Othering the Alternative: Nelson Chamisa in the Post-2017 Chief Shumba Hwenje Song

Abstract

Although Emmerson Mnangagwa’s replacement of Robert Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe prompted celebration among Zimbabweans when it happened, his tenure is hamstrung by contested political legitimacy. At the centre of perceptions of Mnangagwa as politically illegitimate is the location of his presidency in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) coup of November 2017 and his failure to win resoundingly in the presidential elections of July 2018 and August 2023. To mitigate this political conundrum, Zimbabwean song artists whose creative vision aligns with the worldview and priorities of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) emerged with a song repertoire in which Mnangagwa’s major political rival, Nelson Chamisa, is otherised as a politically immature alternative and a puppet of western countries. While numerous post-2017 ZANU-PF musical artists have contributed to this song repertoire, Chief Shumba Hwenje is the most prolific among them. This article uses purposively sampled Chief Shumba Hwenje’s post-2017 ZANU-PF songs to discuss the ways in which their representations of Chamisa as a politically immature alternative to Mnangagwa and a puppet of western countries constitute part of the matrix by which ‘Second Republic’/‘New Dispensation’ ZANU-PF has negotiated political legitimacy for Mnangagwa and maintained power since Mugabe’s ouster. It appropriates postcolonial critical conceptions of stereotype as a discursive strategy that mediates the construction of the other as knowable, prone to exaggeration and predictable to unravel how Chamisa’s framing in the post-2017 Chief Shumba Hwenje song speaks to the staying power of Mugabe-era methods of managing political (il)legitimacy through discursive (mis)representation of opponents. The article goes beyond traditional conceptions of power as legislative, judicial and executive to reveal how cultural economies of (mis)representation are also instructive in making sense of political developments in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.