Concessionary storytelling: epistemic freedom in Zimbabwean anti-extractivist documentaries

Scholarship in African communication and media studies increasingly focuses on how Africans use mediated communication to enact epistemic freedom in environmental contexts. Contributing to this line of inquiry, this article analyzes how Zimbabwean civil society organizations challenge state and corporate narratives that cast mineral extractivism as essential to national development. We examine the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, a civil society organization that produces anti-extractivist documentaries on the negative consequences of mineral extraction for rural and Indigenous communities. Advancing the concept of “concessionary storytelling,” we argue that these documentaries enact epistemic freedom by rendering mineral concessions—government contracts granting corporate access to land, labor, and resources—intelligible through community-grounded knowledge of their promises and pitfalls. We develop this argument through an analysis of three documentaries addressing platinum, diamond, and lithium concessions. Our analysis shows how community testimony and audiovisual evidence are organized through recurring dialectics of order and rupture, resettlement and displacement, and sustainability and degradation. Ultimately, this article opens new avenues for analyzing the role of mediated communication in concessionary politics across the Global South.