Africa Table - Understanding Africa's Political Transitions in the Digital Age

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: Chipo Dendere, Consortium for Diversity Fellow & Visiting Assistant Professor, Political Science, Amherst College

Chipo Dendere is a Zimbabwean-born political scientist. Dr. Dendere is a Consortium for Diversity Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College in the Political Science Department. Her research focuses on African politics, particularly party migration, politics and democratization, public opinion, political behavior, and social media. She is working on a book manuscript on the impact of voter exit on the survival of authoritarian regimes. She collected much of the immigrant data for this project in four countries United Kingdom, United States, South Africa and Zimbabwe where she conducted 100 interviews with the Zimbabwean diaspora. Dr. Dendere has written opinion and analysis pieces for the Monkey Cage Blog and African is A Country and has given media interviews on Zimbabwean politics. She received her Ph.D. from Georgia State University where she worked with Daniel Young and Carrie Manning. She attended Waddilove Mission in Marondera, Zimbabwe. She lives in Amherst, MA, with her husband.

In the last decade the  number of Africans with access to smart phones and the internet has doubled.  An estimated 200 million Africans are on Facebook and nearly double use WhatsApp daily. Africans are using social media to circumvent draconian media and communication laws that often made political engagement risky and even life threatening. Protests in South Africa, Senegal and more recently in Zimbabwe show that technology has the power to dramatically change politics. This conversation will focus on the impact of social media in the narration of the Zimbabwean coup, the generation and spread of fake news as well as the challenges for digital media in politics.