Patriot, Revolutionary and Liberator? Representations of Emmerson Mnangagwa in the Post-2017 Chief Shumba Hwenje Song

Abstract

While the advent of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 with Robert Mugabe as founding prime minister was largely received as the best outcome of the liberation struggle of the 1970s and as the foundation upon which a prosperous nation could be built, the euphoria did not last long. Over the years, Mugabe’s rule became increasingly authoritarian to the extent that his ouster by Emmerson Mnangagwa through the coup of November 2017 would momentarily occasion a new sense of hope which the latter’s regime quickly appropriated to configure itself as Zimbabwe’s ‘Second Republic’/‘New Dispensation’. These identities are pervasive in multiple state-centric spaces that are burdened with the responsibility to frame both Mugabe’s removal from office and his replacement by Mnangagwa’s as inexorable. However, it is in the post-2017 Chief Shumba Hwenje song that ‘Second Republic’/‘New Dispensation’ identities have more traction as tropes of eventual political transition in Zimbabwe. This article utilises Afrocentric ideas on the role of art in cultivating truth, justice, harmony, balance, order, reciprocity and propriety to problematise ‘Second Republic’/‘New Dispensation’ identities implied in purposively sampled post-2017 Chief Shumba Hwenje songs’ representations of Mnangagwa as a patriot, a revolutionary and a liberator. It instrumentalises the post-2017 Chief Shumba Hwenje song as the most recent manifestation of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) song and explores the ways in which the selected songs’ representations of Mnangagwa reminisce Mugabe-era politics of violence, state capture, patronage, exclusion, indispensability, polarisation, entitlement and poverty of accountability. The article suggests that while the songs discussed endeavour to depict Mnangagwa favourably, the ease with which they also portray him as steeped in various components of Mugabeist politics contradict the very claim to newness that the post-Mugabe regime articulates through ‘Second Republic’/‘New Dispensation’ identities.