What Zimbabweans are Talking About

The extraordinary events of the last few days that saw the resignation of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, have caused an outpouring of emotion by Zimbabweans all over the world. From the spontaneous jubilation in parliament when the resignation was announced, to elated drivers fist-bumping pedestrians in Harare, Zimbabweans have finally been able to let their pent-up expression run free.

Using R, a software environment for statistical computing and graphics, we analysed thousands of tweets originating from Zimbabwe and the resulting word cloud demonstrates the most important words and themes currently on Zimbabweans’ lips. 

Words like hope, free and finally suggest a sense of long overdue liberation. And while Robert Mugabe’s resignation has widely been seen as the result of an internal ZANU-PF power struggle, it’s interesting that zanupf receives relatively little mention. In contrast, the principal words and themes are more unifying and less characterised by personalities or factions. These include the words, people, now, and zimbabweans. 

The genie appears to be firmly out of the bottle. 

Ixio Analytics is a Data Science consulting firm that uses advanced statistical techniques to help organisations make sense of their data. www.ixioanalytics.com