“Chele Varakashi†: English Premiere League viewership and the resurfacing of political public sphere in Zimbabwe’s Beer Halls

This paper focuses on the embedded political undertones produced and reproduced by English Premiership League (EPL) football viewers in Zimbabwe’s new political discursive spheres – Beer Halls. It explores the nexus of football fans viewership patterns, commentary and how these attitudes reflect on how football viewership reproduces underlying political fractures that exist in Zimbabwe. Largely credited to the Frankfurt theorist, Jurgen Habermas (1960) a public sphere is an imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space which is made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society. Often football viewership becomes an outlay of wider societal struggles. Beer halls offer space for the playing out of these power dynamics which manifest through football fans viewership and commentary. This article explores the authors’ ethnographic encounters with EPL viewers in beer halls. It explores how football commentary is not monolithic but has in it subtle undertones which speaks to the socio-political tensions in Zimbabwe. Football viewership and commentary in Zimbabwe’s beer halls is fraught with power undercurrents.