Former President of a Former Colony : How The Guardian reported on the final events leading to Robert Mugabe’s resignation

Abstract: During the month of November 2017, the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe was taken into custody by Zimbabwe’s military. This was a move in order to shift the governmental power after which Mugabe after almost 40 years as President of Zimbabwe resigned from his post.   The thesis contains a Ccritical Ddiscourse Aanalysis of articles published by one of the world’s great newspapers during this shift of power. The newspaper analysed is the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’. The analysis studied which characters and major topics are represented in the articles and how they are represented to see what fits inside The Guardian’s news reporting on the final events in the shift of power in Zimbabwe. In order to find these discursive attributes, pictures linked to the articles were analysed, the context in which the events happened as well as the discourse used in the articles from a perspective of orientalism, post-colonialism and ideology. Other theoretical aspects used are framing, representation and critical Critical Ddiscourse Sstudies.   The empirical case in this research project involves three articles collected from T‘the Guardian ’ reaching from the reporting of Mugabe’s firing of his vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa to the reporting of Robert Mugabe resigning as President of Zimbabwe.   The interest in this study is springing from the normative approach of news media to provide an objective story to the readers while providing the whole picture. With this mission many different challenges come along of orientalist and post-colonial character, as ‘the Guardian’The Guardian is a British newspaper and Zimbabwe being a former British colony.   The results concluded an absence of post-colonial and orientalist representations in the news frames regarding Zimbabwe and its population, the most ideologically charged instances rather revolved around Robert and Grace Mugabe.