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Every few years, whenever crime rates rise, someone will dust off a moral panic that blames the latest boogeyman for our social decay. In the 1980s, it was “Satanic” heavy metal. In the 1990s, it was kung fu movies. In the 2000s, it was video games. Now, apparently, my dear mentor Tendai wants us to believe that violent entertainment is breeding a violent Zimbabwe.
This is some lazy and dangerous thinking. Because the more we clutch our pearls over fictional gunfights and TV brawls, the more we ignore the real culprits behind our blood-soaked headlines: economic collapse, institutional failure, and a political culture that treats violence not as a tragedy to be stopped but as a daily fact of life.
Violence in Zimbabwe never needed a television screen to take root. It existed long before Netflix, long before video games, long before Hollywood blockbusters were sold on pirated discs in Mbare. Yet in his latest column, Tendai Ruben Mbofana claims that fictional violence is breeding real violence. It is a neat theory. Neat, because it avoids confronting the harder truth: the problem is not what Zimbabweans are watching. It is what they are living.
His argument rests on shaky assumptions and selective readings of research. He drags out the old Bandura Bobo doll experiment from the 1960s, where children hit an inflatable toy in a lab. He then treats this as a straight line from cartoon brawls to domestic murder. He waves “cultivation theory” and “mean world syndrome” around as if feeling unsafe is the same thing as picking up a bloody knife and stabbing someone.
If these theories were enough to explain reality, Japan’s streets would be rivers of blood from its hyper-violent anime. South Korea’s homicide rate would rival Brazil’s thanks to its brutal thrillers, and the Nordic countries’ obsession with crime dramas would have turned them into war zones. Instead, these countries consume far more violent content than Zimbabwe and yet have murder rates so low they are statistical rounding errors compared to ours.
Zimbabwe’s violence has simpler, better-documented roots. It thrives in an economy that leaves millions without income. Desperation breeds crime here because there are no options. It grows where mutoriro and cheap alcohol flow freely, drugs and drink with a proven link to aggression. It survives in the rot of gender-based violence, where beating a partner can still be called discipline, and police often treat spousal rape as a “private matter.” It is fed by a justice system so slow and corrupt that offenders know they may never face consequences. It is stoked by overcrowding, poor service delivery, and the friction of scarcity, fights over water, transport, but you can easily get a seat in a bar. None of this requires a violent movie. It requires only pressure, frustration, and impunity.
Violent entertainment anywhere in the world does not create violence. It reflects it. Artists mirror the world they live in, and when that world is brutal, so is their work. That woman stabbed in Redcliff after rejecting a man’s advances is not the product of cartoons. It is the product of misogyny, desperation, and impunity. The more violent our reality becomes, the more violent our entertainment will be. Art follows life far more often than life follows art. To claim otherwise is to confuse a mirror with a knife.
Mr Mbofana’s science is as flimsy as his theory. Once you control for economic and social conditions, the link between violent media and crime fades to nothing. Even in the United States, where violent entertainment saturates every platform, violent crime has plunged since the 1990s. The relationship is inconsistent at best, irrelevant at worst. What is consistent is this: countries with strong economies, functioning justice systems, and effective policing have low crime regardless of what is on their screens.
This fixation on blaming entertainment plays directly into the hands of leaders who would rather censor a film than fix a police department. They find it easier to rage against video games than to shut down meth dens. It is a convenient distraction from the real work of creating jobs, reforming the justice system, and breaking the cultural tolerance for abuse. It is easier to police imagination than to police reality, but it is also utterly useless. While the Mbofana scolds fictional villains, the real ones keep walking free.
Until Zimbabwe deals with poverty, drugs, gender-based violence, and a broken justice system, cutting violence from films will change nothing. A man in Harare will not kill his wife because of a fight scene on TV. He will kill her because he lives in a system that teaches him she is disposable and that he can get away with it. If the goal is to reduce violence, we need fewer crusades against cartoons and more against the collapsing structures that make real violence inevitable.
Anything else is a comfortable lie. Mbofana’s article is simply adding to the pile.
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