The Politics of Incongruities in Official Discourse

Abstract Although Zimbabwe has been experiencing an unprecedented economic crisis characterised by high inflation, unemployment, shortages of basic commodities, and rampant corruption, government officials have at different times insisted that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe. If they happened to acknowledge it, they often insisted that the crisis was caused by enemies of the state both at home and away. When President Emmerson Mnangagwa came to power in November 2017, he indirectly acknowledged the crisis by declaring what he called a “new dispensation.” However, it was not long before he relapsed into the contradictory political messaging of the Mugabe era. On the one hand, the regime claimed that the economy was recovering, yet on the other, it maintained that it was nearly impossible for the economy to recover under the ‘illegal’ sanctions imposed by the West. This paper draws on Henry Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Nicholas Holm’s theories of humour and satire to explore how a Zimbabwean newspaper columnist named Muckraker deploys humour and satire to expose contradictions in official communication. In doing so, it considers the following questions: What aesthetic strategies does the columnist deploy to disrupt state narratives, and how do these strategies enable alternative ways of thinking about official discourse? As this article will show, humour and satire are portent tools for unmasking official falsehoods, especially in repressive political environments.