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This chapter examines how cartoons published in the context of the August 2023 elections in Zimbabwe shed light on electoral politics under the Mnangagwa presidency. During the contested elections of August 2023, a popular Zimbabwean online newspaper based in the United Kingdom, ZimDaily, published a series of cartoons that ridiculed electoral democracy in Zimbabwe, contesting official narratives that portrayed the ruling party, ZANU-PF, as a popular and democratic movement. The cartoons compared Zimbabwean elections to a boxing match where the loser, all bloody and swollen, is declared winner, and a football match in which one team (ZANU-PF) wins by flouting the rules of the game. I argue that the ZimDaily cartoons about the August 2023 elections constitute important sites for the narration of Zimbabwe’s electoral democracy, depicting how elections have become a warzone as opposed to a space for citizens to exercise their democratic right.

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The Comic and the Satirical in Zimbabwean Electoral Politics of the New Dispensation: ZimDaily Cartoons and the 2023 Harmonised Elections

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Rodwell Makombe

摘要

This chapter examines how cartoons published in the context of the August 2023 elections in Zimbabwe shed light on electoral politics under the Mnangagwa presidency. During the contested elections of August 2023, a popular Zimbabwean online newspaper based in the United Kingdom, ZimDaily, published a series of cartoons that ridiculed electoral democracy in Zimbabwe, contesting official narratives that portrayed the ruling party, ZANU-PF, as a popular and democratic movement. The cartoons compared Zimbabwean elections to a boxing match where the loser, all bloody and swollen, is declared winner, and a football match in which one team (ZANU-PF) wins by flouting the rules of the game. I argue that the ZimDaily cartoons about the August 2023 elections constitute important sites for the narration of Zimbabwe’s electoral democracy, depicting how elections have become a warzone as opposed to a space for citizens to exercise their democratic right.