"This Flag Is Mine Too": Negotiating Space for Transwomen in Zimbabwe Through Multimedia Approaches

The often violent public discourse around lesbian, gay, transgender, bi-sexual, intersex and others (LGTBI+) Africans can be considered an unmasked and unapologetic strategy by certain powerful African politicians to forge an African Identity through the deliberate acts of exclusion (Hall, 1996) and dehumanisation (Freire, 1970). Former President Robert Mugabe "author of Zimbabwean nationhood" (Muwonwa, 2007:12) through his vitriolic rants such as "We [Africans] are not gay!" at the United Nations Development Summit, 2015, has not only legitimised homophobia but made it a necessary condition for a "true African". Nonetheless, in 2015 a group of six young LGTBI+ Zimbabweans used participatory theatre as part of a project called Nhanho to engage various sectors of the Zimbabwean public in a bold effort to write themselves back into the definition of African (Sibanda, 2015). One of the members of this group, a transwoman known as "Tatelicious" used this project as a springboard and embarked on an extremely popular social media campaign "the Tatelicious movement" which aimed at shifting transphobic perceptions amongst Zimbabweans. This article explores the possibilities of/for negotiating space for transgender people within the African narrative using multimedia approaches. Further, it will use this case study (project Nhanho and "the Tatelicious movement") as a way in to critically discuss the possibilities for different popular platforms to subvert and/or reinforce conventional conservative readings of African sexuality and the extent to which the protagonists are complicit in this.