WhatsApp coup jokes and the dialogue on Zimbabwean politics

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the dialogue stemming from viral WhatsApp jokes on the Zimbabwean coup in November 2017. It argues that coup jokes have created an opportunity to discuss the nature of Zimbabwean politics since 2000. This dialogue, characterised by ambivalence, multiplicity, and open-endedness, provides insights on the political traits that have dominated Zimbabwe since 2000. These are rendered as politics of personality, chimurenga and partisanship. While the architects of the coup sought to create and propagate one narrative, later described as ‘restoring legacy’, coup jokes carried internal contradictions, doubts and conflicts which made possible an understanding of the coup narrative as inherently dialogic. Selected WhatsApp coup jokes, which circulated between 14 and 24 November 2017, were studied. Insights from Bakhtin's dialogism were applied to the study of jokes in order to illuminate their contradictions, dualities and openness, and how this enabled an understanding of the traits that have dominated Zimbabwean politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Zimbabwean coup
• humour
• social media
• jokes
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.thestandard.co.zw/2016/01/24/vp-office-break-ins-mystery-deepens/, accessed 5 May 2020.

2 https://www.herald.co.zw/jah-prayzah-prophecy-of-kutonga-kwaro/, accessed 5 May 2020.

3 https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/12/08/569424251/perceived-as-prophetic-of-a-bloodless-coup-zimbabwean-artists-profile-rises, accessed 5 May 2015.

4 https://www.thestandard.co.zw/2017/01/15/mugabe-succession-shocker/, accessed 5 May 2020.

5 https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2017/11/24/zanu-pf-gets-new-lease-life/, accessed 5 May 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hugh Mangeya

Hugh Mangeya (PhD) is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Communication at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. He is the Editor of The Dyke (Journal of the Midlands State University). His major research interests lie in alternative mediation with a specific focus on how citizens in Zimbabwe have appropriated graffiti and the social media as mediascapes for speaking back to power. He has published a number of journal articles and book chapters with accredited publishers.

Cuthbeth Tagwirei

Cuthbeth Tagwirei is an Apartheid Studies scholar currently based at the University of the Witwatersrand as a Research Fellow, with the Centre for Diversity Studies. His research maintains a constant interest in how people in the margins experience and respond to power. He has published over twenty articles in prestigious peer-reviewed local and international journals on wide ranging subjects including race, gender, class, disability, xenophobia and cultural identity. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Zinyekenyeke: The Apartheid Queue of Harm. In this manuscript, he makes the case for re-examining poverty, servitude, deprivation, humiliation, disease and so forth from the point of view of a new discipline, Apartheid Studies, which pursues an inductive study of apartheid.