Afrocentric Visual Analysis of Online Political Posters: A Case of South Africa’s July 2021 Unrest

Abstract

This article argues that the social media network X (formerly known as Twitter) is a public sphere that uses different rhetorical strategies of visual political communication to set a political agenda and shape public opinion about political issues in South Africa. Visual images in the context of political communication are used to inform, persuade, and create ideological meaning. They employ different visual rhetorical strategies to construct narratives about a political issue or actor. The article employs an Afrocentric perspective as a theoretical and research method to interrogate the underlying African visual rhetoric of online political posters (OPPs) circulated on X by members of the African National Congress (ANC) faction in the KwaZulu-Natal province during the July 2021 uprising. The units of analysis were verbal and visual texts featured in the selected OPPs. The findings showed that ANC members who identified with the radical economic transformation (RET) faction deployed various styles of Afrocentric visual rhetoric to oppose the far-right faction of the ANC. This article contributes to the body of research premised on Afrocentric visual rhetorical and visual political communication, which remains under-researched, particularly in the decolonial context.