Robert Mugabe Fall

About

Robert Mugabe Fall is a photoshop meme featuring a picture of the President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe falling down a step on his way to give a speech in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Origin

On February 4th, 2015, Mugabe stumbled while walking down a series of steps on his way to give a speech at the Harare International Airport (shown below).

Shortly after, the Associated Press^[4] (AP) released a photo of Mugabe taken mid-fall (shown below). That day, the news site News Day^[3] published an article about the incident, reporting that other photojournalists were “forced to delete” their pictures of the president falling.

Meanwhile, Twitter user Sim Kaheru^[5] posted the AP picture with an added speech bubble containing the caption “Nobody move! I saw it first!” along with the hashtag #MugabeFalls (shown below).

Spread

Later that day, additional Twitter users posted various photoshops featuring a cutout Mugabe from the AP photo superimposed into other base images (shown below).^[7]^[8]

Also on February 4th, Redditor raaabs submitted the photo to the /r/photoshopbattles^[6] subreddit, where other Redditors replied with edited versions of the picture. The next day, the Zimbabwe Herald^[12] published an article about the fall, which included a statement by Zimbabwe Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, who denied that the president fell:

‘’Nobody has shown any evidence of the president having fallen down because that did not happen. The hump on which the president tripped was formed by two pieces of the carpet which apparently had not been laid out properly where they joined. And to be honest with you, even Jesus, let alone you, would have also tripped in that kind of situation."

In the coming days, several news sites highlighted notable examples of the photoshop meme, including The Washington Post,^[9] Latin Times Pulse^[10] and Mashable.^[11]