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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.