The process and method of data analysis

The study engaged the critical discourse analysis as a method to analyse all the data collected from Archival research and from other reading materials. This method of data analysis was used to develop theories and hypotheses from the data that I collected from the Archives using the postcolonial approach to Archival research.

3.4.6.1 Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis is a type of discourse analytical that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context (van Dijk, 2001:352; Widdowson, 2004:89). The approach is not

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much concerned with the properties of discourse but with social issues that affect people.As Teun van Dijk (2009:111) rightly puts it,

Critical Discourse Analysis is problem oriented, it does not primarily focus on discourse and its properties, but on social issues and problems, such as racism and sexism or other forms of domination and power abuse, and then examines whether and how text and talk are involved in its production.

By using Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse data concerning the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe’s view of indigenous religion and customs, I aim to utilize the approach in transforming and unsettling the status quo. The tendency and major aim of Critical Discourse Analysis is the transforming and unsettling of the existing order and transforming its elements into an arrangement that are less harmful to some, and perhaps more beneficial to all members of society (Kress, 1996:15). Critical Discourse Analysis will be used in this research to illuminate the relationship between the colonial order in the Methodist Church and the production of rules that still govern the Methodist Church today. The approach will help to describe and explain how power abuse is enacted in Methodist discourse and how the same discourse legitimized such power imbalances in the Church.

The questions that Critical Discourse Analysis seeks to answer, according to van Dijk (1996), are about who may speak or write to whom, about what, when and in what context, or who may participate in such communicative events in various recipient roles, for instance as addressees, audience, bystanders, and overhearers (1986:86). The questions that I sought to answer in this research include, who should have put together the rules governing the Church in Zimbabwe? Who should have examined the context before introducing the rules and regulations? Who should have determined the relevance of these regulations? Who should have participated or who should have been consulted to come up with the rules to govern the black church in Zimbabwe?

The other aspect of Critical Discourse Analysis is exclusion, whereby some discourses exclude sections of people from speaking or from being consulted, as long as it is in the interest of the originators of such discourse to attempt to justify their dominance and supremacy (Leeuwen, 2008:28). It is my argument that black Methodists in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) were excluded when the rules were crafted by the colonial missionaries who viewed themselves as superior to the back and so attempted to replace the African worldview with the European one. The European worldview was imposed on Africans without them knowing or without being listened to. Critical

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Discourse Analysis views power in society as imposed on individual subjects, views human subjectivity as constructed or inscribed by discourse, views the social order as historically situated and therefore, relative, socially constructed and changeable, and views social power as constituted and sustained less by the will of individuals than by the pervasiveness of certain constructions, or discourses (Locke, 2004:1).

The order that obtains in the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe is because of its colonial history whereby the colonial missionaries imposed their belief system and worldview on the African Methodists in Zimbabwe. Using discourse, the missionaries made sure that this order stayed permanently by asking Africans to recite and know the rules by heart. The reading and interpretation of such texts as the Methodist documents, the constitution and policies is revelatory of ways in which discourses consolidate power and colonize human subjects. Trying to take the African Christians out of their worldview, making them hate their religious beliefs and customs was tantamount to human colonization.

One of the progenitors of Critical Discourse Analysis, Norman Fairclough (1995), summed up the approach as aiming;

to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and, (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations, and processes; to investigate how such practices, events, and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power (1995:132).

The most crucial point that Fairclough is making is that discourses are mostly shaped by the ideologies of the most dominant groups or individuals in society or in institutions. The missionaries in the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) were a dominant group although they were a minority. Thus, the Church discourse, including the rules and regulations were guided and shaped by their ideologies. The western or European worldview had so much impact on the discourse of the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe. The discourse that the missionaries crafted gave them an edge over their black counterparts since it gave them access to control the institution. Blacks members, especially polygamists, could not lead in the church, so it gave the whites the right to lead and decide for their black brothers and sisters. Teun van Dijk (1996) elucidates this relationship between discourse and power when he argues that

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One major element in the discursive reproduction of power and dominance is the very access to discourse and communicative events. In this respect discourse is similar to other valued social resources that form the basis of power and to which there is unequally distributed access (1996:85).

Critical Discourse Analysis, therefore, seeks to alter this inequitable distribution of and access to economic, cultural, and political goods in contemporary society. The intention here is to bring a system of excessive inequalities of power into crisis by uncovering its workings and its effects through the analysis of potent cultural object – texts – and thereby help in achieving a more equitable social order (Kress, 1996:15). The approach stresses not only the decoding of propositional meaning of the text but also its ideological assumption (Huckin, 2012).