ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the construction of online discourses of election violence, which has become a recurring motif in Zimbabwe’s politics since 2000. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), acknowledges the polysemic nature of language and its infusion with existing power relations in any given society. The construction of electoral violence discourses on websites can be examined through MCDA since online communication embodies both visual and textual features. The main thrust is to ascertain how a Zimbabwean website, Kubatana, constructed the 2008 electoral violence – the discursive themes that emerged as citizens related their experiences of electoral violence and shared knowledge of the subject. The study found that electoral violence during the 2008 run-off election was presented on the Kubatana website, as an atrocity tale and in some instances, ‘as a violence of purification’. Furthermore, the chapter found that election violence was presented as a ruling party – ZANU-PF phenomenon, – the ‘Zanufication’ of election violence.
