Abstract In this study I critically study selected short stories from Julius Chingono’s collection Not Another Day , a volume that skillfully captures the textures of everyday life in Zimbabwe through a fusion of irreverent humour and moving insight. My analysis attends to Chingono’s fascinating use of satire, linguistic play, and tonal modulation in order to interrogate the interplay of political decay, social absurdities, and the affective toll of systemic violence. Drawing insights from theories of relief, superiority, and incongruity, I interpret humour as affective release, philosophical wisdom, and socio-political critique. I contend that Chingono’s characters confront misery and precarity with a subversive laughter that unsettles normative representations of suffering. His narrative craft, which is deeply marked by tonal shifts, irony, and unforeseen narrative turns, enables a poetics of defiance that resists a sense of despair. Through presentation of grief in humor, the writer constructs a satirical grammar of resistance with a sharpness that cogently challenges official discourses and repressive state formations. Thus, this study also invites further academic conversations on the emancipatory capacity of laughter within the postcolonial African literary archive that is characterised by trauma, silencing, and emerging voices from the margin.
Abstract In this article we analyse NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory as a re-invention of genre, whereby the postmodernist author harnesses the fable to satirise the absurdities of the postcolonial state. We draw on postmodernist theories and theories of the carnivalesque to re-theorise the politically salutary purposes of satire, as depicted in Glory . By re-inventing the genre through creating speaking animal characters, and by situating them in a recognisably postcolonial African state (Zimbabwe), Bulawayo conveys satire’s capacity to both laugh at and encourage transformation. In Glory , therefore, Bulawayo successfully employs satiric humour to ridicule both the political rulers and the ruled who prop up their own oppression. Despite the theoretical ambiguity of humour, events at the end of the novel suggest Bulawayo’s authorial intention to use satirical humour to catalyse the subversion of the seemingly impregnable masculinist necropolitics of fictional Jidada.
Abstract In the South African episode of AI Murray’s comedic documentary series Why Does Everyone Hate the British Empire? , he features the popular South African comedian Loyiso Gola as a local commentator tasked with interrogating the lingering vestiges of British colonialism in the country. Gola, whose usual comedy thrives on the absurdities of colonial and Apartheid projects in South Africa, deploys humour to reflect on colonial and Apartheid remains as he and Murray traverse South Africa’s former hotbeds of colonial power. This article centres Gola and Murray’s parodic humour in this journey of re-discovery, to explore how, in their comedic re-engagement with South Africa’s traumatic colonial and Apartheid pasts, the comedians deal with the ‘ghosts’ of history. The article implements Frantz Fanon’s concept of colonial possession to think through the potential function of humour in what I call the ‘comedic exorcism’ of the colonial and Apartheid spells binding their ‘remains.’ Skirting the usual thinking of humour as a mechanic of resistance and subversion, the article argues that Gola and Murray’s humour manifests complex processes of re-discovery and reflection where comedy is part of a conscious effort of releasing the mind, of exorcising it from shapeshifting spells of coloniality.
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.
