For a nation to progress victims must ‘move on’: a case of Zimbabwe’s social media discourses of Gukurahundi genocide silencing and resistance

ABSTRACT

This qualitative research article is about the meaning of debates on the yet to be officially discussed the Zimbabwean genocide. The main focus is on the meanings of discourses of resistance made by social media interactants and activists; those who either never experienced the genocide or those who experienced it as first-generation survivors and victims and through collective memory passed from generation to generation. My main interest is finding out how these discourses of resistance relate to the ‘new’ political dispensation in Zimbabwe that saw the country’s axed Vice President being installed as the country’s President after a military coup. He later called for the citizens to forget the past and let bygones to be bygones. I question the role of social media in discussing the taboo where memory of the genocide is suppressed and criminalized. The paper further explores the concept of ‘Shonaliness’, i.e. the unproblematized Shona privilege of seeing the world and an insistence that that way is the only correct one. I also address the diagnosis and prognosis through alternative discourses from ordinary people using the subaltern digital public sphere concept as a theoretical framework. Data used in this paper were gathered through purposeful sampling and analyzed using CDA.

KEYWORDS:

• Gukurahundi genocide
• social media
• Shonaliness
• collective memory
• resistance
• Shona privilege

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to the editor and reviewers of this article and the NRF for funding that has assisted me to access reading material. In addition, I would like to thank Dr Edgar Malatji for the support he has rendered me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Shepherd Mpofu

Shepherd Mpofu is an NRF rated researcher based in South Africa. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand and is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Media and Communication at the University of Limpopo. He is also an African Humanities Programme Fellow. His research interests mainly include digital media; media, elections, protests and democracy; new media, diaspora, race and identity; media, violence and genocide. He has published several book chapters and journal articles in reputable local and international publications and journals on these matters. He has also offered media commentary to local and international media around issues that fall within his expertise. He is currently working on a co-edited book on media and xenophobia in Africa and a sole authored book on new media and identity in Zimbabwe.