Abstract
Prior to his recalling by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) amid national protests in 2017, Zimbabwe’s former president, Robert Mugabe, had, for close to four decades, managed to sustain his rule even when odds seemed overwhelmingly against him. Many studies have broached several aspects of his power-retention strategies and public responses to his rule, mostly from “pure” political science perspectives. This article attempts a paradigm shift in methodology and approaches to this topic. It focuses on how the cultural practice of nicknaming and name-calling can illuminate the nature of Mugabe’s rule and his subjects’ perceptions of it in new ways. The article uses a critical discourse analysis approach to analyze focal nicknames and instances of name-calling in the context of their everyday use by citizens. Invoking Taska’s notion of “watchfulness” as a psychopolitical process preceding and informing the act of nicknaming and name-calling, the study argues that nicknaming and name-calling Mugabe not only reflect the nicknamers and name-caller’s experiences of (and attitudes to) his rule but also refract deeper issues attendant on the ways in which they relate and respond to certain exercises, performances, and displays of power.
Introduction: The Political Semantics of Nicknaming Mugabe
A Google search using the phrase “insult Mugabe” generates heaps of pages of news stories about arrests, trials, and incarcerations of people who (are alleged to) have insulted Zimbabwe’s former president, Robert Mugabe, during his reign. Epithets used in such “insults” range from the light humored such as “Bob and the Wailers” and “Mugarbage” to the mortifying such as “Chikwambo” (a goblin). Although there are many instances of endearing monikers used in reference to Mugabe, the widespread use of “insulting” epithets points to a clear show of distaste of not merely the person of Mugabe but also his rule and politics. Although in the past, many ordinary citizens and politicians have faced arrest for using negative monikers in reference to Mugabe, many still found ways to use the epithets and nicknames as comments on his presidency. This subtle form of political participation was made easier by the explosion of virtual social networks and Internet connectivity, especially through the latest technology of smart phones, tablets, and laptops. Censoring or criticizing Mugabe through such online platforms was difficult to monitor, thus creating favorable conditions for the flourishing of almost unsurveillable communities in which Mugabe could be publicly criticized and even verbally insulted in the relatively safe confines of pseudonyms and other forms of identity concealments. But what do the insults and nicknames tell us about the state of political contestation in contemporary Zimbabwe? This article attempts to answer this question through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach that targets insights about the political relationship between the ruled and the ruler, which can be inferred from the semantic, yet aesthetic, textures of the epithets. The article reads the names, nicknames, and instances of name-calling Mugabe in various social media as forms of utterances and, therefore, as products of psychopolitical acts of self-expression and power negotiation. My interest is in the potential role of such epithets as symbolic signs that refract the deeper political crevices of what may, at face value, seem mundane and politically impotent social acts. In this light, my conceptualization of the utterance is, therefore, particularly informed by Frege’s theorization of the semantics and pragmatics of utterances as steeped in time, when he argued that “the time of utterance is part of the expression of the thought” (cited in Burge, 2005, p. 214). Following on this conceptualization, I zoom in on how the spatiotemporality of the epithets aesthetically reflects the political relationship between the epithet caller and the President.
Zimbabwe has since the turn of the century undergone a debilitating economic and political crisis. Many scholars have traced the crisis back to Mugabe’s controversial methods of fending off opposition and sustaining his rule (Phimister & Raftopoulos, 2004; Raftopoulos & Mlambo, 2009; Nkomo, 2001). Such scholars see in Mugabe’s post-2000 revival of a feisty Black nationalism and racialized national policies such as the land reforms and Black Economic Empowerment regulations, a veiled attempt to retain power in the face of widespread disgruntlement. Raftopoulos (2007), for instance, notes “an internal tension over the content and form of politics of Mugabe’s Pan Africanist message” (p. 182). In the same vein, Scarnecchia (2006) sees similar trends in the “fascist cycle in Italy (1920-1924) and Zimbabwe (2000-2005)” (p. 221). A more recent and scholarly book Mugabeism: History, Politics and Power in Zimbabwe (Muponde, 2015) edited by Ndlovu-Gatsheni grapples with the nature of power and political and national identities inspired by Mugabe. In his contribution to this book, Muponde (2015) argues that
[t]here is no one overarching and conclusive meaning of Robert Mugabe the man and the phenomenon; although there are certain ways he can be read as a coherent subject via the sighting of recurrent motifs in the modes of his thinking, feeling, and operation. (p. 137)
Several other authors have grappled with Mugabe’s character and political, social, and philosophical dispositions especially in the context of his militant anticolonial, anti-White, and antiopposition discourse in the post-2000 period. A dominant thread in texts by these scholars portrays the Zimbabwean crisis as a direct result of Mugabe’s authoritarian rule. This perspective of Mugabe can be inferred from titles such as Andrew Norman’s (2004) Robert Mugabe and the Betrayal of Zimbabwe, Heidi Holland’s (2009) Dinner With Mugabe: The Untold Story of a Freedom Fighter Who Became a Tyrant, Martin Meredith’s (2007) Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe, among others. Most of these books sketch Mugabe’s biography, piecing together his momentous events and rhetoric from the days of the liberation struggle, to tease out the evolution of his political philosophy, especially as it relates to, or culminates in, his post-2000 militant nationalism amid Zimbabwe’s crippling economic meltdown. However, the picture of Mugabe imaged by this kind of enquiry is limited by what selected events, processes, and speeches can detail.
Particularly lacking in these texts is a sustained focus on the ordinary people’s experiences of Mugabe’s rule and some of the cultural ways they use to make sense of (and articulate their views on) the President. More specifically, there do not appear to be any scholarly enquiries that study citizens’ more subtler cultural productions (such as nicknames) produced in response to certain aspects of Mugabe’s rule. This study mainly seeks to demonstrate the potential benefits of an onomastic approach to understanding responses to Mugabe’s presidency by analyzing some of his more conspicuous nicknames in their context. The aim is not only to show how such epithets can be understood as covert forms of protest or, alternatively, an affirmation of his rule but also to reflect on how nicknames and name-calling can be understood as important forms of socio–politico–cultural constructs, which participate in discourses on Mugabe and his rule in new ways.
As Zimbabwe’s sole President since independence from Britain in 1980 to 2017, Mugabe is clearly at the center of the so-called the “Zimbabwean crisis,” 1 and this makes a study of cultural responses to his rule important to a fuller understanding of what the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe would refer to as “where the rain began to beat us.” Such a study can also deconstruct and critically reflect on the limitations of hitherto dominant, “hero-narratives” (Primorac, 2007, p. 437) of Mugabe authored by the state. As Harre (1997) argues in another context, “personal characteristics [of both the nickname and the nicknamed] and history provides the dominant motivation in nicknaming” (p. 66). Consequently, people have created, from history, a nomenclature that designates a cache of behaviors and identities to Mugabe based on their interpretations and experiences of his rule. Such nicknames and instances of name-calling, by their very nature, reflect and refract the deep-seated psychosocial dispositions and attitudes, which are triggered by Mugabe’s rule. As Madsen (1986) argues, “[n]icknaming springs from a process of social discourse by which [people] recognise that they all occupy a common zone of familiarity with shared traditions, interests, and hopes” (p. 59). In Zimbabwe’s highly polarized public sphere, people mostly share interests and hopes along partisan lines. Thus, politics underlies the political and psychosocial dimensions to name-calling and nicknaming and informs how people think, feel, and talk about Mugabe and his rule. This then makes such instances of name-calling and nicknames crucial sites to encounter the nature and motives of the “patriotic” (read pro-Mugabe) and anti-Mugabe discourses in Zimbabwean politics in the recent past and present.
Method and Conceptual Framework: Nicknaming, Language, and Politics
This study is totally a qualitative and netnographical enquiry, which relies heavily on a CDA of purposefully selected nicknames and instances of name-calling on Internet social platforms. My conception of discourse analysis is informed by Gee’s (2014) notion of the method as involving “the study of language in use” (p. 8). For Gee (2014), beyond enhancing us to “say things . . . language allows us to do things ( . . . and) to be things” (p. 2). In this light, I conceptualize the use of language by nicknamers and name-callers as conscious and sometimes subconscious and unconscious acts of saying things in ways that not only “do something” but also reveal the name-caller and nicknamer’s engagement with situations of unequal relations of power. The analysis of the focal nicknames and instances of name-calling, therefore, involves, inter alia, treating them as forms of “language in use” (Gee, 2014, p. 8). It comprehends the semantic and sociopragmatic function of focal nicknames and instances of name-calling in the historical and speech contexts of their use. Analyzing nicknaming or nickname-calling as examples of “language in use” (discourse) can help us to make sense of the political discourse that nicknames can perform or engage in specific contexts. As Gee (2014) notes, “[l]ooking closely at the structure of language as it is being used can help us uncover different ways of saying things, doing things and being things in the world” (p. 9). In the same manner, I perceive nicknaming as a complex sociocultural act involving the nicknamer or nickname-calling person’s attempt to say something (nicknaming or nickname-calling) as a way of “doing things” (commenting on Mugabe’s rule) in ways that can reveal her or his political being.
My analysis of focal nicknames basically follows on Taska’s (2012) conceptualization of nicknames as pragmatic social constructions that reflect not only the nicknamer’s view of the nicknamed person but also the personal identity and values by which the nicknamed person himself or herself can be judged. Although Taska’s theorization of nicknames is in the context of industrial psychology, particularly the function of workplace nicknames in dealing with misbehavior in organizations, it can be fruitfully extrapolated to this present enquiry, which deals with political “(mis)behavior.” Taska (2012) argues that nicknames “[e]xplicitly and implicitly . . . convey impressions, expectations and assessments” of the two parties involved (p. 60), that is, the nickname and the nicknamed. For Taska (2012), nicknames “go to the heart of what people think of someone [and] by expressing closeness and distance, affection and displeasure or admiring acknowledgment, they send signals that set ‘the tone of social intercourse’” (p. 60). Thus, underlying the act or process of nicknaming is not only the nicknamer’s view or judgment of someone’s behavior or conduct but perhaps, more important, the nicknamer’s sense of right and wrong, which informs his or her judgment of the nicknamed’s character or behavior and the choice of the nicknames he or she ascribes to him or her. In view of Taska’s conceptualization above, Mugabe can be viewed as the “manager” whose leadership is furtively evaluated by his subjects through their nicknaming practices.
The “potent meanings” (Fortado, cited in Taska, 2012) of nicknames derives from the “watchfulness” of their assigners (p. 60). For Parman (cited in Taska, 2012), this “reinforces in-group solidarity and encourage[s] circumspect behaviour” (p. 60). However, in Zimbabwe, the notion of “circumspect behaviour” is problematic given the country’s highly polarized political sphere. Consequently, Mugabe’s nicknames are bound to reflect a divergence of political attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. It is, therefore, not uncommon to find one name or nickname such as “Bob” being used by both Mugabe’s critics and supporters, obviously with different intentions and producing opposing “assessments” of his rule. This is when context becomes critical. Studies in sociolinguistics generally concur that utterances make particular semantic sense depending on the context of their utterances (see Meyerhoff, 2006). As Firth’s dictum (cited in Leacock, 2014) “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” shows, context gives the nickname its meaning (p. 65). So too does identifying the context of the nickname-calling serve to locate the nickname in empirical discourses that give it particular significance. The “company” that Firth refers to may transcend other words in the sentence or phrases surrounding a given nickname and instance of name-calling and would also extend to the historical situation of the nickname and name-caller. My analysis of selected nicknames is, therefore, informed by Firth’s (1962) argument (citing Malinowski) that the word’s (in my case, the nickname’s) context of situation “is not merely a setting, background, or ‘back-drop’ for the ‘words’ ( . . . but is a) sort of behaviour matrix in which language ha[s] meaning, often a creative meaning” (pp. 8-9).
Nicknaming and name-calling are some of the most understudied, yet pervasive, subtle forms of counter political action in post-2000 Zimbabwe. Studies on this topic such as Nyambi (2016) and Nyambi and Mangena (2015) are only emerging and have already illuminated the various complex ways through which names, nicknames, and name-calling have not only served the political agendas of both the ruled (Nyambi, 2016) and the rulers (Nyambi and Mangena) but also functioned as alternative archives of processes, acts, and mind-sets produced by the post-2000 political conundrum in Zimbabwe. In my earlier article cited above (Nyambi, 2016), I have, for instance, highlighted how nicknaming became a central act in processes of self-legitimating and delegitimating the political other in the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) succession battles. Focusing on the factional nicknames “Gamatox” and “Weevils,” I hinted at what emerged in my earlier study (Nyambi and Mangena (2015) as a reemerging political practice, in which nicknames are used to whip up political emotions and steering certain affects intended to identify political revivals with political disaster and, consequently, portraying the self as the politically convenient option. In another article (Nyambi, 2017) focusing on political nicknaming as a subtle hegemonic tool in the hands of ZANU PF, I engaged with the aesthetics of the fear generated by ZANU PF’s nicknaming practices in the post-2000 period. The study revealed how the nicknames used in ZANU PF circles, in reference to the opposition, functioned essentially as conceptual metaphors, which inscribed fear on their character, politics, and political identity as a way of self-constructing as the legitimate political custodians of the nation. Unlike these studies, this article focuses on nicknames and name-calling by subjects who occupy margins of power. The crux of the enquiry rests on how the epithets can be read as forms of cultural/linguistic intervention in the tensions characterizing the political relationship between the rulers and the ruled in post-2000 Zimbabwe.
Chikwambo Chinotisveta Ropa 2 : Name-Calling and the Aesthetics of Verbal Transgression
In a post-2000 epoch marked by a politico–economic crisis characterized by run-away inflation and political tensions, Mugabe’s legacy as a liberator came under intense scrutiny (Ranger, 2004; Sachikonye, 2011). In the cacophony of oppositional political constructions of Mugabe, Chuma (2005) sees a “crisis of perspectives” (p. 3). Chuma notes, for instance, how outside Zimbabwe, Mugabe was portrayed in
regional and international media ( . . . as) a central player in the crisis, struggling to shape national memories in order “to downplay its ambivalent and worsening governance record and play up its historic role as the founding party of Zimbabwe.”
In the same light, Ncayiyana (2003) describes Mugabe as a “hero turned villain” (p. 713). This trend in characterizations of Mugabe and his presidency indicates his earlier sound economic policies while emphasizing his ruinous political decisions, especially in the post-2000 period. De Wet (n.d.) cites Morgan Tsvangirai’s perspective of Mugabe, which, I argue, informs the reactionary urge in his (Mugabe’s) supporters to deploy the nickname Bob as a honorific epithet and “response”:
Mugabe’s major opponent in the 2002 Presidential election campaign, Morgan Tsvangirai (Leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)) has portrayed Mugabe as an angry and old dictator associated with “violence, senility, hunger, economic ruin and poverty.” (p. 13)
Tsvangirai’s portrayal of Mugabe above epitomizes the opposition’s critical characterization of Mugabe and his presidency, especially in the post-2000 period. Markedly, this characterization aligns with the use by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) secretary general, Douglass Mwonzora, of the epithet “chikwambo” (a goblin) in reference to Mugabe circa 2009. 3 Mwonzvora and Tsvangirai’s statements can be viewed as alluding to the same point—that Mugabe has ruined the country. However, there is something in Mwonzora’s way of “saying” that makes his expression more politically potent and dangerous to the status quo. In this light, Mwonzvora’s subsequent arrest and trial show that the epithet “chikwambo” performed a politically illocutionary act. It communicated a political perspective in a way that not only shows a conflicting relationship between Mwonzvora and Mugabe but perhaps, more important, can compel his listeners to align their views of Mugabe (Mwonzvora was addressing a political rally) along Mwonzvora’s critical perception of him.
At the heart of Mwonzvora’s way of saying is the conceptual metaphor and its method of describing (and, therefore, characterizing) certain things in terms of others. Howe’s (2006) conception of metaphor can help us better understand the dynamics surrounding the persuasive, yet transgressive, effect of Mwonzora’s epithet vis-à-vis his oppositional political campaign. For Howe (2006), the metaphor “is not a literary technique but a sensory phenomenon, a cross-activation whereby seemingly unrelated things . . . are linked in the brain” (p. xvii). In this light, Mwonzora’s use of the moniker “chikwambo” can be conceived as mapping the horrifying and blood-sucking properties of the “goblin” onto the person and presidency of Mugabe. The implied conceptual metaphor MUGABE = GOBLIN was, therefore, politically convenient to Mwonzvora simultaneously as it was inconvenient to Mugabe. This is because, unlike Tsvangirai’s direct criticism of Mugabe cited above, the metaphor evokes a powerful imagery that compels the prospective voter to reimagine Mugabe in terms of the blood-sucking, murderous, and destructive characteristics of the goblin. The metaphor can, therefore, be conceived of as aesthetically illocutionary, for it targets the listener’s feelings to influence her or him to rethink her or his prior conception of Mugabe.
Neuman, Marcus, Crigler, and Mackuen’s (2007) conception of “an affect effect (. . . in) the way citizens engage in or withdraw from political activity” (p. 1) can help us better understand the politically illocutionary potential of Mwonzvora’s metaphorization of Mugabe, especially his use of “chikwambo” as the source concept. Affect deals with emotions and states of minds. It is, therefore, easy to connect affect and politicking. As hinted above, the epithet “chikwambo” maps dreadful characteristics of the goblin onto the person and presidency of Mugabe. Mwonzvora’s hope (and the authorities’ fear) is that the correspondences impress on the prospective voters to imagine Mugabe as capable of causing them harm in the style of the “chikwambo.” Nyambi (2017) perceives a proclivity for the politics of fear in post-2000 Zimbabwean politics. The connection between fear and politicking in Mwonzvora’s use of the moniker “chikwambo” can best be understood when we frame affect along Neuman et al.’s (2007) description of it as “an episode of massive synchronous recruitment of mental and somatic resources to adapt to and cope with a stimulus event that is subjectively appraised as being highly pertinent to needs, goals and values of the individual” (p. 9). In Mwonzvora’s metaphor, the effect of affect, manifest in its stirring of fear, is stimulated by the metaphorical imagining of Mugabe as vested with the same potency to cause the people harm in the fashion of the goblin. The people’s political decisions, a product of their affected emotions, would, therefore, most likely follow on their human instinct to avoid danger and adjunct to that, to reject the source object of the danger—Mugabe.
In line with my reading of the political semantics of “chikwambo” as facilitated by the epithet’s metaphorical effect, a fascinating point to draw from the Constitutional Court case, in which Mwonzvora was charged for “insulting” the President, concerns the Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku’s scathing attack on the state prosecutor. He said,
Politicians call each other names such as weevils and Gamatox, are you suggesting that you prosecute people for that? . . . If somebody calls the President a weevil or Gamatox, are you going to prosecute that person? It is part of the trade of politics. Why are you bringing such matters to the Constitutional Court? The President is not a goblin and we all know that. Why should the law bother itself about it? You have to be an imbecile to believe that the President is a goblin. (Newsday Online, January 29)
Clearly, the Chief Justice’s response is based on a literal conception of Mwonzvora’s labeling Mugabe a goblin. It would, therefore, suggest that Chidyausiku agreed with the defense argument that Mwonzora’s statement was “subjective and meaningless since Mugabe was not a goblin” (Newsday Online, January 29). An interpretation of the metaphor MUGABE = GOBLIN indicates Mwonzvora’s opinion of what Mugabe was or is capable of doing to citizens, and this characterization defines what he is to them. The metaphor is, therefore, the “line” separating an insult and an opinion. Mwonzvora’s acquittal, therefore, reveals how, in a political context characterized by intolerance to opposition (see Howard-Hassmann, 2010), nicknaming and name-calling became relatively safe methods for transgressive appraisals of Mugabe and contesting his presidency.
Mugabe as Bob: Contexts of Nicknaming, Political Affect and Disaffect
The nickname Bob is one of several of Mugabe’s nicknames that express different perceptions of his presidency and one’s relationship to him depending on the identity of the nickname-caller and the context of the nickname-calling. “Bob” is conventionally derived from a Western naming tradition that shortens boyhood names for “Robert” to endearments such as “Bob,” “Rob,” and “Bert,” just as “William becomes ‘Bill’” and so on. However, to Mugabe’s local admirers mostly in the ZANU PF ruling party, Bob is more than a Western-style short variation of Robert. It is rather a nickname in the sense of Taska’s (2012) notion of a form of “language-making [that] provides the cues or mechanisms for members to draw on available social and cultural resources, such as localised and more generalised oral traditions to convey their responses” (p. 61). In the context of the intense political polarization characterizing post-2000 Zimbabwe, the use of the moniker Bob by people of conflicting political persuasions reflects on the dynamics attendant on their political antagonism. According to Taska’s paradigm, when used by his supporters and opponents, the nickname Bob reveals their “watchfulness” (Taska, 2012, p. 60) vis-à-vis the others’ political framing of the President. In specific contexts, the moniker Bob not only reflects images and counterimages of Mugabe but perhaps, more important, illuminates the politics underlying the ways of seeing, which produce counternotions of Mugabe and his rule. Certain uses of Bob in certain contexts can, therefore, reveal the contradictions in narratives of Mugabe’s political iconography in post-2000 Zimbabwe.
The politics of Mugabe’s iconography as reflected in the nickname Bob in the Third Chimurenga can be inferred, for instance, in its deployment in Last Chiyangwa’s popular song titled Agirimende (agreement). The song was one of the major Third Chimurenga “anthems,” which gained popularity, in part, because of the favored airtime it enjoyed on state-controlled radio stations. Generally, the song was a response to Western (especially British) condemnations of Mugabe’s 2002 electoral victory. Chiyangwa’s song generally portrays Mugabe as the champion of Black freedom whose presidency is owed to the people’s “agreement” to vote for him. In the song, Bob (pronounced Bhobho in the Shona language) is used with connotations of self-pride, self-determination, and self-assertion that reinforces the Third Chimurenga’s anti-Western and Zimbabwe’s prosovereignty politics. Markedly, the line “Mutungamiriri we Zimbabwe ndiBob” ([Zimbabweans agreed that] Bob is the President of Zimbabwe) is repeated twice sequentially, underlining the local victory over the West’s expectation. The second time Bob is mentioned, the singer’s voice is pitched high in a typical ZANU PF sloganeering style. The energy and vindictive tone in the announcement of Bob as “Mutungamiri weZimbabwe” (the people’s choice of a leader) against the wishes of the West not only is in sync with Mugabe’s much-vaunted aggressive temperament in his dealings with the West, particularly with Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair, but also echoes the superficial, yet reverberating, belief in ZANU PF that Zimbabwe is a mightier force than Britain. One is reminded here of another Third Chimurenga song “Zimbabwe ishumba” by the party functionary, Cde Chinx, which constructs Zimbabwe as a lion (“Zimbabwe ishumba”) and Britain as its prey (“Britain inyama”) during the Third Chimurenga. In this context, the informal epithet Bob seems more appropriate to Chiyangwa because it augurs well with the “struggle” mood of the times. Chiyangwa uses the moniker as a form of spiteful cheer whose malevolence coheres with Mugabe’s post-2000 anti-British vengeance.
Associations of revolutionary aggression acquired by Bob in Chiyangwa’s song are further reinforced in the lines preceding and succeeding the one that fervently reassert Bob’s leadership in spite of British machinations against him. The lines go as follows: “Ende land tichangoitora muchida musingade” (“[W]e will take land from white farmers whether you [the British] like it or not”) and “musatinetse musatishupe maBritish” (“don’t cause us problems you British people”). The first line epitomizes the Third Chimurenga proclivity for a ruthless subject position and tone, especially in ZANU PF’s responses to British perceptions of Mugabe’s rule. This can be inferred from the imperiousness of a vengeful declaration to appropriate land from White farmers who are often identified in Third Chimurenga discourses as the “kith and kin” of the British people. The claim to agency and authority over the land is then undergirded by the repeated lines exalting Bob’s power, effectively identifying him as the point of reference and inspiration for the violent anti-White nationalism. Bob is, thus, loaded with connotations of feistiness and imperial combativeness in defense of Zimbabwe’s independence cause.
In ZANU PF circles, the name Bob is not only used with aggressive implications to celebrate Mugabe’s feisty guardianship of Black liberation in the face of neocolonial threats but also used with nativist undertones in reconstructions of Mugabe as a champion of Black people’s economic empowerment. Unlike the political titles such as “His Excellency, President and First Secretary of ZANU PF, Head of State and Government, and Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces,” which indicate the power vested in his office and the commonplace “Robert Mugabe” that carries connotations of ordinariness, the moniker Bob reveals the nickname-caller’s affection and approval—not only of Mugabe—but also his pro-Black policies. The “Bob Is My Man” sticker craze that hit Zimbabwe in the run-up to the 2013 elections is a good example of this usage. The stickers were inscribed onto different shapes, which were emblazoned with a picture of Mugabe punching the air in his typical nationalist-styled fist. Various party slogans such as “Indigenise,” “Empower,” “Develop,” “Employ,” “I’m 100% Zimbabwean,” and so forth framed the stickers, completing a visually catchy narrative that essentially portrayed Mugabe as a leader who is in touch with the fundamental needs of Black people.
Bob in “Bob Is My Man” carries undertones of the urban ghetto lingo, where the phrase “my man” or its variant “my main man” designates a close person to whom one is bound by many strong ties. Bob, thus, refers to a version of Robert who has been informalized and rendered capable of being “owned” by or aligned to the user of the sticker. Given the evident personalization of power around Mugabe (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2009), “owning” Bob was tantamount to the enjoyment of privileges, advantages, and protection that comes with Mugabe’s power. It is no wonder, then, that some people, for instance, minibus taxi crews and illegal taxi operators, took advantage of the “immunity” provided by the “ownership” of Bob through the stickers, to evade arrest at roadblocks and undesignated pickup points.
Bob, Age, Politics, and the Urban Youth Culture
Still on the subject of the affective nuances of Bob, it is important to note the moniker’s connection to ZANU PF’s campaign for the youth vote. This is because this connection can reveal the politics behind ZANU PF’s campaign discourse. Despite the veneration often bestowed on old people by tradition, advanced age can be a huge disadvantage in modern Zimbabwean politics. Mugabe and ZANU PF are clearly aware of the risk attendant on his old age (he turned 93 in 2017), hence the consistent efforts to portray him as strong, healthy, and (ironically) even young. This can be inferred from the common presidential portraits and other party promotional images, which superficially stop Mugabe’s biological time through their tactical use of pictures of a youthful Mugabe. Attempts to keep perceptions of Mugabe’s strength in line with political expectations can also be seen in the energy and aggression with which state functionaries respond to situations and circumstances that may signal his age-induced challenges. An opportune example is the debacle around Mugabe’s fall on descending from a podium in 2015. The incident was clearly damaging to his “fit as fiddle” rhetoric. However, its effects on public opinion and perceptions of Mugabe were countered by the former Information and Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Moyo who not only invoked an instance when a younger president (United States’ Barack Obama) fell but also vigorously rebutted reports of Mugabe fall, insisting, rather, that his physical strength allowed him to “break the fall.”
As a nickname and, therefore (in Taska’s, 2012 theorization), a product of his supporters’ “watchfulness” (p. 60), Bob can be linked to the politics of state reconstructions of Mugabe as “the strong healthy man” (Attree, 2007, p. 58) and other discourses around his (in)capacity to connect with the experiences and worldviews of the younger generations. In ZANU PF circles, the nickname superficially informalizes the name Robert, which is normally used with mundane protocol titles such as “President Robert Mugabe,” “Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe,” and lately, the effusive “His Excellency, President and First Secretary of ZANU PF, Head of State and Government and Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.” The “red tape” feel of these titles do not sit well with the urban swagger culture of youthful voters who are viewed by Willems (2013) as increasingly becoming a fertile political constituency. In a country where demographics suggest the increasing importance of the youth vote, a political campaign tailored to their informal cultural tastes was seen as imperative. The MDC was perhaps the first party to perceive this need and accordingly framed its 2008 campaign with the telling slogan “Morgan is more,” clearly a nod to the Western modern culture, which accentuates his first name over his surname, Tsvangirai. The end result was a fashionable feel that could appeal to the youth.
Fronted by a nonagenarian, the ZANU PF party certainly had a more difficult task to connect with the young voters. Perhaps, one of Mugabe’s most notable attempts to associate with the so-called “Born-Free” generation was his featuring in an urban grooves 4 song aptly titled “Get connected,” which was performed by the appropriately named Born Free Crew in 2010. In the song, Mugabe can be heard rapping using the Shona urban lingo widely used by urban youths. He says, “zvirisei sei Shingi” (“what’s up” or “how are you doing”). Although the youthful singers do not refer to Mugabe as Bob in this song, they do call him Mudhara (“old man”), an affectionate title mainly used by youths to refer to their fathers. In this way, Mugabe is not reinvented as a youth, but he can be said to be reconstructed as “connected” to the youths and as someone with whom they can identify. In some contexts, the nickname Bob is used in attempts to recreate Mugabe—not so much as youthful or seemingly young but as a “strong, healthy man” (Attree, 2007, p. 58) for whom age is proverbially “nothing but a number.” Hence, his perceived exuberance, alertness, and vitality are accentuated over his number of years. The old, yet presumably dynamic and athletic body is celebrated in the ruling party, inter alia, through the spectacle of the Bob Super Cup annual football tournament. The tournament is staged as part of the spectacle of the 21st February Movement, which is named after Mugabe’s birthday. The centrality of youth is constantly displayed by the fact that the commemorations are essentially a national youth event organized by the ZANU PF Youth League. The football tournament is variously named according to the number of years Mugabe turns in a given year. The nickname Bob is prefixed to each number to produce such names as “Bob 89 Super Cup,” “Bob 90 Super Cup,” “Bob 91 Super Cup,” and so forth. Athleticism and agility is emphasized by the criterion used in the selection of participating teams. The tournament is not only the preserve of teams in the top flight national league but also only involves four of the teams that would have finished high in the previous league on the log standings. Because the high-performing teams usually have the biggest fan base, their participation guarantees a large following for the Bob Super Cup, and potentially makes them physically and mentally accessible with a political message.
Saddam Waenda Sare Bob: Counterdiscourse in Popular Mugabe Nicknames
Chiyangwa’s political deployment of the nickname Bob in his song alluded to above typifies the intensely polarized perceptions of Mugabe in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The post-2000 sociopolitical context of Bob encourages multiple meanings of the nickname as, predictably, the nickname Bob also carries subversive connotations when used by Mugabe’s critics and opponents. These critics invoke the same nickname not only to inscribe an affective flair to their disapproval of Mugabe’s policies and style of leadership but also to persuade the listener to search for alternative political dispensations. In opposition discourses, the nickname Bob acquires adverse meanings through its usage alongside words and sentences carrying negative semantic prosodies. This phenomenon can be easily seen in opposition political songs such as Paul Madzore’s “Saddam waendakwa sare Bob” (Saddam Hussein is gone, it is now Bob’s turn). The following lyrics reveal the semantic “contagion” between the nickname Bob and its subversive syntactical “company”:
Saddam waenda sare Bob
Takanga tirere hope Tsvangirai wakatimutsa/ Mugabe akavhunduka kwazvo akatanga kunyora mitemo kamwe kacho kanonzi POSA kamwe kacho kachinzi AIPPA/kusungirira vana veZimbabwe
Saddam waenda sare Bob.
Saddam is gone, it’s now Bob’s turn. We were in a slumber/Tsvangirai woke us up/Mugabe was terrified/He began to write pieces of legislation/one of which was called POSA/yet another one called AIPPA/trying to shackle the people of Zimbabwe Saddam is gone, it’s now Bob’s turn.
Throughout this song, Bob is used in a chorus “Saddam waenda sare Bob,” which constantly punctuates the song. The importance of a chorus aligning Bob and Saddam can be shown by the general importance of the chorus as a structural component of songs. Cope (2009) offers an incisive perspective:
If a song has a chorus, then that song should exist because of that chorus, not the other way around. That is how important it is. Essentially, the chorus should embody the reason why the song was written in the first place, and we are looking at it first because other sections in songs should be considered in relation to, and in appreciation of it. (p. 66)
In Madzore’s song, the chorus essentially expresses a summary judgment of Bob based on a catalog of crimes spread across different sections of the song. Following on Cope’s theorization above, such offenses must be read in terms of the semantic significance of Bob in the chorus. Bob acquires connotations of despotism through its close proximity to (and relationship with) the name and, by implication, the person and character of Saddam Hussein, one of the notorious dictators in recent world history. Madzore’s song can, thus, be viewed as a mobilization strategy that reconstructed Bob as an embodiment of a murderous regime to whip up emotions of antipathy, which could potentially lead to more support for the opposition and mass action against Mugabe. Here, examples of the many curtailments of basic human rights such as freedom of expression and association are invoked to portray Bob as a dictator of Hussein’s proportions. The nickname Bob is here associated with Mugabe’s perceived crimes, which are depicted as a frame of reference and justification for his ousting, as in Hussein’s case.
This association of the nickname Bob with negative political energy and violent agency can also be seen in White Zimbabwean cultural productions, where it fascinatingly reveals some of the cultural ways through which White victims of the Third Chimurenga engage with the politics of their race-inspired victimization. As in Madzore’s song above, the use of Bob inflects negativity to constructions of Mugabe and his rule. Bob is, thus, the butt of many satirical songs by White Zimbabweans shared on the virtual social space, especially the self-broadcasting platform YouTube. One of the most active publishers on this medium is a musical group/individual identifying themselves by the cryptic acronym RCECRD. Although the identity or citizenship of the user is enigmatic, they assume a White Zimbabwean identity in their songs, as can be inferred from their accents and satire especially in one of their songs titled “Song Dedicated to a Dictator.” The chorus line classifies the speaker as an evicted White farmer in the context of the Third Chimurenga land reforms with its politics of racial antagonism and controversies around its methods, successes, and/or challenges. The speaker reveals an antagonistic relationship with Mugabe that is typical of the general sentiment shared by most users on Rhodesian cyber societies such as the Facebook Page “Rhodesians Worldwide.” The group’s use of the nickname Bob essentially associates it with his “infamy” for presiding over the national economic collapse. In “Song Dedicated to a Dictator,” unlike “Robert,” “Gabriel,” or “Mugabe,” “Bob” carries connotations of fateful roguery, thus,
Bob’s your uncle, Bob’s your auntie, Bob’s your man and Bob’s your dad/Bob’s the long lost relative you never knew you had . . . / Bob chased away the farmers/But there is really nothing at play/who cares about the economy, the famine or the war/Bob says anytime we like we come back (to white farmers) we take more/democracy Zimbabwean style/oh what a wondrous thing/Gaddafi pays our petrol bills/and Mbeki makes us sing/Bob cooks the books/Bob steals the show/Bob makes sure he wins/some say Bob is the punishment for all African sins. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNaghNGDc3s)
The hoodlum-like and vacuous associations carried by the nickname Bob in this song are reinforced in the group’s other song called the “Zimbabwe Farm Song.” This links Bob to common stereotypes of Black beneficiaries of land reforms as incapable and sometimes unwilling to match their White predecessors. A reinvention of the English “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” nursery rhyme, the “Zimbabwe Farm Song” depicts two contrasting images of a Zimbabwean farm. There is, on one hand, the pre–land reform, White-owned farm, which is represented as the archetype of Old MacDonald’s Farm with a concatenation of evidence of its prosperity in “a moo-moo here/an oink-oink there, here a chick there a chick everywhere chick chick.” The contrast—a post–land reform, Black-owned farm is evoked as a derelict homestead occupied by clueless and delinquent owners finding momentary pleasure in disposing of the former White farmer’s farm equipment and produce. The “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” rhyme is, thus, “bastardised” to reflect the lack of production at the farm and the speaker’s thoughts and feelings about it:
Mugabe repossessed my farm iya iya eish/And on that farm we had some ducks iyaiyaeish/with a “I want that duck,” “no I want that duck,” “no it’s me that wants to eat that duck”/ Mugabe repossessed my farm iya iya eish/and on that farm we had a tractor iya iya eish/with a “I want that tractor,” “no it’s my taxi, it can take forty-eight people”/tell me what happened to Zimbabwe/the lovely country that we all used to know?/Tell me what happened to Zimbabwe/well I don’t know/ but Bob must go/ Mugabe repossessed my farm iya iya eish/and on that farm we had a cow iya iya eish/with a “I want that cow,” “no I want that cow,” “no I need that cow to pay lobola now.”
Conspicuously, although it is “Mugabe” who repossesses the speaker’s farm, “Bob” is the one who is associated with the eventual failure of the Black farmers and, therefore, responsible for their mediocrity. Reinvoking Cope’s (2009) insight on the centrality of a chorus, one can perceive the emphasis on the connection between Bob and the absurdities of the Black farmers. As in Madzore’s song above, the chorus comes in after a list of “evidence” of the failures at “Zimbabwe Farm,” by asking the question “What happened to Zimbabwe?” Apparently, this is a rhetorical question, not least because it is answered with, “well I don’t know, but Bob must go” (emphasis added). In this way, the nickname Bob is connected to “what has happened to Zimbabwe” through its usage in a chorus line that portrays glaring evidence of a ruinous land reform program to reach the conclusion and solution that “Bob must go.”
Madzibaba Gabriel: A Player and a Prayer 5
Religion emerged in a politically charged post-2000 period as a fertile political ground. At the height of the crucial 2013 election campaign, Mugabe shocked most Zimbabweans by appearing at the Johane Marange Apostolic Church Annual Passover in Bocha with his wife, both clad in the church’s priestly white robes with, bared feet and Mugabe holding the church’s sacred rod. This African indigenous church is one of the most popular churches in Zimbabwe and its male members are given the title “Madzibaba” (father), whereas the female members prefix their names with the title “Madzimai” (women). Momentarily then, the President became “Madzibaba” Mugabe although, judging from his speech, his mission was clearly more political than it was religious. As revealed in Chitando’s (2013) aptly titled and edited book Prayers and Players: Religion and Politics in Zimbabwe, religion is inalienable with political developments in the nation’s colonial and postcolonial history. The Apostolic sects were arguably more overtly political and unwavering in their support of ZANU PF and Mugabe. This is evidenced by their constant participation at party and national spectacles of ruling party power such as the annual Heroes and Independence Day commemorations. The Apostolic sects were especially more receptive to Mugabe because, as an indigenous church, its sacred foundations are premised on their radical repackaging of Christianity on the basis of native and Afrocentric belief systems that are much akin to Mugabe’s indigenization and anti-West ideology.
At his Madzibaba Mugabe moment in Bocha, Mugabe can be seen to have manipulated this ideological–spiritual commonality to his political advantage. The following excerpt of his “sermon” at Bocha reveals the intricate affinity he created between religion and politics:
Vote wisely to safeguard the gains of independence. Your plight is within my heart and we will ensure that your wishes are fulfilled once ZANU PF is voted into government . . . I am surprised that (Barack) Obama says gays should have rights, what rights? It is totally against our culture and this demeans us because we don’t associate with such people. I feel pity about our children scattered across the borders as they copy these cultures. (“Mugabe Pleads for Apostolic Vote,” 2013)
Mugabe’s message (in this Madzibaba moment) is designed to spiritually and culturally synchronize with the fundamental beliefs and expectations of the church. Thus, the popular nickname “Madzibaba Mugabe” is not only derived from his uncharacteristic appearance in the White apostolic garb. In fact, it is culled from his phenomenological immersion in the spiritual doctrine of the church, which allows him to effectively create a spiritual–political affinity between the church members and his and ZANU PF party’s political philosophy. In this way, the line between religious and political concerns is thinned as they easily merge into each other. Thus, in this “sermon,” Mugabe can turn a religious controversy of gay marriage into a political problem with an easy solution, namely, by voting “wisely.”
Following Mugabe’s Apostolic “sermon” to “vote wisely,” the religious epithet “Madzibaba” was widely used especially on social media to variously nickname Mugabe as Madzibaba Mugabe, Madzibaba Robert, Madzibaba Gabriel, and so forth (see, for instance, the article “The Real Madzibaba Robert Is Revealed,” 2010). Taska’s (2012) theorization of a nickname, as informed by a prior “watchfulness,” (p. 60) can help us better understand the polemical function of the humor in Mugabe’s nicknames inspired by the Johane Masowe Apostolic Church debacle. I would like to view these nicknames as forms of political comedy and the nicknamers or nickname-callers as participants in an elaborate counterdiscursive “assessment” (Taska, 2012, p. 60) of Mugabe’s politicking. As Dagnes (2012) notes, “political comedy is supposed to have a viewpoint” (p. 2). The “viewpoint” in the nicknames cited above is in fact a product of the nicknamer or nickname-caller’s “watchfulness” (Taska, 2012, p. 60), which involves a prior sense of moral superiority. It is from this high moral position that the nickname or nickname-caller is able to call out Mugabe’s political “(mis)behavior” (to use Taska’s, 2012, p. 59 word) through nicknaming him. Following Mugabe’s Johane Masowe fiasco and his subsequent sarcastic nicknaming as Madzibaba Gabriel on social media, an Internet-based commentator using the creative pseudonym “Stop-a-thief” inserted a serialized poem titled “Victory Poem” on the readers’ feedback platform of major national newspapers.
6
“Part 4” of the serialization deploys the nickname “Madzibaba Gabriel” to critically engage with Mugabe’s unprecedented campaign:
And each election he comes to rob Takes his family to Rome Claiming he is of Catholic form Cometh his dreaded elections He starts his usual shenanigans Suddenly he is Madzibaba Gabriel Not ashamed of his evil Zimbabweans will not forget To show him the way to the State House gate. (emphasis added)
There is an innuendo in the use of a pun involving the word “rob,” which suggests the persona’s inclination to portray his behavior as unbecoming. “Rob,” in this poem, can easily refer to both Mugabe’s act of stealing elections and the method that he uses—the Apostolic “rob” or garb, that is, his momentary communion with a religious sect whose doctrine is fundamentally opposed to the conservative beliefs of his Roman Catholic Church. By the time the reader encounters Madzibaba Gabriel in line 6, he or she already has been emotionally chaperoned by Mugabe’s charlatanry to profile him as a deceiver. The perspective of Mugabe encapsulated in the nicknames is, therefore, judgmental. In this context, therefore, the nickname reinforces the value of honesty in political leadership in the very act of nicknaming Mugabe for his dishonesty.
Conclusion
Taska’s (2012) notion of nicknames as inherently assessive suggests that their use in reference to individuals and institutions of power is a covert act of negotiating impacts of certain performances of power in the public sphere. Mugabe’s nicknames demonstrate conflicting views of his rule and discourses and counterdiscourses of some of his political maneuvers to sustain hegemony. The conflicting dynamic in the semantic nature and pragmatic function of the nicknames and name-callings is informed by the fact that the nicknames are created and used in a highly polarized speech and political society in which discussions about (and assessments of) Mugabe’s leadership proceed from inherently “interested” political points of view and states of minds. The name-calling and choice of a nickname, thus, depend on how Mugabe and/or any aspect of his leadership style relate to the name-caller or nicknamer’s political consciousness and affiliation. Name-calling and nicknaming are, thus, not mere acts of articulating one’s impressions of Mugabe and his presidency, but perhaps, more important, a critical site to theorize the political illocutionary function of the monikers as spatiotemporal products of socio–politico–cultural forces. The context of the utterance of the epithets was seen to form the basis for their semantic, yet political, function. Thus, when used by opposition political campaigners, nickname-calling and the conceptual metaphor it engenders (such as MUGABE = GOBLIN) heighten the campaigner’s subversive framing of Mugabe and his presidency as threats to people’s lives. The vivid picture of Mugabe generated by the metaphorical correspondences between the concepts “Mugabe” and “goblin” targets the prospective voter’s sense of the fear of death. This can potentially compel them—not only to fear Mugabe and his presidency but also, more important, to seek alternative leaders and leadership. Recently, as Mugabe’s foreign (often medical) trips abroad become more frequent in the backdrop of a constrained fiscus, his critics, have already found a nickname for this inconvenience in his presidency. He is nicknamed “the visiting President,” so called for the little time he spends in the country and on government business in between his foreign trips. This indicates a continuing socio–politico–cultural trend that indicates the importance of nicknames as a salient linguistic resource for understanding displays and performances of power and the popular reactions to it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.