimodal genre that parades graphic art and text whose use is to provide specific knowledge on contemporary issues. Through a qualitative multimodal analysis, this chapter focused on the analysis of purposively selected 13 newspaper cartoons carrying COVID-19 themes published in the Chronicle between March and May 2020. Taking a semiotic and textual analyses approach, the study envisaged that the editorial cartoon is a powerful weapon for communicating important news and the Chronicle used this genre extensively in following up with the themes that were introduced through the Zimbabwean government’s policies enacted to fight the deadly virus – COVID-19.