Digital narratives of legitimacy : President Mnangagwa’s Instagram discourse in Zimbabwe’s fragmented media landscape

Existing research on Instagram-based political legitimation has largely focused on Western contexts, whereas leader-centered African cases and fragmented media settings remain underexplored. This study analyzes how Zimbabwe’s President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, constructs political legitimacy on Instagram over 8 years (2017–2025). Using Van Leeuwen’s four legitimation strategies and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic grammar of visual design as the analytical framework, we employed Zeeschuimer, a browser-based social media data-collection tool, to purposively collect still photographs from the sampled period. We coded the posts as image–caption pairs according to Van Leeuwen’s typology and organized them into emerging thematic narratives of legitimation. Findings highlighted strategic narratives about Zimbabwe’s alignment with international powers, infrastructure development priorities, the people’s consensual choice, and regional leadership, collaboration, and support. We argue that these findings demonstrate Mnangagwa’s use of Instagram’s features for curated self-presentation and narrative control to build a discourse of competent, people-focused, and internationally recognized leadership that consistently downplays legitimacy-challenging information. This study offers a multimodal analytical perspective on political legitimacy in the Global South, extends the boundaries of political communication scholarship, and provides insights into how platform-based legitimation and affordances operate in Zimbabwe’s contested political environment.