Beyond the Neocolonizer’s Appreciation of Climate Change: Consumption of Zimbabwean Tabloid Umthunywa

A global challenge, which seeks to maintain knowledge from the Western as the universal knowledge marginalizes the Global South epistemologically, ontologically, historically and culturally. Against this milieu, this chapter focusses on the ontological and epistemological exiled elderly rural readers in the Global South’s reading of the mediation of a tabloid written in minority language isiNdebele, uMthunywa’s online coverage of climate change. The importance of this chapter lies in that it brings forth the intersection of digital spheres and authorized audiences in liberating knowledge about climate change, which challenges the current rendition of bourgeoisie-centric order. Using the indigenous theory and encoding and decoding model of communication as theoretical toolkits, the chapter examines the meaning given to the paper’s online coverage of climate change. Additionally, it examines readers’ perceptions of whether Western remedies characterizing the paper’s coverage of climate change are effective in subverting the phenomenon. In meeting its objectives, the chapter employed in-depth interviews with purposively sampled Filabusi-based elderly readers. The chapter fleshes out that the understanding of climate change issues by rural folks in Filabusi is characterized by de-colonial overtones. The study’s participants’ views are poised at delinking from Euro-modern scientific explanations of climate change while insisting that the phenomenon is culturally and traditionally located in indigenous practices. They reveal that traditional customs and practices are the only remedy towards solving climate change. All in all, the chapter shows that the decolonial reading of digitized information aids in the thwarting of Western ideologies which have relegated the Global South to the peripheries of knowledge creation.