Zimbabwe activists capitalise on social media

Acie Lumumba has launched a political party called Viva Zimbabwe which he says will fight against the Mugabe regime.

And protesters linked to #tajamuka (meaning ‘we have rebelled’) – a movement led by Patson Dzamara, whose activist brother Itai went missing over a year ago – has seen dozens of Zimbabweans occupying Harare’s Africa Unity Square and, more recently, protesting against Vice-President Phekezela Mphoko’s continued stay at Rainbow Sheraton Hotel at the taxpayers’ expense.

Openly criticising the government has typically been a risky business in Zimbabwe, and many who have dared speak out against Mugabe or ZANU-PF have been imprisoned, attacked or disappeared. Additionally, over the past few years, media freedoms have been particularly squeezed with more journalists being persecuted and news houses threatened.

It is in this context that online platforms seem to have presented a less traditional but potentially far-reaching way for large numbers of Zimbabweans to both access dissenting viewpoints and share their own. And with mobile penetration at 95.4% and internet access at 48.1%, the implications could be huge.

This kind of online activism is more difficult for the government to monitor, though that has not stopped government supporters trying to push back. Mawarire, for instance, has been intimidated and received death threats. Lumumba’s house was broken into, with the assailants taking his laptop and leaking a sex tape which was on the machine. And many of the protesters who have been part of the #tajamuka movement have been arrested.

The Zimbabwean government has also engaged in its own war of words, firstly trying (largely unsuccessfully) to kickstart the counter-hashtag #OurFlag, but also trying to delegitimse the social media phenomenon as a US conspiracy.

After US ambassador Harry Thomas tweeted “wonder if #Zimbabwe’s #thisflag movement will spread to the US and other nations”, Zimbabwean Minister Jonathan Moyo claimed the US was behind the whole movement. He claimed a meeting the ambassador had held with social media voices was “Evidence of an exposed cat coming out of a see-through bag” and claimed “US envoys ignited social media revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, whose common outcome was bloodshed”.

Furthermore, faced with growing dissent, Mugabe has even threatened to control social media, saying: “There is a lot of filth in it.  There are a lot of serious insults peddled in there…China set up security measures and we will soon look into how they are administering it so that the abuses and insults can be reduced.”

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