Digital resistance in Zimbabwe
Following on from my previous post about the digital divide not being the internet’s fault, I thought I’d write about some more practical stuff. As the benevolent dictator said: ‘Ttheory is good only as far as it connects to something’.
So in this post I’ll be looking at digital activism in Zimbabwe - sokwanele.com and kubatana.net.
But first a bit of scene-setting.
Zimbabwe has a relatively good telecommunications infrastructure. A direct internet network link to the US was set up in 1996-97, meaning that Zimbabwe was one of the first African contries to be connected to the web (The first time I ever used the internet was actually in Harare in 1996). There are currently over 1.3 million internet users, 11% of the population, which puts it above South Africa in terms of usage.
There are a large number of political websites, many set up by Zimbabweans living abroad – it is estimated that since 2000 about 3.5 million people have left the country. However, the websites that they have set up, for example newzimbabwe.com and talkzimbabwe.com are now widely used inside the country too.
The growth of the internet and the digitial public sphere has partly beeen attributed to Zimbabwe’s harsh and repressive political environment. Since 2002 the Zimbabwean government has enacted a number of repressive laws to curtail civil liberties. As Last Moyo says:
These laws and some extrajuridicial tactics used by the government have not only muzzled the media and contrained civil society’s political activism in ‘real’ space, but have also arguably closed the democratic space for civic networking, mobilization and participation in national politics.
There might be some paralells with Iran here. As Annabelle Sreberny has hinted – the fact that the public sphere is so severely restricted, forces people to take their politics somewhere else – in this case online. I think it could be interesting to do a comparison of online activism between Iran and Zimbabwe – there seems to be some similarities. Large diaspora, repressive regime, high literacy, fairly widespread internet and so on. But I digress.
Sowanele, which means ‘enough is enough’ in Ndebele is a pro-democracy underground activist movement. Its main way of communicating is online – through sokwanele.com, the This Is Zimbabwe blog, its YouTube channel, Facebook page and Twitter account. It also uses crisis mapping (which I’ve blogged about previously) to great effect. Its clerarly an expert in online activism. And it inspires action too. Here’s a recent tweet:
Kubatana.net is an online network of over 250 Zimbabwean activist organisations organisations. One of the things it does is provide a searchable online directory of civil society organisations. This is a way to find organisations in human rights and activism in Zimbabwe but it’s also a way for organisations that don’t have the capacity or resources themselves to have an online presence.
It also organises mass protests and encourages people to send mass protest emails and letters against the Zimbabwean state’s attempts at cyber surveillance. Last Moyo again:
…it could be argued that kubatana.net represents a potentially powerful tool for democratic participation and digital resistance for Zimbabweans who have access to the Internet.
Update: Just seen that Kubatana has recently released ‘Freedom Fone’ – a mobile information service. More information on mobileactive.org.
Image credit: sokwanele.com
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