Historical and Contemporary Expressions of Populism in Africa and Beyond

Day 1 Monday, November 18

Coffee and registration: 9:00 am - 9:30 am
Rackham Bldg, Earl Lewis room, 3rd floor

Welcome Remarks and Opening 9:30 - 10:00 am
Rackham Bldg, Earl Lewis room, 3rd floor

Session 1: 10 am - 12 pm
Rackham Bldg, Earl Lewis room, 3rd floor

Populism in Comparative Perspective

Chair: Anne Pitcher, University of Michigan

Geoff Eley, University of Michigan 
Calling the People into Politics: Left, Right or Center?

Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University
The German Extreme Right and Southern Africa: From the Nazi Party at UCT to the AfD on Herero Reparations

Elzbieta Matynia, The New School for Social Research
Democracy as Conspiracy: Reversals in Poland and South Africa

Lunch: 12 pm - 1.30 pm
Rackham Bldg, East Conference room, 4th floor

Session 2: 1.30 pm – 3:30 pm
Rackham Bldg, Earl Lewis room, 3rd floor

Populism from Above

Chair: Keith Breckenridge, University of the Witwatersrand

Mekonnen Firew Ayano, University of Missouri School of Law
Populist legality and politics of cultures

Daryl Glaser, University of the Witwatersrand
South Africa’s Ideologically Eclectic Racial Populisms (Pre-recorded presentation)

Sylvester Akhaine, Lagos State University
Populism and the Anti-corruption Trope in Nigeria’s Politics

Coffee/tea break: 3.30 pm - 4.00 pm
Rackham Bldg, Earl Lewis room, 3rd floor

Session 3: 4.00 pm – 6.00 pm
Rackham Bldg, Earl Lewis room, 3rd floor

Populism as resistance of the poor

Chair:  Shireen Hassim, Carleton University and University of the Witwatersrand

Li Pernegger, University of the Witwatersrand
City of Strife: Agonistic Responses to Service Delivery Protests in Johannesburg

Johannes Machinya, University of the Witwatersrand
Migration and politics in South Africa: mainstreaming xenophobic populist rhetoric into the national political discourse

Julia Hornberger, University of the Witwatersrand
Populism and the circulation of fake medication

Jacob Boersema, New York University
Populism and Whiteness in South Africa

Tuesday, November 19

Coffee/tea: 9.00 am - 9.30 am
Rackham Bldg, East Conference room, 4th floor

Session 4: 9.30 am - 11.30 am
Rackham Bldg, East Conference room, 4th floor

How democracies fail/ austerity and populism

Chair: Anne Pitcher, University of Michigan

Rod Alence, University of the Witwatersrand
Structural Adjustment as Radical Populism: Ghana under Rawlings, 1982-83

Benjamin Fogel, New York University
The 'new politics' of Bolsonarismo: Lessons from the crisis of politics and the New Right in Brazil

Patrick Bond, Wits University School of Governance
Neoliberal liberalism -> African authoritarianism -> Disorganised dissent

Lunch: 11.30am -1.00 pm
Rackham Bldg, West Conference room, 4th floor

Session 5: 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Rackham Bldg, East Conference room, 4th floor

Cultures of Populism

Chair: Keith Breckenridge, University of the Witwatersrand

Tinashe Mushakavanhu, University of the Witwatersrand
There is Nowhere to Go Mister: Dambudzo Marechera’s poetics of resistance

Alice Wabule, University of the Witwatersrand
Analyzing the populism in David Bahati’s anti-gay campaign from the lens of Critical Diversity Literacy

Jacqueline Mgumia, University of Dar es Salaam
The Performance and Trickle Down Effect of Populism

Coffee/tea break: 3.00 pm - 3.30 pm
The Graduate Hotel, Huron Room

Session 6: 3.30 pm - 5.30 pm
The Graduate Hotel, Huron Room

Media and the circulation of ideas

Chair: Shireen Hassim, Carleton University and University of the Witwatersrand

Albert Sharra, University of the Witwatersrand
Creativity in populism: New faces, ideas and approaches in Africa

Chipo Dendere, Wellesley
Internet Shutdowns in Africa: When and why do governments ban the internet

Shepherd Mpofu, University of Limpopo
Liberator gone rogue?: Social media in the (de)construction of Robert Mugabe’s legacy

Session 1: Populism in Comparative Perspective

Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

Calling the People into Politics: Left, Right or Center?

Abstract forthcoming

Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University

The German Extreme Right and Southern Africa: From the Nazi Party at UCT to the AfD on Herero Reparations

The loss of Germany's African territories at the Treaty of Versailles elevated the memory of Empire to a significance for German populist and fascist ideology which it has never entirely lost. This paper looks at the place which 'Africa' occupies in the current discourse of the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) through the lens of this long history. From the downfall of the Kaiserreich to 1945, the loss of colonies became one of the major grievances of the German ultra-right, and was to be repeatedly raised as an issue by the Nazi regime. The question was further complicated by the significant presence of German settlers in South West Africa and South Africa. The Nazi Party was started in southern Africa in 1932 by Professor Hermann Bohle of the University of Cape Town, and became enormously popular amongst the region's German communities, especially in Namibia. Bohle's son, Ernst, became the head of the Nazi's Auslands-Organisation, controlling the party's overseas branches, and was convicted at one of the minor Nuremberg Trials.  In the postwar period, support for the apartheid regime, and especially for the status quo in Namibia, became a theme of even fairly mainstream German right wing politics, with the leader of the Bavarian CSU, populist Franz Josef Strauss, making it a particular focus in his political career. Gustav Sonnenhol, the Vorster-era German Ambassador to Pretoria (and former SS member), became an important pro-apartheid ideologue.  In recent years, the imaginary of 'Africa' has featured rather prominently in the AfD's propaganda, centrally as a source of frightening imagery in its anti-immigration politics. But it has also played a part in the AfD's project through a celebration of the colonial era, dramatized through the party's strenuous opposition to reparations for the Herero and Nama genocides. The paper argues that this discourse is best understood not just in relation to the general history of German colonialism, but to the very specific dynamics set in motion by the 1919 loss of empire. More broadly, the point is that although contemporary populists construct bogus representations of threat and national humiliation, they do so in relation to the specific national ideological legacies on which they build. To demonstrate this, the paper makes some comparative comments, highlighting the differences between the AfD's Africa-discourse and that of the UK's UKIP and Brexit Party and France's Front national/Rassemblement national. 

Elzbieta Matynia, The New School for Social Research

Democracy as Conspiracy: Reversals in Poland and South Africa’

It was three decades ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that promised a new beginning and demonstrated the possibility of comprehensive systemic change without bloodshed. Velvet, ne or otherwise un-radical, this kind of revolution has become a “site” of tangible hope, a site in which words have power, in which people are allowed to speak and are listened to, and where they realize their agency through instruments other than weapons. What a victorious triumph of liberal democracy… what a perfect backdrop for proclaiming the end of history. So what has happened to this democratic imaginary that had the power to mobilize people across Eastern Europe, South Africa, and beyond? How is it that democracy has made such a u-turn, and that so many of us are now struck dumb as we watch its massive reversal? And how come de-democratization, under various guises, is taking place virtually everywhere? This is to explore the paradoxes that link the opening up of democratic transformations launched in Poland in the Spring of 1989, and 5 years later in South Africa to its troubling shrinkage three decades later.

Session 2: Populism from Above

Mekonnen Firew Ayano, University of Missouri School of Law

Populist legality and politics of cultures

My essay looks at a populist current in today’s Ethiopia. This current is not exactly the kind of “anti-elite” populism of political figures and parties permeating much of the Western democracies. The populist genre thriving in Ethiopia appears in the form of a widely dispersed “private” activism as well as governmental (governmental officials’) propaganda tinged with sectarian doctrines and relying on the old and new media platforms. Its ideological and political forces come from claims of rights of cultural groupings. The cultural-rights claims are imbued with legality, turning cultural groupings into legal and political constellations, as Ethiopia’s post-military Constitution (1995) creates a federal arrangement recognizing the “nations and nationalities” rights to self-determination. These rights are exclusive and include the right to develop one’s language, cultures, and form a country by breaking away from the federal arrangement. The constitutional expressions imbue “populist” cultural-rights claims (“ethnic populism”) with legality. I will describe three tropes of cultural-rights populism. First are the groups representing claims of rights of particular cultural groups. Here the examples are too many as there are de facto private activists of the “rights” of every major ethnic/cultural groupings. The political clout of these cultural activists has been steadily growing. The second is a loosely connected group that represents a political image “Ethiopia” as a uniform cultural grouping. Positioning this group’s agenda is difficult. This is partly because the group represents individuals who come from relatively diverse cultural groupings. Also, the group presents itself as pan-Ethiopian and receptive of cultural pluralism. But critics consider that a charade shadowing a particular cultural agenda. The group indeed drives cultural populism of a different kind – a vaguely articulated pan-Ethiopian vision – from an angle disdaining aspect of particular cultural rights, local histories, and problematical political programs. The group does not reject cultural politics; it merely presents a different picture of culture and cultural politics. The third, representing largely government officials, is a position that has moved across the spectrum between the two political and ideological positions. Over the last two decades, since in 1991 when the military government fell, the official position sought to balance those two socially embedded political and ideological forces. Since 2018, however, a group of former officials who are ruling in what seems to be different agenda and political program are emphasizing notions of “synergy”, “personal responsibility”, “mind-set”, and “prosperity”. These notions have often been expressed in terms, forms, and contexts demeaning cultural and political grouping. Under the trope, “anti-elite” propaganda is gaining traction among the top power circle.

Daryl Glaser, University of the Witwatersrand

South Africa’s Ideologically Eclectic Racial Populisms

South Africa is currently roiled by a range of populist movements, including the Economic Freedom Fighters, Black First Land First, the Zuma wing of the ANC, Numsa and the ‘fallist’ student movement. These groups fight ostensibly dominant elites in the name of masses of people whom they claim are excluded from the post-1994 democratic dispensation. Like many populist movements globally, they tend to be majoritarian-democratic rather than liberal-democratic – they are polarizing, intolerant, hostile to liberal elites, militarist and engage in coercive mass mobilisation. However, a notable feature of the populisms examined here is that – like, say, Chavismo or Corbynism – they present themselves as leftist rather than rightist. They draw freely upon Marxism-Leninist, anti capitalist, anti-imperialist and even intersectional discourse. However, like conservative national populisms, they are also specialists in ethno-racial polarisation, mobilizing nativist sentiment against alleged alien interlopers. The result is ideological eclecticism, compounded often by political and ideological opportunism. This particular left-right eclecticism is not however unique to the contemporary South African scene: it joins the country’s populisms less to any global populist moment than to a longer global history of left-right crossover movements and of movements allying the left to ethno-racial nationalism.

Sylvester Akhaine, Lagos State University

Populism and the Anti-corruption Trope in Nigeria’s Politics

This paper will focus on the anti-corruption trope as a populist factor in Nigeria’s politics in the prevailing fourth republic. It will do this in the context of the historicity of populism in Africa’s politics and the recent world-wide rise in populism. The paper will argue as follows: One, that populism has electoral value in societies with disarticulated economy and massive social disempowerment because it provides a basis for competing claims of freedom from the social conditions that plague them. And two, in the developing world, anti-corruption as a streak of populism converges with aspects of neoliberal economic policies, such as openness, transparency and the rule of law embedded in the Monterrey Consensus. Therefore, it attracts overt sympathy   to the populist regime from agencies of global governance. The paper will conclude that populism in the main is hollowed and serves no transformation goal other than electoral value in the prevailing context in Nigeria. More importantly, it harbours the potential for inflaming identity crisis in a multinational society like Nigeria

Session 3: Populism as Resistance of the Poor

Li Pernegger, University of Witwatersrand

City of Strife: Agonistic Responses to Service Delivery Protests in Johannesburg

I interrogate state-society conflict in a new way by exploring the state’s agonistic management of service delivery strife in the case of the post-apartheid Johannesburg metropolis. Anti-state citizen protest across the globe has been on the rise in recent years pointing to a seeming 'failure' of the state and democracy to engage in appropriate urban governance. Despite South Africa’s so-called miraculous transition from apartheid to democracy, the state has struggled to come to grips with citizen dissatisfaction as expressed in service delivery protests. Popular perceptions abound that protests are violent, politically motivated and ineffectual at changing the state's governance practices. However, the story behind protests is far more complex than it appears on the surface. Two trends cause the state concern. One, South African protests now number 2 000 a year and climbing, most aimed at local government (Runciman, 2017). Two, protests are escalating in violence and the state's response is reportedly more militarised (von Holdt, 2013). However, scholars tend not to document the state's responses to protest, nor the perspective of its agents that deal with these situations of conflict. How does the state respond to conflicts? What impacts can an ‘agonistic’ state—one that accepts that conflict, including protests outside procedurally prescribed frameworks, is a potentially creative and constructive force for continued democratic change—have on these conflicts? This paper draws on recent doctoral research on stories of city strife in Johannesburg. This case study incorporates documentary analysis, over 30 interviews with state-affiliated respondents, and material on over 470 service delivery protests against the post-apartheid metropolitan administration. Stories of conflict in informal settlement development in Orange Farm, informal trading management in the Inner City and city billings administration in middle-class suburbs provide fresh insights into the intersection of city governance and protest. This paper provides insights into the local-level state's qualification of the conflicts and its portrayals of protestors; its agonistic and antagonistic responses to protestors' claims, and power dynamics; and the forms of agreement reached (or not). In considering these stories, the state’s responses to conflict in post-apartheid Johannesburg are revealed. Evidently, the local state responded immediately to incidents of protest, but it also responded over the longer term to the underlying issues. The state applied different extents of agonism and antagonism in conflictual interaction with some unexpected effects (Pernegger, forthcoming). Apparent innovation in urban governance and enhancement of institutional change offers lessons on a more responsive governance which deepens democratic ideals. These agonistic experiences offer potential lessons with implications for the global democratic discourse on the potential of agonism in practice.

 Johannes Machinya, University of the Witwatersrand

Migration and politics in South Africa: mainstreaming xenophobic populist rhetoric into the national political discourse

This paper examines how South Africa’s political elites mobilise populist political narratives, which stimulate an already long-standing anti-foreigner attitude among the people of South Africa, that target a particular ‘Other’ – the ‘illegal’ foreign nationals – as social pathogens whose presence not only defiles the national body politic as a diseased and criminal people, but also causes the socio-economic problems bedevilling the country – crime, unemployment, poor health, the problem of housing and others, and encumbers the capacity of national institutions to solve such problems. The research will use a qualitative approach through discourse analysis to examine the politicians’ public speeches (at rallies and various mass and/or social media platforms) on ‘illegal’ migration. Through further discourse analysis of social media debates (particularly on Twitter and Facebook), the research will further explore how the politicians’ epistemic refusal to name the various forms of violence on foreigners as xenophobia (instead, attributing them to criminal motives) legitimises and normalises xenophobic sentiments. This study will significantly contribute to alternative ways of understanding the complex interplay of populist political discourse and xenophobic violence in South Africa and elsewhere through interrogating how political elites stimulate, cultivate and normalise xenophobia through their anti-foreigner public pronouncements.

Julia Hornberger, University of the Witwatersrand

Populism and the circulation of fake medication  

In South Africa and even more so in other Southern African countries, the suspicion and the accusations that certain goods are fake are closely connected to nationalistic if not racist assumptions about the origin of the objects themselves, or about the origin of the person who is distributing and selling them. This is especially true in the case of goods from China, or goods sold by Chinese merchants. But it also comes through when, for example, in 2018 in Johannesburg a bizarre mix of YouTube videos went viral unleashing a viscous suspicion that foreign shop owners running small township grocery shops were poisoning South Africans by selling fake food. When it comes to fake medication it is often their Indianness which evokes the suspicion and outright rejection. Here, age-old patterns play themselves out with the (Indian) merchant representing rapacious capitalist forces exploiting a seemingly upright, and bound to much more rural values, ‘native’ African population (Soske). At the same time, when people actively seek and consume what others call fake goods, it is often with the desire to participate in the modern world. Fake goods provide a short-cut to modernity (Abbas) and make exclusive goods popularly available. And indeed, Indian generics are considered as the pharmacy of the poor; Indian doctors working in Africa have contributed to making biomedical services more widely available to the working poor. Fake iphones bring slick design to the township. I am then interested in how fake goods, especially fake pharmaceuticals, mediate the thin line between the popular and the populist. Fakeness is not a fact; it is a highly interpretative and relational signifier. It allows people to position themselves in a fraught field of geopolitical capitalist trade relations and local struggles for dignity and recognition.

Jacob Boersema, New York University

Populism and Whiteness in South Africa

Abstract forthcoming

Session 4: How Democracies Fail/ Austerity and Populism

Rod Alence, University of the Witwatersrand

Structural Adjustment as Radical Populism: Ghana under Rawlings, 1982-83

Jerry Rawlings' government adopted policies of macroeconomic stabilization in 1983.  Though not the first case of what came to be known as "structural adjustment" in Africa, it was the most dramatic. When Rawlings seized power on the last day of 1981, he was already well known for his radical populist rhetoric, which pitted hard-working, productive Ghanaians against a corrupt, parasitic elite.  Yet within a year and a half his government announced a package of severe fiscal austerity and major exchange-rate devaluation, backed by the IMF and the World Bank.  Besides running straight into the teeth of most of the organized "left" in Ghanaian politics, the move contradicted many Western economists' conception of populism as intrinsically opposed to orthodox macroeconomic stabilization. Previous explanations of the policy shift have emphasized the brute financial leverage of the IMF and the World Bank, or they have asserted an unlikely conversion of Rawlings to neoliberal economic ideals (or both).  In this paper, I offer a more nuanced, micro-level account of decision-making within the government in 1982 and early 1983. My account draws on primary documents and interviews with key individuals across the political and policy spectrum (including with Rawlings himself).  A central contribution is to theorize and document a largely overlooked source of the policy shift: Rawlings' interactions with a diverse group of economic experts he convened to advise him.  I show that "confirmatory signals" from experts across the policy spectrum -- including notable critics of IMF and World Bank prescriptions -- motivated Rawlings' decision to commit to macroeconomic stabilization.  This commitment flowed directly from Rawlings' radical populism - though time unsurprisingly revealed deep ambivalence over the "structural" part of structural adjustment.

Benjamin Fogel, New York University

The 'new politics' of Bolsonarismo: Lessons from the crisis of politics and the New Right in Brazil

In October of 2018 Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro, possibly the most extremist president ever elected in a major democracy after a campaign defined by vicious polarization and the collapse of mainstream center-right parties. This paper analyzes the rise of Bolsonaro and its implications and lessons for Africa––in particular South Africa. Drawing on the italian historian Enzo Traverso’s concept of ‘post-fascism’. I argue that Bolsonaro’s election victory in 2018,was due to the ability of the Bolsonaro coalition - the Boi (Beef), Bala (Bullets) and Bibilia (Bible) blocs - to transform mass anti-systemic sentiment towards reactionary politics through the figure of Bolsonaro. This paper analyzes the political blocs that comprise Bolsonaro coalition and asks if similar forces exist or are forming in South Africa. I argue that Bolsonaro’s victory was facilitated by the personalization of political, social and economic crisis through the articulation of an anti-corruption politics in which only a messianic figure located ‘outside of the system’ will be able to exert meaningful change through cleansing the nation of ‘the old politics’ of horse trading and graft. At the core of the ‘new politics’ of Bolsonaro is the violent defense of elite privilege, the destruction of the public sector, and the expansion of neoliberal accumulation throughout all sectors of Brazilian society.

Patrick Bond, Wits University School of Governance

Neoliberal liberalism -> African authoritarianism -> Disorganised dissent

Neoliberalism’s global scale crisis has been most acute in Africa, in terms of economic welfare, human suffering, ecological damage and policy sovereignty. Social opposition to the first rounds of dissent was quelled during the 1980s, and export-led growth strategies finally appeared to pay off when, during 2002-11, commodity prices soared and “Africa Rising” became the watchword. However, as commodity prices plateaued during 2011-14 and then crashed, authoritarianism has revived. The reimposition of neoliberal policies, a new round of unrepayable foreign debt (in part associated with Chinese-funded infrastructure), and renewed austerity are all bearing down. From internal elite circuits, this threatens to unleash a well-known combination of neoliberalism, neopatrimonialism and repression by authoritarian leaders. New rounds of protests, often arising as a direct result of these economic catalysts, were witnessed in some of the most famous sites of struggle such as Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, Nigeria in 2012, and South Africa at various points in recent years. Ongoing strife has also brought intense pressure on governing regimes in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Senegal, Sudan, Togo, Zambia and Zimbabwe, leading to major political reforms and even changes in regimes. This article examines the dynamics of this process to expose the neoliberal foundations of rising authoritarianism accompanied by repression – and what is sometimes termed populist resistance – across the African landscape.

Session 5: Cultures of Populism

Tinashe Mushakavanhu, University of the Witwatersrand

There is Nowhere to Go Mister: Dambudzo Marechera’s poetics of resistance

Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera is less famous for his ideas than for his public behavior. Yet, Marechera was an astute political observer who gave some of the most penetrating analysis of the early years in Zimbabwe’s democratic project. He was not sold on the populism that saw Mugabe win resoundingly in the country’s first plebiscite, or the populism that was whipped up to massacre the Ndebele people.  He warned his contemporaries – writers, intellectuals and artists – that ‘when politicians talk about culture, one had better pack one’s rucksack and run…’ His reading of the relationship between populist politics and culture anticipated the latter years of Mugabe’s rule when he introduced 100% local content on radio and TV, and destroyed the publishing infrastructure and any capacity for meaningful cultural and knowledge production. In this presentation I seek to read Marechera’s sensitive and incisive creative contributions through mapping the impact of his enduring critique of Mugabe’s populism and nationalist narrative.

Alice Wabule, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Analyzing the populism in David Bahati’s anti-gay campaign from the lens of Critical Diversity Literacy

The paper seeks to bring to light; what is populism about Bahati’s moralizing anti-gay campaign. I articulate his campaign as an idealized propaganda technique that relies on ideas of a dominant culture and religiosity for manipulating mass consciousness to justify negative stereotypes, harassment, discrimination, and violence, thus, creating oppressive social structures that maintain categories of inclusion and acceptance or censure for one’s sexual orientation. The major questions that the paper seeks to answer are; should collectivism, be it culture or religiosity serve as a pinnacle for moralizing given their conservatism? Is culture a constant? Looking at this from the critical diversity perspective, firstly, I explain how Bahati’s ideas were constructed with selfish intentions, perhaps as a strategy for seeking recognition and power, by way of elevating his political status with little consideration for the consequences that created disabling conditions for the exercise of one’s rights and freedoms, and denying individuals a chance to live a happy and healthy life. I then apply the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework to show the myth of a homogeneous world in the 21st century. CDL is emphasized as a strategy for understanding and celebrating difference rather than subjecting our thinking and actions to the dominant collectivists. It shares the commitment to uncovering assumptions that obscure more penetrating understandings of historical and current social realities. I conclude by arguing that the changing social imaginary of contemporary times require more rights-based ethos in regard to how we think about ourselves, including those groups that are oppressed against the backdrop of the social collectivists in enhancing social justice.

Jacqueline Mgumia, University of Dar es Salaam

The Performance and Trickle Down Effect of Populism

Populism is appraised negatively in a lot of literature, especially in what is considered to be left wing or progressive literature. This article is written from an anthropological perspective that seeks to show why some elements of populism are attractive to marginalized groups, particularly poor women in Tanzania. Using examples of gendered political performances drawn from the 5th phase Presidency of Tanzania, this article presents four elements that are used by Tanzania’s political elites to attract the attention of the poor, particularly women. First, the elites tend to adopt a leadership style that invests heavily in declaring and demonstrating affinity to and sympathy with the fortunes and aspirations of the poor. Second, they attempt to offer plausible justification for non-adherence to key basic liberal ideas of justice, such as the rule of law and separation of powers, in the name of the poor. Third, they also seek to offer plausible justification for acting instantaneously and outside institutional frameworks to address systematic oppression and injustices of the poor. Fourth, their style of leadership is presented as capable of acting spontaneously in resolving pressing problems that poor women are facing. Overall, the paper demonstrates how some elements of populism have been able to turn public rallies into administrative decision-making and court spaces that receive and rule against injustices of marginalized groups or individuals. Intriguingly, in these spaces, the political elites present themselves as the savior of the poor, from the failures of state structures and/or the poor performance of civil servants. These spaces were uniquely initiated by the President giving orders and instantaneously taking disciplinary action against his subordinates in favor of marginalized groups as well as providing financial support to poor individuals, an approach that has become popular very quickly with marginalized groups, and its adoption trickled down to political elites at different levels in Tanzania. In this context, this paper will argue that the poor, particularly women, are inadvertently incentivized to consent to the quick fix processes that seem, nonetheless, to dis-empower collective action and agency, without addressing the underlying structural reasons for marginalization. Yet, his approach seems to provide hope and relief to the prolonged injustice experienced by the poor.

Session 6: Media and the Circulation of Ideas

Albert Sharra, University of the Witwatersrand

Creativity in populism: New faces, ideas and approaches in Africa

Populism as a persuasive political phraseology continues to inform significant waves of grassroots contention across the world triggering seemingly extraordinary developments determining processes of democratization. However, despite observable developments in populism, researchers continue to focus mainly on populists in formal political structures such as Julius Malema in South Africa, ignoring bottom-up populism created outside established political institutions and championed by charismatic leaders without history in populism or activism. Pastor Evan Mawarire, founder of #ThisFlag movement in Zimbabwe, is one such example promoting right-wing populism. He created a protest video tied to the themes of the country’s flag, explaining how Robert Mugabe’s leadership was violating the nation’s core values. The video was shared online and went viral creating a nationwide protest. In a world where protest messages are everywhere online, not all protest posts can lead into an online movement. It is, therefore, imperative to investigate how such populists create bottom-up populism. Most important to study is the tactics emerging populists use with social networks (Facebook) being the main tool for political mobilisation of mass constituencies against established elites. This paper wants to expand on existing literature by investigating how emerging populists outside established political institutions use creativity to create online slogans/hashtags for political mobilisation of mass constituencies against established elites. The focus is on both the leaders and the relationship between leaders and supporters, particularly how the leaders’ tactics create collective dynamics of politics of belief through digital media using a case study of Mawarire.

Chipo Dendere, Wellesley

Internet Shutdowns in Africa: When and why do governments ban the internet

What does it take for a citizen movement to topple a deep-rooted authoritarian regime? This paper analyses the successes and failures of citizen led social media campaigns in Africa. Using data drawn from extensive ethnographic study of 50 WhatsApp and Facebook communities as well as a study of popular threads on twitter this paper studies the conditions under which citizen activism; particularly those movements that originate on social media become street protests that can effectively unseat an illegitimate regime. The majority of movements fail because authoritarian regimes tend to be institutionally strong, well-organized and campaign on people’s memory of the horrors of colonialism. I find that the success of recent movements evidenced by -policy changes and increased citizen participation- is in part because of the rise of a youth citizenry that does not feel indebted to liberation struggle. Born frees are more willing to take political risks by speaking candidly about politics online and mobilizing their peers via online engagement to fight what they consider a new form of colonialism by the former liberators.

Shepherd Mpofu, University of Limpopo

Liberator gone rogue?: Social media in the (de)construction of Robert Mugabe’s legacy

Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe who died almost two years after being ousted in a military coup is a man who cannot simply fit into a homogenous classification of a leader. A few weeks before his death he made a pronouncement to the effect that he did not want to be buried at the national heroes’ Acre- a shrine he personalized and made a symbol for his power and used it to reward his cronies and punish and humiliate his enemies at death. He was both a dictator and a liberator, a sinner and saint, a unifier and divisive. The paper uses two sources of data to deconstruct Mugabe’s leadership, populism and nationalism. Firstly, the paper traces Mugabe’s legacy from the time he involved himself in the Zimbabwean politics until his death. Many books, thesis, documentaries and public landmarks have been used to capture Mugabe’s significance in Zimbabwean, African and global politics. Secondly, it uses social media commentary after his death to gauge the multifaceted nature of Mugabe as a politician, liberator, murder and champion for his people and Africa. The paper uses the Big Man Syndrome as a theoretical framing to demonstrate how Mugabe delivered Zimbabwe from colonialism, into tyranny and various forms of socio-economic and political chaos. As demonstrated by social media commentaries, Mugabe was admired for being the world’s most educated leader, an African leader who challenged the West in protection of his people, a toxic leader who left his country worse than he found it and a man who led the most educated nation.