Making sense of the Second Republic in Zimbabwe through laughter: the poetics and politics of resistance after Mugabe

The research area of Digital HumanThe fall of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s long-time strongman, through a military-assisted coup in November 2017 was a landmark event that attracted a lot of media attention both locally and internationally. When Robert Mugabe fell, the architects of the coup framed his demise as a watershed moment that marked the end of tyranny and the beginning of a new dispensation of political liberalisation and economic prosperity. However, seven years after Mugabe’s fall, little to nothing has changed in the country’s fortunes. If anything, the situation seems to be getting worse. This lecture is an attempt to make sense of the politics of the Second Republic through a critical “reading” of social media comedy, a genre which has become ubiquitous in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. Could it be a coincidence that the Mnangagwa presidency has come to be defined by a comic cultural aesthetic, which has effectively eclipsed the book culture and intellectual dogmatism of the Mugabe era? The overarching question that this lecture seeks to tease out is: How can comedy, a genre which is often associated with fun and entertainment, help us to make sense of (and/or theorise) the politics of the new political order in Zimbabwe?