Musical Parody and Innovative Cultural Activism among Zimbabwe’s Urban Youth in the Age of Social Media

Young people in Zimbabwe have experienced political marginalisation under a repressive regime that silences political dissent. In response, young Zimbabweans have harnessed new media, especially social media, as creative, liberatory and alternative spaces through which they participate in political discourses. Drawing on the genre of music parody, this article examines musical video parodies of Taffy Theman, a popular young Zimbabwean YouTuber based in Australia. Examining parody as a versatile musical and artistic form of political expression, I pay attention to elements of humour and satire as integral elements of parody. Furthermore, the paper engages with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and Achille Mbembe’s conceptualisation of laughter in the postcolonial African context to explore how Taffy Theman uses new media to recreate fellow young artists’ contemporary music in a humorous way to question political cultures and ideologies of repression in contemporary politics in Zimbabwe. I argue that musical parody functions as an innovative multi-media genre that resonates with the ever-evolving cultural activism among urban youths as well as their imaginaries of possibility and change, while also connecting young Zimbabweans who have been pushed out to migrant spaces with ‘back home’.