The advent of digital media, which incorporates social media, has increased the visibility of the othered indigenous people. The Tonga people of Zimbabwe belong to the othered/ marginalised. Very few studies have examined the adoption of digital media by the marginalised members from a Zimbabwean perspective.

This study examines the extent to which digital media have increased the participation and visibility of the marginalised Tonga people of Zimbabwe and how they have redefined, supplemented or replaced traditional journalism in Zimbabwe. Despite their rich heritage, the Tonga people in northern Zimbabwe lack a suitable local public platform to express themselves, with the only online publication being www.mulonga.net, launched on 25 March 2001 in Vienna, Austria.

Using online content analysis of www.mulonga.net, this study examines how the new forms of citizenship, participatory cultures and empowerment are expressed among the Tonga people. From the public sphere theory perspective, the study argues that the adoption of this "novel" phenomenon guarantees interactivity at both local and global levels.

Some excerpts:

Digital media platforms such as mulonga.net facilitate glocalisation of cultural identities, thereby enhancing the
visibility of the Tonga. It is indeed worth noting that the Tonga people can celebrate
the ordinary (Williams’s 1989 definition of culture) on a sophisticated but far-reaching
platform. This form of journalism counters the mainstream journalism that had failed
the cause of the Tonga people as outlined in the previous section.
...
Digital media technologies are redefining, supplementing or replacing traditional
journalism and media in Africa in projecting the identities of the maginalised
communities. Through the mulonga.net cultural exchange (Kuthan 2015),
Austrians are showcasing a fruitful collaboration between Austrian Free radios and Radio ZongweFM/Zambia.
...
Community radios, according to Moyo (2012), may be conceptualised more
significantly in terms of the manner in which they provide counter hegemonic voices
in society by virtue of their mechanism of serving one community at a time. In this
context, alternative media ought not to be viewed as a mere traditional dissemination
of news to the people but rather as an ideal gatekeeper of society in every way because
it embodies a philosophy of communication that seeks to emancipate marginalised
groups, undercutting the ruling elite’s social mechanism that is often projected in the
mainstream media as common sense and ideal (Atton 2002; Bailey, Cammaerts, and
Carpentier 2008; Moyo 2012). Such media often do not only seek to challenge or
question political and cultural control of the masses by the elite. Community radios are,
epistemologically framed, oppositional to dominant worldviews, and their social orders
represent the ideologies of the underdog. Sadly for Zimbabwean marginalised groups,
community radios have not been licensed in Zimbabwe and the provision of community
radio licenses has been highly politicised in Zimbabwe.

Therefore, what stands out as a major gain for the Tonga people as reflected on
mulonga.net is the practical involvement with ICT tools like computers as well as the
potential to navigate on the internet. This empowers the recipients of these ICT tools.
Through surfing the internet, the Tonga people do not only engage with the other local
ethnic groups but have the opportunity to engage even with the other foreign populations
as well as those Africans in the diaspora. To this effect, new forms of citizenship are
emerging among Tonga people while improvements regarding participatory cultures
can be made to empower the Tonga people and make their day-to-day challenges
global challenges too. There is cultural and intellectual transformation as a result of the
interactive nature of the digital platforms to which the once isolated marginalised group
is now exposed.
....
Conclusion: The presence of online communication platforms such as mulonga.net amongst the
Tonga people of the Zambezi Valley in Zimbabwe brought invaluable changes. There
has been a widened public sphere forum amongst the Tonga people. The merits of a wider
platform have been advanced by Habermas as, among others, enabling participation in
national debates. Participatory cultures are also enhanced through digital platforms like
mulonga.net. This has been noted through practices of cultural exchange between the
Tonga people and the Austrians. Most importantly, the involvement of the Tonga people
in discussing and enhancing their identity has been noted through the establishment of
telecenters in the Binga area in Zimbabwe, where several ICT centres were established
with the assistance of World Links.

However, the encounter between the Tonga people of Zimbabwe and the digital media
facilitated by mulonga.net has had its flaws. Practices such as cultural exchange
programmes facilitated by mulonga.net can be criticised for being exploitative in the
extreme. Exhibiting the Tonga people and cultural artefacts to the European gaze is a
way of othering the already marginalised Tonga group. It has been argued before that
visibility and participation is best understood as an economic strategy that demonstrates
how media conglomerates have reinforced the entertainment industry through the global
media to appease capitalistic forces and make profits through the media (Garman 2014).
Moreover, network signals are yet to be perfected in the border towns and these pose
connectivity challenges for their inhabitants. The efforts to include the Tonga people
in the broader economic, cultural and political spectrum of the global networks should
begin with improving signals.

Most importantly, digital media platforms can only enhance local integrity through
the use of local languages as means of communication. The web page mulonga.net
predominantly uses English, which Ngũgĩ (1986; 1993) lambasts as a vehicle of the
colonisation of Africa. Hall (1997) opines that language can be used to reflect the
realities of the world as they exist and so a language can only serve to express the
identity of the native culture.

Nonetheless, as far as marking the visibility of the Tonga people globally is concerned,
the platform may well be celebrated.