Re-memorying Mugabe through Digital Parody in the ‘New Dispensation’: The cases of Jah Bobo and MukuZim1

This paper analyses the re-memorying of Robert Mugabe through digital parody in what is popularly, yet infamously, referred to as the New Dispensation, that is, the post-Mugabe period. We explore the strategies employed by the parodists, namely, Jah Bobo and MukuZim1, to exhume Mugabe (where the state has failed) and the implications of such creative exhumations on how Mugabe is remembered. We use re-memory here in the sense that it is not only a counterfactual exercise (creating ‘what if’ scenarios to reimagine Mugabe) but also a way of enlarging the archive by attaching imagined narratives to the existing text. This parody highlights counterfactual political performances and narratives by the coup-born regime to reconstitute and re-memory Mugabe, not as the antagonistic motif that he had become before and after the coup, and immutably so through death and burial, but as an unproblematic nationalist predecessor. Most importantly, we explore how the digital parodying of Mugabe has created an opportunity for the state to own his recalcitrant body by proxy, especially through the state's association with, and material rewards for, the digital parodists.