Cartooning as a Linguistic Strategy in Tanzania’s Presidential Election

Cartooning can serve as an effective multimodal linguistic strategy for articulating the socio-political realities of a country. Beyond their entertaining appeal, cartoons can convey serious and sensitive issues that might be difficult to express through conventional prose. This article presents a social semiotic analysis of political cartoons circulated via social media during Tanzania’s 2015 presidential election. Being one of the stiffest elections in the country, the cartoons suggest that the nation was circumvented by corruption, unaccountability, and favouritism on the part of government institutions. More prominently, John Pombe Magufuli, the ruling party’s presidential candidate in the election, was shown to be in stiff competition with his colleagues in his own political party - CCM, and also with Edward Lowassa, who defected to the opposition coalition, Umoja wa Katiba ya Wananchi (famously abbreviated as UKAWA), and became its presidential flag-bearer.