Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 373

Hipsters Don’t Dance Top World Carnival Tunes for November 2014

Back, but a little delayed due to our site maintenance/redesign are Hipster’s Don’t Dance with their November 2014 chart of hot World Carnival tunes. Check it below, and be sure to visit the HDD blog regularly for all their great up-to-the-timeness out of London.

DJ Spoko x War God

We don’t know whether it was the excellent Spoek Mathambo doc Future sounds of Mzansi that drew us back to the DJ Spoko LP but the whole thing, which came out in October is excellent. 85 mins of pure Bacardi house fun.

Dr Sid x Lady Don Dada

Not sure if this will get a single release but this cut off his excellent LP this year has been on repeat. After the Mavins successful 2014, we are excited to see what else is in store for this super group.

MI x Wheel Barrow (Feat Emmy Ace & Beenie Man)

MI’s new LP came out this month and we instantly gravitated towards this one. Not only does it feature the immortal Beenie Man but also features some dembow drums which we love.

Edem x Koene (Feat. Ice Queen & Lil Shaker)

This came out earlier in the year but we love it still. Magnum’s beat is great unrelenting but fun and Zambia’s Ice Queen delivers on of our fave verses of the year.

Hagan x M.O.T.Y Edit

Discovered on the rather excellent AIAC Radio show, this edit of the Schoolboy Q hit transforms the West Coat hit into some sparser and a whole lot more fun.

Digital Archive No. 6 – Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

When I was first given the opportunity to write this weekly series, I reached out to a few friends and colleagues who work in the digital realm for suggestions on possible projects that I could feature.  One of the first projects that was suggested to me, by fellow AIAC contributor Jill Kelly, when I started this series was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTD), so I’m finally getting around to it.  Actually, I’ve incorporated data from TASTD in a few research projects of my own, so it makes sense to feature something that I have successfully utilized in some of my own research!

The TASTD is a project with a long history, stretching into the 1960s when scholars first began to collect archival data on slave trade voyages and started coding them into a machine-readable format.  Originally made available to scholars on CD-ROMS in the 1990s, the dataset was finally presented as an open access site in 2006 thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard.  An all-star team of historians serve on the Advisory Board for the Database, including Herbert Klein, , Joseph Miller, G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis (who serves as co-editor).

This site compiles data for nearly 35,000 slaving voyages, providing extensive open access metadata for each of the voyages, including additional sources to consult.  The database also maps out the various stages of the vessel’s journey and provides any related images that might be available for that particular voyage.  In addition to the metadata available for download, the site also includes a section of Educational Materials, which includes a set of lesson plans aimed at students at the primary and secondary levels.  For example, this Database Scavenger Hunt is designed to aid students from 7th-12th grade in utilizing the TASTD to not only gain knowledge of the slave trade in various regions, but also in developing the technological know-how necessary to successfully explore the database and cultivating their analytical skills.

In addition to the data on slaving voyages, the directors of TASTD have branched out to create several connected projects, including the African Names Database and the African Origins Project.  The African Names Database adds an additional layer to what is available through TASTD, pulling from those same slaving records to provide the names of and details for over 91,000 slaves who were carried on ships between 1808 and 1862.  The African Origins project is “a scholar-public collaborative endeavor to trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade.”  Using the records of Africans freed by International Courts of Mixed Commission and British Vice Admiralty Courts, the founders argue, “this resource makes possible new geographic, ethnic, and linguistic data on peoples captured in Africa and pulled into the slave trade.”  This project specifically encourages contributions from the public to help in recovering the backgrounds of Africans captured and sold into slavery.  This endeavor is interconnected to the project that will be featured in Digital Archive No. 7, Slave Biographies.

 

**As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you want us to cover in future editions of Digital Archive.**

Black Death and Revolution

In the days leading up to the grand jury decisions in the separate murders of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, there was a certain tension that I felt brewing walking around New York City. There were a few people speaking in hushed tones here, a couple of Facebook statuses there, anticipating the inevitable.

As a black person, who watched from beginning to end, the process of the Trayvon Martin case, I thought to myself, this feels awfully familiar. But I tried to reassure myself. Surely, there was enough evidence to proceed to a trial, right? An 18 year-old boy is dead under very suspicious circumstances. At least, give us a damn trial. But, just like the Trayvon Martin case, America told us that black lives don’t matter. Now, a solid week after a grand jury decided not to give the American people a trial yet again (in the Garner choke case), I still feel hollow. There were no guessing, no conflicting accounts. It was right there on videotape. An illegal maneuver was used on a man who was pleading for his life from the very same people who were supposed to protect and serve him. And yet, because it was a black life, it did not matter.

You will get shot, lynched, beaten up, enslaved, whipped, and vilified for life and that is the norm. Why on earth would the justice system consider differently? Time and time again the system has thumbed its nose at black death, knowing that there will be no consequence, no retribution for these actions. Well, enough is enough. The time is now. America needs a revolution.

I walked with hundreds of young people, up in Harlem, on 125th street all the way up the Willis Bridge heading up to the Bronx. People chanted “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” while police officers followed us, their blue and white lights flashing, gripping their nightsticks, looking around nervously. We sat down, with our hands up, daring them to move us, and even the people in their cars showed their support by blaring their horns and pumping their fists, with smiles on their faces. I looked around and realized the power people hold in their hands. The power to bring a New York City bridge to gridlock and make people take notice of a disadvantaged people that have been murdered in this country for far too long.

Then I marched again, on the West Side High way, all the way to Times Square and Grand Central Station after the grand jury failed to indict Eric Garner. But this time, I felt weak, and insignificant. We blocked traffic for a while, but how long would that last? We were merely an inconvenience. An inconvenience that would quickly fade away. A group of men I walked by in their power suits laughed and mocked us. Some officers were chuckling and one asked, “Is this it?” I wanted to tell that officer and others, that no, this was not it. That there will be die-ins, and boycotts and more marches and more protests to come. I wanted to tell him that a revolution was coming. A revolution that America desperately needs.

Pay no mind to the naysayers, denouncing people for being brave and walking the streets. There are those that want to keep the status quo, and make you believe that America’s flaws are small and that we should be content with what we have now. Never mind them. And do not let your fire wane in the coming weeks because other news will happen, and the trendiness of #ferguson and #blacklivesmatter and #Icantbreathe will soon give way to the holidays, some sport event or some celebrity’s antics. Keep fighting and keep protesting.

Hit them where it will hurt them most. Economically. Real change comes when one can make money, or lose money. Doing this will mean taking drastic measures, like giving up public transportation. And yes, that would make things difficult and it would be a terrible inconvenience. But revolutions were never easy. If you want real change, we can no longer ask for it. We have to take it. Could you imagine what would happen if even half of New Yorkers decided not take the subway for just one day? It would show America that we do not want to live in a society that castigates and kills a population so disproportionately. Even if you are not a member of the black population, this systemic evil will only come back to demean you. And do not be so quick to vilify those in Ferguson that are protesting in the most extreme actions. Is looting wrong? Yes. Is rioting wrong? Yes. But this the reaction to systemic violence that has been waged against black people in America for centuries and it was only after the riots in Ferguson that people took notice. America has a history… no, a tradition of violence, starting from the Boston Tea Party to now. People will try to demonize them and let that takeaway from the real issue at hand. Pay them no mind, because America needs a revolution.

So rebel. Fight the oppressive, racist system that aims to subvert those who dare rise up. Do it in your own way. Social media does matter, if that is your way of protest. Walk the streets, put up posters and disrupt the social norms, if that is your way of protest. Sign petitions, stand in front of your congressman’s or senator’s or prosecutor’s office and demand change. Boycott and strike, because they only really care once their wallets starts to shrink. I write, because that is my form of protest and I will not stop even in the face of ridicule and adversity. I write for Mike Brown, Trayvon, Diallo, Sean Bell, Jordan Crawford, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Rumain Brisbon and anyone else who has become a casualty of this shameful, lethal tradition of ours. Protest and fight. Change the injustice that surrounds us. The time is now. America needs a revolution.

#ICANTBREATHE

One morning last semester at John Jay College in New York City, I asked my students how many of them had ever been stopped by the police. All of them raised their hands, and we fell into a spirited conversation about the constitutionality of “Stop and Frisk” and the fine distinctions between reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Later, I remembered, most of my students had told me that they knew nothing about the march to Selma, the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, or the student-led protests in Greensboro, North Carolina. They understood injustice and how it impacted their communities, but had little historical context for institutional bias and the struggles that had failed to end it.

The personal, they say, is the most powerfully political. Such a moment happened last week when, in response to the non-indictment of Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner case, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams publicly shared his first encounter with police brutality in Jamaica, Queens. Chased into a stairwell, the 15-year-old Adams laid unarmed and unprotected as several police officers kicked him over and over in the groin. Adams relived the painful experience for years after, cringing every time he saw a police car. A generation later, it remains the fuel for Adams’ crusade to transform police practices from within.

Listening to the story, I realized what had been absent from my conversations about race, social discourse, policing, and the law. A few students in my class had admitted that they had faced daily harassment. Others had surely witnessed violent acts but did not vocalize this. When they spoke about the police – some detached, others angry – they characterized officers on patrol as an unwelcome presence in their neighborhood that filled them with discomfort. There was fear beneath these comments, deep-rooted in a lifetime of structural violence and suffered indignities, and it had become elephant in the room. I did not feel prepared to tell them that it would all be ok. But without an acknowledgment of the anxiety of their lives, it was no wonder my students were reluctant or unable to make connections between Mississippi attack dogs, fire hydrants, and lynch mobs and the indignities they face today.

It is too early to tell what the outcome of the emerging Ferguson-Garner citizen action movement will be. But one thing is clear: we will continue to feel its impact deeply as it empowers us to break shared silences and testify to the uncertain and traumatic conditions in which our youth are growing up. Phillip Agnew, who led a student-led civil disobedience movement in Florida following the Trayvon Martin killing, has already blazed this path with the Dream Defenders. The organization’s website sports bullet-proof vests for youth ages 12-18 and a spoof video of a black mother strapping her reluctant son into the vest. It is an eerie commentary on habitual terror and the way we have internalized it.

The message for change has begun to sink in at all levels of society. At a lawyering conference in June 2014 organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Bertha Institute, Agnew, with a sermonic fire in his voice, called upon public interest lawyers to reach deep and find an emotional commitment to their work. “Those with the will to win, will win,” he said. “How radical are you really prepared to be?”

The death of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the failure to indict, and the patronizing debate over whether Garner ought to have resisted being arrested for the thirty-fifth time have given us a laser-sharp focus around which to carry these messages forward – the need to eradicate the broken policies that have disproportionately targeted African-American, Native American, and immigrant communities across this country leaving them in debilitating fear for too long. People have come together just to shout: #WeCantBreathe.

But as Agnew and Adams have shown us, even within institutions dedicated to the pursuit of justice, the work of speaking out, healing, and organizing can be overlooked. A significant percentage of John Jay students aspire to careers in law enforcement. Protest movements should call upon these students. If they can see Eric Garner’s death as fuel for their ambitions, imagine a future that goes beyond body cameras, think critically about incentives for police to undergo training and embrace the dignity of the policed, they will embody the radical leadership that we need. There can be no effective policy solutions that don’t empower stakeholders and victims.

Organized, non-violent action remains the first step for moving policy-makers towards the recognition of the root of our problems, because it is the only means by which intergenerational, diverse citizens and partners can model their collective courage. My hope is that the students of the City University of New York and elsewhere in the city (and the country) can find the heart to critique the system, despite being robbed every day of their breath.

 

 

Francophonie: Do we still need an organization of France’s former colonies?

The 15th Summit of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) was held in Dakar last month. The organization, which boasts a membership of 57 countries (mostly former French colonies) has as a primary objective, “to promote the French language and cultural and linguistic diversity.”  However, both as an institution and as a concept, Francophonie is rooted in French colonial history and Françafrique murky political and economic dealings.  So, what does Francophonie means anyway?

The Francophonie summits, which are held every two years, are idiotic gatherings that border on the ridicule and grotesque and makes one wish that leader like Thomas Sankara were still around. The summits usually display African artists entertaining their French guests, despite the fact that those same guests would invariably deny them visas to go perform in Europe.

Francophonie is mainly concerned about increasing the use of the French language around the world, especially holding its ground in Africa, its last frontier. In fact, by the year 2050, 80% of the people speaking French will be Africans. As President Francois Hollande said at the 2012 Francophonie summit in Kinshasa, “French is an African language…” with the unspoken caveat that Africans should stay home and speak it there. It goes without saying that African migrant workers are not welcome on French soil, no matter how sophisticated how well they mastered the French subjunctive.

Francophonie is France telling Africans “we share a common (ugly) history. Feel free to teach it to your children, but our kids need not know.”  It’s France telling African immigrants, we love hearing you speak French, but we would prefer not having to see you on our shores.

Francophonie means also African presidents dying in French hospitals because they never cared to build good hospitals at home. If you grew up in an African francophone country, such hospital names as “La Pitié-Salpêtrière” or “Les Invalides” became common parlance.

Francophonie means France going the extra mile to make sure that the Secretary General of OIF is not French but Francophile enough to enforce the French government’s agenda. At the Dakar summit, outgoing OIF SG and former Senegalese president Abdou Diouf passed the baton to the Canadian Michaëlle Jean, amidst complaints from African delegations.

At the institutional level, Francophonie functions as a network of political support for African lifelong presidents. Francophonie means the outgoing OIF SG Abdou Diouf prefacing a book titled “Compaoré: Stateman and Man of Action”, published only a couple of weeks before Compaoré was chased out of office by Burkinabe women with wooden spatulas. It also means Hollande airlifting Compaoré to safety to Cote d’Ivoire, before a permanent exile in Morocco, another hot spot of Francophonie. Compaoré’s exit route is eerily similar to that of Mobutu, another staple of Francophonie, a couple of decades ago.

Francophonie means ensuring that Bongo replaces Bongo in Gabon and Faure inherits Gnassingbé’s mandate.  It means also keeping Biya on life support at the helm of Cameroon, and using French troops to stop the rebels from taking over N’Djamena in 2008, saving private Déby. Francophonie means the outfitting of the African continent with French bases, from Djibouti to Dakar. Francophonie means Sarkozy delivering an infamous speech at the University of Dakar and saying the “tragedy of Africa is that the African hasn’t still entered history”… and getting a standing ovation. The African man “never launched himself towards the future. The idea never came to him to get out of [the] repetition and to invent his own destiny,” Sarkozy said, without flinching. Achille Mbembe’s response to the Dakar speech is a must read.

As the Senegalese writer Adama Gaye eloquently , at the end of the day, Francophonie means business. Literally. For the French economy.

5 Questions for a Filmmaker–Kivu Ruhorahoza

Kivu Ruhorahoza, from Rwanda, made two award-winning short films (Confession and Lost in the South) before rising to fame with his first feature Grey Matter in 2011. The film – a unique take on the Rwandan genocide – has screened at festivals across the globe and won the mainly self-taught director the Jury Special Mention at Tribeca Film Festival for his ‘audacious and experimental approach,’ and a host of other awards. Sundance Institute announced earlier this month that Ruhorahoza’s second film, Things of the Aimless Wanderer (which explores a forever relevant theme; the relationship between Westerners and Africans in Africa) has been selected for the 2015 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Film section.

1) What is your first film memory?

I’m not sure I can trust my memory on this, but it’s definitely a Bollywood-movie. One of the films I remember, not just for the songs and the pretty women but the plot as well, is Amar Akbar Anthony – a film about three orphans raised by three families; one Christian, one Jewish and one Muslim. I also remember Andha Kanoon because of the film’s hero – or anti-hero rather – Vijay Kumar, played by Rajinikanth. I wanted to be cool, angry and stylish like him.

Watching movies was a collective experience when I was a kid. There were only two TV sets on my street. Me and tens of friends would watch movies either at the one neighbour’s house or the other’s. Even if we didn’t understand the language, we would still laugh, cry and sing along.

2) Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

Cinema, as an art form, is complete. It steals from photography, dance, music, literature, theatre, sculpture. A beautiful film watched in the right conditions can be quite a life-changing experience. It was after watching Fespaco-winner Au Nom du Christ when I was fifteen, and L’Ennui at sixteen, that I revised my plans of becoming a novelist.

3) Which film do you wish you had made?

Sans Soleil by , the film is a good example of the work of a filmmaker who has reached maturity and an artist who is truly free. Great films are first and foremost cinematic objects, but also political and philosophical statements. Sans Soleil is a masterpiece from a technical point of view; with its soundscape, the editing and the narration, it’s as close to cinematic perfection as it gets. It’s also an amazing statement on memory that I identify with.

When I was a teenager I often dreamt of travelling. I wanted to live a nomadic life and I was lucky enough to end up doing so. I’ve visited many strange places and met a lot of strange people. I prefer not to take photos during my travels so all that remains of those early travels are the memories in my head, which consists of images as well as smells, sounds and lights. Some memories have faded away of course, and often my brains starts playing tricks on me by mixing together components of different experiences into new ones; like a memory I have of sipping Vodka in Warsaw or Rio while listening to electronic music. I don’t know if it happened, but I like it so it doesn’t really matter.

4) Name one of the films on your top-5 list and the reason why it is there.

Werckmeister Harmonies by . For the cinematography, the directing, the sound design, the acting. The film is so carefully choreographed and the whole thing just seems like it was crafted by a superior intelligence! I know it sound idiotic but watch it and you’ll understand. The film also has the best Steadicam shot in the history.

5) Ask yourself any question you think I should have asked and answer it.

Name a forgotten film that deserves to be unearthed.

The House of Hunger by South African filmmaker Chris Austin. It’s great cinematically and one of the best entry points to Dambudzo Marechera’s troubled world.

The Gambia Gambit

“Everybody who is written about has an image of what he will look like on the printed page. He is always disappointed,” wrote the South African commentator Jonny Steinberg …

…And so the Norwegian Conservative Party Prime Minister Erna Solberg (born in 1961) may have more reasons than most to be disappointed. In October of this year, mainstream Norwegian news media covering the launch of an unauthorized and utterly unremarkable political biography of her, highlighted her youthful adventure with a young Gambian exchange student at the University of Bergen in Norway. Some sample headlines: “Erna silent about Gambian ex-boyfriend;” “Feared harassment – silent about Gambian ex-boyfriend” ran the sensational (later amended) headlines of the internet editions of the mainstream news outlets Aftenposten and NRK.

It was not that Solberg—a proverbial career politician if there ever was one, who was first elected to the Norwegian Parliament aged twenty-eight, who true to her social origins in the upper bourgeoisie of Bergen (Norway’s second largest city and a conservative political bastion) has hardly ever held any ordinary form of work—had not told this story before. When she was first appointed to a cabinet post in the center-right Bondevik Government in 2003, a post in which she would earn the Thatcherian media epithet ‘Iron Erna’ for her aptitude in learning to walk and talk to the tune of increasingly restrictive popular views on immigration (Muslim immigration in particular), Erna Solberg did an interview with the tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang (VG) in which she talked at length about her two-year relationship with her Gambian ex-lover Ousmane. It had apparently occasioned more than a bit of talking behind her back in Conservative Party circles in Bergen. That is until she broke off the relationship after a visit to Ousmane’s home village in Gambia, and realized the challenges of the ‘cultural differences’ between them. There was, as a matter of fact, also a reference to her youthful adventure in an interview with the mainstream regional newspaper Bergens Tidende (BT) ahead of Solberg coming to power as prime minister after the parliamentary elections in Norway in 2013.

So if this was ‘strategic silence’ and ‘self-censorship’ on Solberg’s part it was of the kind that white middle-class male desk editors in Norwegian liberal news media regularly conjure up out of thin air in order to create seemingly ‘sensational’ headlines intended to attract readers. It happens in a time in which Norwegian news media face a long downwards spiral in terms of both readership and revenue. It is to the Solberg’s credit that she herself has never sought to instrumentalize her youthful adventure with Ousmane, especially given the fact that since October 2013 she has, in coalition with the populist right-wing Progress Party, presided over the most right-wing government in Norwegian democratic history. It is a government which is committed to monumental tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful 1% of the Norwegian population, and has installed the swiftest and most efficient forced deportation machine ever seen in Norway (in the face of the world’s worst refugee crisis since 1945.)

So what do the sensationalist media reporting on Solberg’s youthful adventure with Ousmane tell us about the state of affairs in Norway? As of 2014, there are an estimated 97, 000 people of African descent living in Norway, a small country of approximately 5 million inhabitants. Although Norwegian historians have established that there have been Africans in Norway since 1596, African immigration to Norway is by and large a modern phenomenon, dating from the 1960s.

There is a long-standing and not very honorable Norwegian tradition of externalizing various forms of racism both historically and presently, so that anti-black racism, the most paradigmatic form of racism is always and inevitably located elsewhere. Ordinary Norwegians may comfortably condemn such racism when manifested in say, the USA United States or South Africa, without ever taking a closer and introspective look at the racism and discrimination which continue to blight the everyday lives of black Norwegian.

It is a central part of the national mythos in Norway that it was innocent of the sins of colonialism: A modern corollary of this national mythos has been that there is no racism to speak of in modern Norway. Norwegian historians have in recent years exploded the former myth; the latter was exploded by a number of racist-motivated murders in the 2000s.

And yet, Norwegian mainstream media’s continued fascination with the by now utterly unremarkable fact (in the context of an increasingly multicultural Norway) that black and white men and women may feel attracted to one another and – heaven forbid, may actually engage in sex with one another! – tells us that there is still a long way to go.

The A to Z of Kenyan Twitter

“Twitter is going to change Kenya!” I declared in my presentation. We’d just set up a “Twitterfall” behind me, glowing on one of the plasma screens. It scrolled up with a clockwork flow showing the 25-odd attendees their tweets in real-time. Trickling down one after the other it featured the tweets and responses from those caught in traffic, those in their seats in the audience ahead of me and those joining in virtually as we began our Twitter gathering.

It was February 2010, I was co-convener of Kenya’s first Twitter conference – #140ConfNairobi. Along with a great team we’d brought together brands, influencers, businesspeople, media, mavens and members of the public come and sit on the 2nd floor of the Westgate Mall, between a cocktail bar and teppanyaki grills at Onami. Questions streamed from the floor and online and our morning was well spent listening, learning and lecturing on Kenya’s state of social media and its potential.

In the 4 years since then Kenyans on Twitter have gone on to characterise and shape the perception of not just the country but the continent. As they are more often referred to, #KOT can be difficult to fully describe. More than just the over 1.5 million users on Twitter, #KOT shun other social networks, naming Facebook, the country’s #1 social network after a Kenyan slum.

Digital class warfare aside, #KOT exercise calm and restraint in the midst of chaos or poise and purpose when shaping what could likely become a national movement or voicing an outcry – seen most recently in #MyDressMyChoice. In that same breath, or tweet if you like, they’re able to polarise the timeline with talk of gender and femininity and/or feminism.

Kenyans on Twitter are the ones to be rallying behind a hashtag, making light work of creating a global trending topic. Be it to bringing CNN to apologise for a story, correcting misperceptions of the country with #SomeoneTellCNN or to celebrate the humour behind the national education and final examination system with examples such as #KCPE2010, #KCPE2012 and others.

In another fleeting moment they will wage virtual war on another African nation (be the reason sparked by football (Nigeria), politics (South Africa) or foreign policy (Botswana). Again the war cry of #SomeoneTell beckoning them. And #KOT won’t stop with just trading barbs and insults, they’ll take any misperception and stereotype they can find and using what seems to be a growing lexicon of African-made memes as when attacking Nigeria.

In 2009, the buildup to #140confNBO was slow and steady. We’d had a global viral sensation that year in Just A Band’s hit single gone viral video “Ha-He” and its unmistakable antihero Makmende. Particularly for those who had been on Twitter the past 1 to 3 years it was a time to celebrate our humble beginnings as (we thought) Twitter got mainstream. With that our attempts began in earnest to decipher what Kenyans online were saying just as the fibre-optic cable made landfall some months prior in September 2009 bringing lower-cost connectivity.

I’ve been part of this digital citizenry for those years and #KOT are now an inimitable, unapologetic and inspiring colony. The A to Z of Kenyan Twitter is the first in a number of publications to understand Africans online with their habits, trends and its impact on society, media and business.

I still agree with what I said at the dias of Onami’s dimly-lit restaurant floor, and feel that Twitter has since lived up to its claim of changing the country. Over 5 years of monitoring, studying and capturing the essence of African digital society has been an exceptional journey. For Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and not forgetting Francophone and Lusophone Africa the potential to pull, probe and publish is exciting. Only thing is that this time we’re surfing Kenyan and African cyberspace trying to ride the wave as well as record it.

The project launched in October with a website, Slideshare.net presentation, an audio MP3 download/stream on Soundcloud.com, a direct PDF download (here), 27 videos on Youtube (here), a board featuring 27 pins of the images on Pinterest, 27 images on Instagram, and, of course, a GIF (at the top of this post).

Here’s the intro video:

 

Angola’s Flash Mobs

There has been an increase in protest activity across sub-Saharan Africa recently: Burkina Faso’s citizen uprising dominated Africa-focused news outlets and twitter feeds as the president of the country resigned and the military took control of the state; protests also erupted in Togo with citizen calls for constitutional changes in order to bar President Faure Gnassingbe from seeking a third term; and citizens have also taken to the streets in Burundi to voice concerns over the shrinking political space and in DRC to reject any constitutional changes to remove presidential terms. While these countries draw hundreds and thousands of protestors to the streets, a small group of pro-democracy activists in Angola mark the success of their movement through a series of five minute protests.

During the past few months, youth activists have been organizing flash mob protests in front of government buildings around Angola’s capital city of Luanda. Like many other countries, Angolan law requires demonstrators obtain a permit. Activists argue that the information is used to arrest them as soon as they arrive at the protest location. Angolan youth have not been deterred however. Instead they came up with the idea of flash mob protests, organized via text message, to draw even just a few moments of attention for their cause before they are arrested beaten and dragged away by police. In a brief interview early Saturday morning, rapper-activist Luaty da Silva Beirão explained, “If our protests were going to be interrupted after just five minutes, why should we comply strictly with permit laws? It is clear that the police use the information about our location to stop us. This is why we decided to use the element of surprise.”

The activists are from a small-scale youth movement, named Central Angola 7311 after the day of the first protest of 2011. An anonymous call for a mass protest on March 7, 2011, at the Independence Square in Angola’s capital city, Luanda, went viral via the Internet and text message. On the day of the rally, police briefly detained all in attendance, including 17 rappers and three journalists of the private weekly newspaper Novo Jornal, who were there to cover the demonstration. The organizers include rappers, intellectuals, and journalists who call for access to higher education and employment, better housing conditions, improved service delivery of water and electricity, and improved democratic institutions. The youth movement has also called for the resignation of President Eduardo do Santos who has been in office for 33 years.

For these activists, each brief protest serves to “erode the machine of the Angolan state.” 71 year old José Eduardo dos Santos has been president since 1979. He remains in office after the country’s 27 year-long civil war. The war began in 1975, immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal. In 2010 dos Santos strengthened his grip on power with a new constitution that ended the need for a direct presidential ballot— the head of the party that wins in parliamentary elections now automatically becomes president.

In the lead up to the 2012 elections, dos Santos faced increasing opposition as youth groups stepped up anti-government protests. The ruling MPLA prevailed in the polls, maintaining a majority in parliament and securing another term in office for dos Santos. Although a limit of two five-year presidential terms has been set in the country, this does not apply retroactively, meaning that dos Santos could remain in the post until 2022.

While the protests remain small and youth activists say, “sometimes we laugh at ourselves and what we call progress,” they know they have made small gains. Since 2011 when youth first started protesting, there has been an increase in smaller, low-level protests throughout the country including civil service workers demanding better pay and working conditions. Most recently, residents of the Lamarão neighborhood in Aracaju, held a protest after a power cut. This view is echoed by Tiseke Kasambala, Southern Africa Director of Human Rights Watch, who states, “What we’ve seen is an intensification in the number of peaceful protests in Angola, as a result of poor governance issues and the poor economic situation and the gross inequalities that exist in the country.” Given Angola’s culture of fear and intimidation, these protests suggest that various sectors among the population are no longer afraid of the regime the way they once were.

Well-known journalist Rafael Marques de Morais notes that the fear is very real, because journalists and youth activists are routinely arrested and tortured—including him. Amnesty International has also accused the Angolan state of torturing and killing opponents and using violence and excessive force to suppress dissent against the government.

Interviews conducted in Luanda in 2013 with 35 activists indicated that youth were in the process of rethinking strategies. One of the primary youth leaders explained, “We learned that we could attract more attention by marching instead of staying in one place. This helped because we were not large in number so we got attention but we also made the population aware of the protest because you know, we’re never on the news.”

These flash mob protests are the latest tool in their arsenal of strategies. Protesters also utilize a network of citizen journalists to document demonstrations and the violent police response in the moments before they are shut down. Beirão explains that the goal of these flash mob protests is break the barrier of fear, inspire others to feel free to protest, and to create spaces for discussion.

Demonstrations in Angola illustrate the importance of considering the social and political context in which activists must struggle to achieve their goals. In Burkina Faso the situation unfolded quickly as thousands of people took to the streets, demanded that Blaise Campaore who was in power for 27 years step down, and within days the situation shifted as the president resigned and the military took control of the state. The protests in Togo are still playing out with citizens and opposition groups calling for a change in the constitution to limit a third run for a man whose family has been in control of the state since for nearly 50 years. The opposition and youth activists in Angola have not been able to gather the masses or topple the MPLA regime; does this mean that the nascent youth-driven protest movement has been a failure? Is there a clear way to determine the success or failure of citizen uprisings?

Angolan anti-corruption journalist Rafael Marques de Morais recently asserted that the Angolan government is tightening the noose around free expression. Given that collective citizen action in Angola is rare and the majority of the population believes they are under government surveillance, these protests can be viewed not only as a success but as the seeds of change in a country that rarely experienced demonstrations before 2011. Protestors are developing the building blocks needed to sustain a citizen uprising: they have a structure and are developing strategies to continue getting the message out and keeping the pressure on even in their current socio-political environment. Should the tipping point arrive in Angola, there are some activists ready to hit the ground, running.

Angola’s Flash Mob Protests

There has been an increase in protest activity across sub-Saharan Africa recently: Burkina Faso’s citizen uprising dominated Africa-focused news outlets and twitter feeds as the president of the country resigned and the military took control of the state; protests also erupted in Togo with citizen calls for constitutional changes in order to bar President Faure Gnassingbe from seeking a third term; and citizens have also taken to the streets in Burundi to voice concerns over the shrinking political space and in DRC to reject any constitutional changes to remove presidential terms. While these countries draw hundreds and thousands of protestors to the streets, a small group of pro-democracy activists in Angola mark the success of their movement through a series of five minute protests.

During the past few months, youth activists have been organizing flash mob protests in front of government buildings around Angola’s capital city of Luanda. Like many other countries, Angolan law requires demonstrators obtain a permit. Activists argue that the information is used to arrest them as soon as they arrive at the protest location. Angolan youth have not been deterred however. Instead they came up with the idea of flash mob protests, organized via text message, to draw even just a few moments of attention for their cause before they are arrested beaten and dragged away by police. In a brief interview early Saturday morning, rapper-activist Luaty da Silva Beirão explained, “If our protests were going to be interrupted after just five minutes, why should we comply strictly with permit laws? It is clear that the police use the information about our location to stop us. This is why we decided to use the element of surprise.”

The activists are from a small-scale youth movement, named Central Angola 7311 after the day of the first protest of 2011. An anonymous call for a mass protest on March 7, 2011, at the Independence Square in Angola’s capital city, Luanda, went viral via the Internet and text message. On the day of the rally, police briefly detained all in attendance, including 17 rappers and three journalists of the private weekly newspaper Novo Jornal, who were there to cover the demonstration. The organizers include rappers, intellectuals, and journalists who call for access to higher education and employment, better housing conditions, improved service delivery of water and electricity, and improved democratic institutions. The youth movement has also called for the resignation of President Eduardo do Santos who has been in office for 33 years.

For these activists, each brief protest serves to “erode the machine of the Angolan state.” 71 year old José Eduardo dos Santos has been president since 1979. He remains in office after the country’s 27 year-long civil war. The war began in 1975, immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal. In 2010 dos Santos strengthened his grip on power with a new constitution that ended the need for a direct presidential ballot— the head of the party that wins in parliamentary elections now automatically becomes president.

In the lead up to the 2012 elections, dos Santos faced increasing opposition as youth groups stepped up anti-government protests. The ruling MPLA prevailed in the polls, maintaining a majority in parliament and securing another term in office for dos Santos. Although a limit of two five-year presidential terms has been set in the country, this does not apply retroactively, meaning that dos Santos could remain in the post until 2022.

While the protests remain small and youth activists say, “sometimes we laugh at ourselves and what we call progress,” they know they have made small gains. Since 2011 when youth first started protesting, there has been an increase in smaller, low-level protests throughout the country including civil service workers demanding better pay and working conditions. Most recently, residents of the Lamarão neighborhood in Aracaju, held a protest after a power cut. This view is echoed by Tiseke Kasambala, Southern Africa Director of Human Rights Watch, who states, “What we’ve seen is an intensification in the number of peaceful protests in Angola, as a result of poor governance issues and the poor economic situation and the gross inequalities that exist in the country.” Given Angola’s culture of fear and intimidation, these protests suggest that various sectors among the population are no longer afraid of the regime the way they once were.

Well-known journalist Rafael Marques de Morais notes that the fear is very real, because journalists and youth activists are routinely arrested and tortured—including him. Amnesty International has also accused the Angolan state of torturing and killing opponents and using violence and excessive force to suppress dissent against the government.

Interviews conducted in Luanda in 2013 with 35 activists indicated that youth were in the process of rethinking strategies. One of the primary youth leaders explained, “We learned that we could attract more attention by marching instead of staying in one place. This helped because we were not large in number so we got attention but we also made the population aware of the protest because you know, we’re never on the news.”

These flash mob protests are the latest tool in their arsenal of strategies. Protesters also utilize a network of citizen journalists to document demonstrations and the violent police response in the moments before they are shut down. Beirão explains that the goal of these flash mob protests is break the barrier of fear, inspire others to feel free to protest, and to create spaces for discussion.

Demonstrations in Angola illustrate the importance of considering the social and political context in which activists must struggle to achieve their goals. In Burkina Faso the situation unfolded quickly as thousands of people took to the streets, demanded that Blaise Campaore who was in power for 27 years step down, and within days the situation shifted as the president resigned and the military took control of the state. The protests in Togo are still playing out with citizens and opposition groups calling for a change in the constitution to limit a third run for a man whose family has been in control of the state since for nearly 50 years. The opposition and youth activists in Angola have not been able to gather the masses or topple the MPLA regime; does this mean that the nascent youth-driven protest movement has been a failure? Is there a clear way to determine the success or failure of citizen uprisings?

Angolan anti-corruption journalist Rafael Marques de Morais recently asserted that the Angolan government is tightening the noose around free expression. Given that collective citizen action in Angola is rare and the majority of the population believes they are under government surveillance, these protests can be viewed not only as a success but as the seeds of change in a country that rarely experienced demonstrations before 2011. Protestors are developing the building blocks needed to sustain a citizen uprising: they have a structure and are developing strategies to continue getting the message out and keeping the pressure on even in their current socio-political environment. Should the tipping point arrive in Angola, there are some activists ready to hit the ground, running.