Staging the Zimbabwean ‘revolution’: ‘Carnivalising’ the November 2017 demonstration

Abstract

In this account, I deploy Mikhail Bhakhtin’s concept of the carnival to frame the November 2017 demonstrations in Harare, Zimbabwe, that led to the resignation of former president Robert Mugabe as a carnivalesque or ‘theatrical’ performance. I examine the spatial and theatrical characteristics of this carnivalesque demonstration, highlighting how it created a special form of free and familiar contact among people divided by political, professional and class barriers. Methodologically, I draw from my personal recollections, video recording and photographs in the public domain, the particular spectacular performative that characterize this demonstration as a performance, to historically reconstruct the performance. I submit that these public performances, which mainly took part on the main streets of Harare, challenged and allowed demonstrators to performatively subvert all forms of social (and political) privilege and governmentality. I conclude that through disrupting governmentality and constituting a horizon of meaning and expectation, the performer-demonstrators claimed back their spatial agency, determining and choosing how they democratically used the public space in these urban centres and simultaneously, Zimbabwe’s political landscape.