A Decolonial and Social Justice Reading of the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter Cyber Protest: Or When Black Lives Should Matter to Our Selves

Social media provide communication and social researchers a lens through which to glean the pressing social justice issues/questions of the day. This chapter illuminates how the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter movement is representative of the collective yearning for economic and political justice in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Read against the backdrop of the BlackLivesMatter movement’s quest for racial justice and the end of white-on-black violence, it contends that the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter activism contests the hypocrisy of African political elites who decry colonial and contemporary white-on-black violence, while instrumentalising black-on-black violence to consolidate their grip on power. Using a decolonial analytical lens, it disrupts the Zimbabwean power bloc’s ideologically self-serving rhetoric of solidarity with diasporic Africans who are victims of racial injustice. The example of Zimbabwe is used to highlight the coloniality of the injustices faced by continental Africans. Against this backdrop, the chapter argues that a focus on interracial injustice, violence/oppression without a corresponding focus on intra-racial injustice/violence/oppression runs the risk of rendering intra-racial injustice invisible. It is on this premise that the chapter reads the Zimbabwean lives matter movement as indicating that the promise of justice and equality that animated the anticolonial movement has not been realised.