Mugabe’s fall from grace: satire and fictional narratives as silent forms of resistance in/on Zimbabwe

Zimbabwean state media has been known to portray the long-serving President as a superhuman who has remained unscathed by the ravages of age. Rumours of his failing health have often been downplayed by narratives of him being as “fit as a fiddle.” This myth of the indefatigable Mugabe was dealt a blow when in February 2015 he fell to the ground in full public view upon his return from an African Union meeting in Ethiopia where he had been named chair of the continental organisation. This paper sets out to analyse the satirical memes that flooded social media after the falling of Mugabe. Bringing into conversation Goffman’s dramaturgical model, Scott’s weapons of the weak thesis as well as Mbembe’s theories of sovereign power, the paper contends that these “memes” led to the emergence of competing narratives that cracked the armour of Mugabe’s invincibility in Zimbabwean political and social discourses. The paper further argues that the memes constitute vital avenues of resisting, contesting, rewriting and availing a different “truth” about Zimbabwe and powerful myths around the fetishisation of Mugabe’s person and power.