The Zimbabwean political landscape has been toxic and polarised since the formative years of African nationalist movements in the early 1950s. Ethnicity and ideological differences usually engender political intolerance and promote tensions and rivalry. The multiparty democracy introduced after 1980, when Zimbabwe got political independence, has exhibited the same political culture at both intra-party and inter-party levels. Generally, political players (and their supporters) use language to construct positive self-images and negative-other identities. This project focuses on the deployment of nicknaming that targets political opponents, other political parties’ names, political ideologies, and party policies. This is a sociolinguistic examination of the role of (nick)naming in the politics of self-presentation and the social construction of the ‘other.’ The aim is to show how self-given names of political parties and manifestoes and the subversion of opponents’ personal names, political party’s names and/or policies often participate in the process of self-legitimating and delegitimating the political other. The study traces this political culture from 1980 to the present. This was deliberately done to analyse shifts and continuities during the Robert Mugabe phase (1980–2017) and Emmerson Mnangagwa (2017–present).
