As international audiences watched 18 days of nonviolent
protests topple longstanding president Hosni Mubarak this
month, Egypt suddenly became a sexy topic. But, despite the
fact that the rich banks of the Nile are sourced from
Central Africa, the world looked upon the Egyptian uprising
solely as a Middle Eastern issue.
Few seemed to care that Egypt was also part of Africa, a
continent with a billion people, most of whom are living
under despotic regimes and suffering economic strife and
political suppression just like their Egyptian neighbours.
“Egypt is in Africa. We should not fool about with the
attempts of the North to segregate the countries of North
Africa from the rest of the continent,” says Firoze Manji,
the editor of Pambazuka Online, an advocacy website for
social justice in Africa.
‘Where is Anderson Cooper?’
Egypt and Tunisia may
have been the catalysts for
demonstrations across the
Arab world, but will those
ripples spread into the rest
of Africa as well and, if they
do, will the international
media and its audience
even notice?
“What the continent lacks is
media coverage,” says
Drew Hinshaw, an
American journalist based
in West Africa.
“There’s no powerhouse
media for the region like Al
Jazeera, while European
and American media
routinely reduce a conflict
like [that in] Ivory Coast or
Eastern Congo to a one-
sentence news blurb at the
bottom of the screen,” he
argues.
Hinshaw is particularly
troubled by the failure of the
international media to pay
due attention to events in
Ivory Coast, where the UN
estimates that at least 300
people have died and the
opposition puts the figure
at 500.
“With due deference to the
bravery of the Egyptian
demonstrators, protesters
who gathered this
weekend in Abidjan [in Ivory
Coast] aren’t up against a
military that safeguards
them – it shoots at them,”
he says.
“The country’s economy
has been coughing up
blood since November,
with banks shutting by the
day, businesses closing by
the hour and thousands of
families fleeing their
homes,” Hinshaw
continues.
“And in all of this, where is
Anderson Cooper? Where
is Nicolas Kristof? Why is
Bahrain a front page news
story while Ivory Coast is
something buried at the
bottom of the news stack?”
he asks.
The journalist is equally as
disappointed in world
leaders.
“This Friday, Barack
Obama publicly
condemned the use of
violence in Bahrain, Yemen
and Libya,” Hinshaw says.
“When was the last time
you saw Obama come out
and make a statement on
Ivory Coast? Or Eastern
Congo? Or Djibouti, where
20,000 people protested
this weekend according to
the opposition?”
“The problem is that most
American media
compulsively ignore
everything south of the
Sahara and north of
Johannesburg,” he argues.
“A demonstration has to be
filmed, photographed,
streamed live into the
offices of foreign leaders to
achieve everything Egypt’s
achieved.”
“Their histories have been intertwined for millennia,” he
explains. “Some Egyptians may not feel they are Africans,
but that is neither here nor there. They are part of the
heritage of the continent.”
And, just like much of the rest of the world, Africans
watched events unfold in Cairo with great interest. “There
is little doubt that people [in Africa] are watching with
enthusiasm what is going on in the Middle East, and drawing
inspiration from that for their own struggles,” says Manji.
He argues that globalisation and the accompanying economic
liberalisation has created circumstances in which the people
of the global South share very similar experiences.
These include “[i]ncreasing pauperisation, growing
unemployment, declining power to hold their governments to
account, declining income from agricultural production,
increasing accumulation by dispossession – something that is
growing on a vast scale – and increasing willingness of
governments to comply with the political and economic wishes
of the North,” Manji explains.
Rallying cry
“The events in Tunisia and Egypt have become, within Africa,
a rallying cry for any number of opposition leaders,
everyday people harbouring grievances and political
opportunists looking to liken their country’s regimes to
those of [Tunisia’s deposed Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali or
Hosni Mubarak,” says Drew Hinshaw, an American journalist
based in West Africa.
“In some cases that comparison is outrageous, but in all too
many it is more than fair,” he explains. “Look at Gabon, a
tragically under-developed oil exporter whose GDP per capita
is more than twice that of Egypt’s but whose people are
living on wages that make Egypt look like the land of full
employment.”
“The Bongo family has run that country for four decades,
since before Mubarak ran nothing larger than an air force
base, and yet they’re still there,” Hinshaw says. “You can
understand why the country’s opposition is calling for new
rounds of Egypt-like protests after seeing what Egypt and
Tunisia were able to achieve.”
But with little geo-political importance, news organisations
seem largely oblivious to the drama unfolding in the West
African nation.
Elsewhere on the continent, protests have broken out in
Khartoum, Sudan where students held Egypt-inspired
demonstrations against proposed cuts to subsidies on
petroleum products and sugar. Following those demonstrations
on Jan. 30, the New York-based Committee to Project
Journalists reported that staff from the weekly Al-Midan
were arrested for covering the event.
Ethiopian media have also reported that police there
detained the well-known journalist Eskinder Nega for
“attempts to incite” Egypt-style protests.
And in Cameroon, the Social Democratic Front Party has said
that the country might experience an uprising similar to
those in North Africa if the government does not slash food
prices.
“There are lots of Africans too who are young, unemployed,
who see very few prospects for their future in countries
ruled by the same old political elite that have ruled for 25
or 30 or 35 years,” says CSM Africa bureau chief Scott
Baldauf.
“I think all the same is
Filling a void
So with traditional media
seemingly failing Africa, will
social media fill the void?
Much has already been written
about the plethora of social
media networks that both
helped engineer protests and,
crucially, amplified them
across cyber-space.
Online-activists, sitting behind
fibre optic cables and flat
screens, collated and
disseminated updates,
photographs and video and
played the role of subversive
hero from the comfort of their
homes.
Of course, not all Tweets or
Facebook uploads came from
pyjama-clad revolutionaries far
from the scene of the action –
an internet-savvy generation of
Egyptians was also able to
keep the world updated with
information from the ground.
“It’s not clear to me that social
media played a massive role in
organising protests,” says
Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder
of Global Voices, an
international community of
online activists. “[But] I do
think it played a critical role in
helping expose those protests
to a global audience,
particularly in Tunisia, where
the media environment was so
constrained.”
So, could the same thing
happen in Africa?
“I think it’s important to keep in
mind that African youth are far
more plugged in than most
people realise. The spread in
mobile phones has made it
possible for people to connect
to applications like Facebook
or Twitter on their telephones,”
says Nanjala Nyabola, a
political analyst at the
University of Oxford.
“At the same time, I think
most analysts are overstating
the influence of social media
on the protests,” she adds.
“The most significant political
movements in Africa and in
other places have occurred
independently of social media
– the struggles for
independence, the struggles
against apartheid and racism
in Southern Africa,” Nyabola
explains.
“Where people need
or desire to be organised they
will do independently of the
technology around them.”
Gabon, Zimbabwe and even
Ethiopia may never have the
online reach enjoyed by
Egyptians, and the scale of
solidarity through linguistic and
cultural symmetry may not
allow their calls to reach the
same number of internet users.
But this does not mean that a
similar desire for change is not
brewing, nor that the traditional
media and online community
are justified in ignoring it.
It is difficult to qualify the role
of social media in the popular
uprisings gaining momentum
across the Arab world, but it is
even more difficult to quantify
the effect of the perception of
being ignored, of not being
watched, discussed and, well,
retweeted to the throngs of
others needing to be heard.
Ignoring the developments in
Africa is to miss the half the
story.
ssues in Egypt are also present in
other countries. You have leaders who have hung onto power
for decades and who think the country can only function if
they are in charge,” he adds. “A young Zimbabwean would
understand the frustration of a young Egyptian.”
Divide and rule
Just as self-immolation was not new in Tunisia, whose
Jasmine Revolution was sparked when poor vendor Mohamed
Bouazizi set himself ablaze, discontentment and rising
restlessness is not alien to Africans. Acts of dissent and
their subsequent suppression are the bread and butter of
some oppressive African states
In the past three years, there have been violent service
delivery protests in South Africa and food riots in
Cameroon, Madagascar, Mozambique and Senegal.
But whether the simmering discontent in Africa will result
in protests on the scale of those in Egypt remains to be
seen.
“All the same dry wood of bad governance is stacked in many
African countries, waiting for a match to set it alight,”
says Baldauf. “But it takes leadership. It takes civil
society organisation,” something Baldauf fears countries
south of the Sahara do not have at the same levels as their
North African neighbours.
Emmanuel Kisiangani, a senior researcher at the African
Conflict Prevention Programme at the Institute of Security
Studies in South Africa, believes the difference in the
success levels of protests in North and sub-Saharan Africa
can be attributed in part to the ethnic make-up of the
respective regions.
“In most of the countries that have had fairly ‘successful
riots’ the societies are fairly homogeneous compared to sub-
Saharan Africa where there are a multiplicity of ethnic
groups that are themselves very polarised,” he explains.
“In sub-Saharan Africa, where governments have been able to
divide people along ethnic-political lines, it becomes
easier to hijack an uprising because of ethnic differences,
unlike in North Africa,” Kisiangani says.
An important year
This is an important year for Africa. Elections are
scheduled in more than 20 countries across the continent,
including Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
But as food prices continue to rise and economic hardship
tightens its grip on the region, it is plausible to imagine
Africans revolting and using means other than the often
meaningless ballot box to remove their leaders.
“What people want is the democratisation of society, of
production, of the economy, and indeed all aspects of life,”
says Manji. “What they are being offered instead is the
ballot box.”
But, Manji argues, “Elections don’t address the fundamental
problems that people face. Elections on their own do nothing
to enable ordinary people to be able to determine their own
destiny.”
This, according to Kisiangani, is because “the process of
democratisation in many African countries seems more
illusory than fundamental.”
“The protests have created the ‘hope’ that ordinary people
can define their political destiny,” he says. “The
uprisings…are making people on the continent become
conscious about their abilities to define their political
destinies.”
