The Battle for the True Zimbabwean Archive of Crisis: Journalist Hopewell Chin’ono’s Facebook Page and the State Archive in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Since independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean government has reserved the right to not only control the national archive, but also to decide what constitutes Zimbabwean history. However, the advent of new media technologies, particularly social media, has opened up new platforms to archive alternative histories and contest hegemonic narratives. Following the economic crisis of the post-2000 period, the battle for the Zimbabwean archive has intensified, with different parties seeking to authorise contesting versions of the national archive. The purpose of this article is to examine how prominent Zimbabwean journalist, Hopewell Chin’ono’s Facebook page can be read as a counter archive that not only records the experiences of ordinary Zimbabweans in the context of crisis, but also contests hegemonic narratives of the state. The article draws on theories of the archive, particularly the view that scholars need to move away from viewing the archive as a specific place where “we deposit records” to think about the archive as the everyday, the world. The study is qualitative and it uses netnography as method to identify and collect relevant posts from Chin’ono’s Facebook page. The study argues that Chin’ono’s Facebook page constitutes an alternative archive that records the everyday in an attempt to contest authorised versions of the Zimbabwean crisis.