This Is a Laughing Matter: Social Media as a Sphere of Trolling Power in Malawi and Zimbabwe

Humour has since time immemorial been employed in both micro and macro spaces to challenge the powerful. This has only accelerated with the advent and wide use of social media applications where the laughing of power takes a viral effect that is almost impossible to contain. This chapter with bias on Malawi and Zimbabwe looks at how two public ‘dissident’ figures have employed political humour to troll, laugh at and challenge powerful governing elites. The concept of the dissident we employ draws from Matsilele’s (Social media dissidence in Zimbabwe. PhD diss., University of Johannesburg, 2019) seminal work that tries to understand those often characterised as ‘enemies of state’ by the ruling elite politicians due to their unconventional approaches towards the powerful. Therefore, when we use the term, we do not use it loosely, but we use it with a strict contextual bias. We use a triangulated theoretical departure that considers those at the fringes of power as subalterns of sorts, not similar to what Gramsci imagined in his prison notebooks as well as reconfigured public sphere which Habermas in his seminal works never imagined at the time of writing his earliest works on the public sphere. Methodologically, we employ a qualitative approach with purposive sampling. We mainly rely on the social media analysis concept to analyse online texts and visuals. Ultimately, this chapter argues that those at the margins, and in most cases, motivated by hate and disdain of those in power, employ virtually mediated humour to troll the powerful.