From transparency to opacity: storytelling in Zimbabwe under state surveillance and the internet shutdown.

In response to mass protests in Zimbabwe in January 2019, the government ordered all internet service providers in the country to suspend operations. While Zimbabwe experienced its first total internet shutdown then, the government previously imposed other forms of restrictions to social network platform access, including the removal of a Facebook page of 'whistleblower' Baba Jukwa in 2014. Moreover, the government's 2018 National Policy for Information and Communication Technology initiative promised more centralized state control of the country's internet traffic. These issues and potential realities raise concerns for journalists and storytellers in Zimbabwe. How can they can circumvent censorship online? How does their use of social media complicate conceptualizations of temporality and censorship on the internet? Shortly after the shutdown ended, the Johannesburg Review of Books published a story by a journalist formatted as a Twitter timeline from his 'recollections and imaginings' of what he would have posted during the week-long social media blackout. It included descriptions of protests, statements about the state, and satire aimed at the president, telling the type of stories that the government had attempted to censor. As a vehicle for the piece, the JRB created a new Twitter account, @Zvakadhakwa, for the tweets. This paper explores notions of risk, transparency, and opacity in journalism, and storytelling under surveillance and digital censorship in Zimbabwe, by engaging with scholarship on Baba Jukwa Facebook posts before the internet shutdown in Zimbabwe and deploying a close textual analysis of the alternate Twitter timeline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]