Abstract
Matches between Zimbabwean Premier Soccer League (PSL) teams Dynamos FC and
Highlanders FC are popular but controversial. In 2004, Robson Sharuko, senior sports editor of
The Herald newspaper, dubbed this game the ‘battle of Zimbabwe’. The fixture usually explodes
into ugly scenes of violence. Such incidents hardly evade the eyes of the mass media. However,
growing scholarship on Zimbabwean football have under-theorized this violence. The essay
deploys the framing theory and Foucauldian discourse to analyze the framing of selected episodes
of violence at the ‘battle of Zimbabwe’ by two state-controlled newspapers – The Herald and the
Chronicle, which fall under the Zimbabwe Newspapers (Zimpapers) stable. The study shows that
contrary to the common perception that The Herald and the Chronicle provide monolithic
accounts on events, they furnish heterogeneous narratives on violence at this fixture. This
heterogeneity is influenced by ethnic tensions between two dominant ethnic groups in Zimbabwe
– the Shona and the Ndebele.