Visual Resistance

With almost all other venues for speech and debate closed off, activists are using graffiti to speak out against Mugabe’s dictatorship in Zimbabwe:

A few streets away from Robert Mugabe’s heavily guarded official residence is a wall painted with screaming red graffiti telling Zimbabwe’s president that “At 80, it’s time to go”. . .

Other graffiti insulting the president and ZANU PF have multiplied recently on walls in Harare and other major cities and towns. Along a street named after the president himself, a dissident artist has scrawled, “Mugabe is a dictator.”

With nearly all avenues of protest closed, Zimbabweans frustrated by the Mugabe regime use graffiti to express their anger with the system. The words on the walls are a clear indication that the majority of the people in the towns and cities are completely fed up with the ruling party and yearn for change. . .

So popular has this type of protest become that nearly every wall along the streets of Harare is painted with graffiti. Some hurls insults at the president’s young wife, Grace, known as “The First Shopper” for the way she spent huge amounts of money in the top boutiques of London, Paris and New York before Britain, France and the United States banned her and her husband from entering their countries. Grace, a former secretary, was once photographed at Singapore’s Changi International Airport with fifteen trolley-loads of exotic foods and electronic goods at a time when the World Food Programme said half the Zimbabwe population was starving.

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