A Discourse of Disillusionment: Letters to the Editor in Two Zimbabwean Magazines 10 Years after Independence

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Abstract
This paper examines Letters to the Editor (LEs) in two Zimbabwean magazines in 1990. Zimbabwe celebrated 10 years of independence in 1990 and the marking of a decade stimulated evaluation of the achievements of independence. The LEs in independently owned magazines provided a site for non-elite writers to engage in an alternative discourse to the `celebratory' discourse of the state-controlled daily press. We examine the corpus of LEs in terms of discourse structure and lexico-grammatical features, using critical discourse analysis and computer concordancing to identify features of this alternative discourse. We conclude that there is an emergent `discourse of disillusionment' which suggests the gradual erosion of the post-independence national consensus. We discuss briefly the relevance of this discourse to the role of media and civil society in Zimbabwe.