Abstract
This study is about the digital political communication of Zimbabweanness. It investigates how political satire in Zimbabwe discursively constructs, critiques, contests, mediates and negotiates national identity, what it means to be a Zimbabwean, and who or what authorises such belonging. Two YouTube channels specializing in satiric political skits, Bus Stop and Magamba TV, are used to demonstrate this discursive construction. The digital sphere has enabled new imaginaries countering public discourse on state-controlled media. The study traces contestations of Zimbabwe’s national identity since independence in 1980, refracted by the Gukurahundi genocide, questions over national sovereignty and national security, the fast-track land reform programme, and human rights abuses perpetrated by the incumbent ZANU-PF government. From the off, Zimbabwe’s nation building project was framed in a particularistic way, invoking race and ethnic belonging as central pillars, and privileging ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe with the power to include and exclude from this national project. The formation of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), in 1999 further sharpened the politics of belonging as people regarded as sell-outs, unpatriotic, totemless and not Zimbabwean faced exclusion and stigmatisation, even rejection, eviction and ejection from the national project presided over by Mugabe. The articulation and rearticulation of Zimbabwean identity reached an inflection point in the second decade of the 21st century as Zimbabwe arrived at a crossroads. The land reform programme had concluded but with many questions remaining, battles with the MDC had settled into attrition, and ZANU-PF was breaking up into factions, leading to Mugabe’s ouster. With the rise of Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa as president, questions about Gukurahundi returned with a new salience. This is the context in which this study drew on satirical skits that seemed to feed off this inflection point. The study proposes a conceptual framework that deploys a context-sensitive understanding of satire relevant to the global south and to Zimbabwe. Through the adoption of a multi-modal approach that combines elements of critical discourse analysis, visual and semiotic analysis, and thematic content analysis, the study concludes that Magamba and Bus Stop TV are successful in utilising opportunities inherent in the inflection point and crossroads facing Zimbabwe to open and amplify new spaces for contesting, negotiating and critiquing what it means to be Zimbabwean and to belong to the national project. The satiric platforms use the digital sphere to bypass centralised state censorship and to get away with subversive messaging and political communication that would have been censored previously. Performative strategies that articulate national identity constructions through allusions, hyperbole, visuality, juxtaposition, colloquialisms, comedy, gesture, topicality, vividness, parody, and exaggeration have found audience, salience and resonance, democratised expression, altered and expanded the range of political communication in Zimbabwe in new and profound and ways.