Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
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Andrew Heavens gave an amazing seminar on photoblogging at the Digital Citizen Indaba a few weeks back. One idea that stuck with me from his talk: “The camera doesn’t matter, but being there does.” More important than having the right gear is being in the right place to take an important photo. Andrew’s one of the few photojournalists in Ethiopia, so he’s able to share images that no one else is able to.
Two of the key examples almost everyone – myself included – gives when explaining the idea that people can “commit acts of journalism” without neccesarily being journalists are the photos taken in Thailand of the Southeast Asian tsunami and in the London underground after the tube bombings. Like the citizen video of the Rodney King beating, these documents demonstrated that journalist in the future is going to involve professionals as well as people who happened to be there with the opportunity to record what they saw.
While there’s no doubt that Andrew’s right and that being there is critical to some types of online publishing, I wonder if we don’t sometimes oversell the importance of “being there” as part of citizen media. Much of the rhetoric around the importance of citizen media – including the rhetoric I deliver roughly once a week these days – is about diversifing the media by introducing more local voices – people in their own communities who can report their own news. But I think there’s another place where citizen’s media may be at least as important – introducing citizen expertise on subjects where existing journalists may not be expert.
I found myself exploring this train of thought as I talked with Professor Bernard Hibbitts at the University of Pittsburgh yesterday. Hibbitts is the founder of Jurist, a remarkable website that covers legal news around the US and, increasingly, the world, primarily through the efforts of University of Pittsburgh law students. Students write original articles on legal issues, often providing legal context for stories reported in other media.
Hibbitts tells me that an inspiration for the site was the realization that newspapers were eliminating their legal reporters, combining legal reporting with crime or political reporting. Reporting on a legal story often requires sophisticated knowledge of the law – many of the best legal reporters are lawyers or have a legal background. By asking law students to work as legal reporters, Jurist gives a lawyer’s perspective on a wide range of news on a daily basis.
(There’s a long history of asking law students to take on professional responsibilities while they’re still in school. Unlike most professional journals, law journals are edited by students, inverting usual power dynamics by giving students the chance to edit and select papers for publication by their professors and their colleagues.)
It’s interesting to think about other subjects where citizen media might be able to bring expertise to the table that professional journalists might lack. When Grigoi Perelman refused the Field Medal for his work proving Poincaire’s conjecture, most newspapers didn’t even attempt to explain the substance of Perelma’s work – it would have been interesting to see how a citizen media site with mathematician reporters would have covered the story. (Alas, Wikinews, which likely had mathematicians reporting the story didn’t do much better. At least they tried.) Mathematician reporters would also have an interesting set of insights on stories involving economic statistics, statistical analysis, climate change extrapolations… it makes you wonder why math departments aren’t encouraging projects like Jurist.
As we talked about the similarities and differences between Jurist and Global Voices, I realized that while some of GV’s strength is about where our contributors are – all around the world, in countries not sufficiently covered by mainstream media – some of our strength comes from what we know, especially what our editors know. Our Africa editor, Ndesanjo Macha, is living in North Carolina, pretty far from his home in Tanzania. But he’s got great knowledge of African politics and issues and is able to use that knowledge to make content decisions despite not being on the ground. Ditto for Neha Viswanathan who covers India from the UK, and several of our other excellent editors.
It’s easier to talk about citizen media in terms of “being there” because it’s less threatening to existing media outlets – everyone understands that no newspaper can have a bureau in every corner of the world, and that the citizen with a camera will sometimes be the best first source of information on a story. But it’s a bit more threatening to talk about citizen media filling holes in journalists’ expertise. Most journalists aren’t physicists, currency traders or airplane pilots – when covering those subjects, maybe it’s helpful for the journalists and the physicists, traders and pilots to work together.
Zambian elections took place today, pitting incumbent president Levy Mwanawasa against three rivals, including Michael Sata, a strong candidate who led in some pre-election polls. Mwanawasa was running primarily on his economic record – Zambia has had good economic growth the past few years, a great deal of outside investment and some forgiveness of foreign debt. Sata was running on economics as well – making an argument that Zambia’s economic gains weren’t being shared by most Zambians, and arguing that foreign investors in Zambia were stripping away the country’s riches without adequately compensating the populus.
The election has attracted some attention from bloggers and commentators who are interested in China’s role in Africa, including yours truly. Sata’s anti-China rhetoric has incensed China’s ambassador to Zambia, Li Baodong, who threatened that China might cease investment in the country if Sata were elected – a number of commentators, including John Reed in the Financial Times, consider this an intervention by China in the Zambian election. Sata made headlines today by praising Robert Mugabe, blaming capitalist imperialists for Zimbabwe’s troubles, and stating, “The people of Zimbabwe are not suffering. They are much happier.”
(This strongly contradicts some of my impressions from Zimbabwe, but as a capitalist imperialist, my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.)
Election results are likely to be released Saturday, and the polling is expected to be close. Head Heeb is all over the story, and sees a likely victory for Mwanawasa, because he believes other opposition candidates – notably businessman Hakainde Hichilema – will pull votes away from Sata. Catherine, writing from Lusaka, suggests that Sata and Mwanawasa are the clear front runners and that Sata is percieved as being more pro-poor and pro-change than the incumbent.
I continue to be fascinated by the rise of Chinese and Indian investment as a major force shaping African politics. African exports to Asia have tripled in the past 15 years, and Asian exports to Africa are rising faster than in any other region. As an unabashed enthusiast for development through trade, I see this largely as a good thing. But the points Sata and others raise about working conditions and equitable distribution of profits are very valid ones. And the willingness of Chinese businesses and government agencies to invest irrespective of human rights concerns in countries like Zimbabwe presents a tremendous problem for other countries that are trying to shape governmental behavior through trade incentives.
Should be very interesting to see what the results are on Saturday.
The last port in southern Somalia uncontrolled by the Union of Islamic Courts was Kismaayo, close to the Kenyan border. UIC forces took control of the city without violence on Monday and then faced protests from some residents – some protesters were detained, and there are conflicting reports on whether any were harmed.
Kismaayo is strategically important both because it’s a major town and because it was the last logical place to stage a sea landing of forces opposed to the UIC… or AU peacekeepers, as the interim government has requested.
Reports continue to stream in that Ethiopia is sending troops to reinforce Baidoa, the only city the provisional government continues to hold. Ethiopia continues to deny any presence in Somalia, despite widespread reports of more than fifty armored vehicles crossing the border. While Ethiopia denies a presence on the ground, they’re making noises about the presence of “terrorists” on their border, warning of an al-Qaeda foothold in Somalia.
Sara Kuepfer, writing at the International Relations and Security Network has a useful commentary, warning that it’s a mistake to take Ethiopia’s “anti-terror” claims at face value:
Clearly, the international community would be wrong to rely on Ethiopia to counter the Islamist threat in Somalia. Instead, it should enable the deployment of African Union peacekeepers and support the ongoing peace talks between the UIC and the Somali interim government.
UIC security chief Sheik Yusuf Indahaadde has described Ethiopia’s actions as a declaration of war and has warned that “the consequences of insecurity created by Ethiopia will spread to neighbouring countries and to East Africa as a whole.”
Kenya is already feeling some of these consequences, reporting an increasing stream of refugees into northeastern Kenya, including 3,400 in a recent week. Many of the refugees are coming from Kismaayo and Baidoa, which may indicate a desire to leave the city before it falls.
For the provisional government to have a prayer of holding Baidoa, the UN Security Council would need to lift an arms embargo long in place over the nation, allowing the forces in Baidoa to re-arm. This would need to be supported by AU peacekeepers – already stretched thin in Darfur – and might provoke a harsh counter-reaction from UIC forces, who don’t seem to have any problems obtaining arms. Kenya is pushing to lift the embargo – so far, the US seems unwilling to consider lifting it.
This weekend, the New York Times picked up a meme that’s made the rounds of the press and bloggers watching Somalia – surprise that the UIC-controlled parts of Somalia are much safer than they were months before, and that the brand of Sharia imposed hasn’t resembled the Taliban’s Afghanistan.
Islamic leaders are operating almost in campaign mode, organizing street cleanups, visiting hospitals, overseeing a mini building boom and recruiting elderly policemen to don faded uniforms they have not worn for years and return to work. Beyond that, they sent a letter this week to the United Nations Security Council pledging to support democratic rule.
Maybe this is just smooth talk. Or premature signs that could prove misleading. Hard-core elements still operate here, including militiamen who drive around with black scarves and black flags and shoot people for watching Hollywood movies. Young men like them were believed to have killed an Italian nun at a Mogadishu hospital last Sunday, apparently in retaliation for Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on Islam.
But the Islamist leaders say they are rogue elements who will be punished, and they have reopened some movie theaters and issued decrees emphasizing tolerance. Whether they live up to those promises seems to hinge on whether they can, or even want to, rein in the militant groups that helped propel them to power.
Sick of reading me? Always wondered what my voice sounds like over a crackly cellphone calling into a studio in Cambridge from western Massachusetts?
Well, wonder no longer. Mark Sommer at “A World of Possibilities” has interviewed me and several friends for a radio show about participatory media. You can listen to David Weinberger and me finishing each others sentences about midway through the show, or enjoy the always wise Andrew Zolli as he contextualizes the participatory media revolution. The audio is here as an mp3 – enjoy!
Eric Osiakwan is a busy man. Near as I can tell, he’s one of the few people I know who has more job titles that I do. And since he’s been to twenty-five African nations in the past five years, he may be one of the unlucky few who spend more time on airplanes than I do. (Joking about this over coffee later, Eric acknowledges that his last girlfriend once told him, “If you like the airplane so much, why don’t you marry it?”)
I last ran into Eric in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he was speaking at the Highway Africa conference. As the executive secretary of AfrISPA (the African ISP operators’ association) and GISPA (the Ghana ISP association), he’s been hard at work on the issues surrounding the proposed EASSy cable, which will complete a fiber-optic link around the African content and, if all goes well, radically reduce the cost of connectivity.
What’s happened with EASSy so far has been pretty fascinating – at its onset, it looked like EASSy would follow the “closed consortium” model that’s helped keep West African bandwidth so expensive. Eric shows a slide that suggests that connectivity in US universities costs roughly $0.12 per kilobit per second of connectivity, while connectivity in West Africa is $8 per kbps – more expensive than satellite connectivity, or connectivity in Central or East Africa. Ironically, the introduction of a cable in west Africa – SAT-3 – hasn’t meaningfully dropped prices in many countries.
Eric describes two approaches to making SAT-3 more affordable. In Ghana and Nigeria, pressure from competitive ISPs strengthened by ISP associations has been able to “push back” on the consortium pricing. As a result, the same E1 circuit that costs $25,000 per month in South Africa costs $1,500 in Ghana. ISPs made satellite connectivity more affordable, forcing the SAT-3 providers to cut their costs much closer to the wholesale cost.
In Mauritius, they’re taking another approach – trying to make the argument at the government level that connectivity is an “essential facility” and using regulation to open access to the cable. Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa are rumored to be exploring this model as well.
The fear has been that the proposed East Africa cable – EASSy – would fall into the same economic traps as SAT-3. But something very interesting has happened around EASSy – a great deal of momentum has developed around the idea that EASSy should be “open access”, that any entity that wants to purchase connectivity from the cable should be able to at a reasonable price without undue restriction. There are forces suggesting that what’s most important is building the cable quickly, and that an open process is bound to be more complex and involved. But Eric and others have argued that the SAT-3 clearly screwed things up and that EASSy has to use a different model, even if it slows down construction.
Eric dreams of a cable where different entities can buy in via different models. In countries where it might be profitable to have access to a fiber cable, like Kenya, the cable should allow for private investment. In countries where private investment in the cable would be at least five years off, Eric sees the possibility of “stretch” funding – public/private partnership to help make private investment in infrastructure more reasonable. In other countries – Burundi, for instance – the cable needs to be treated as a social good, paid for by donors. Eric’s most radical idea is that we could increase African ownership of the cable by floating some ownership shares on regional stock markets, allowing individuals to own a piece of the cable as well.
The conversation broadened quickly into a discussion of communications on the continent, and how communication enables entrepreneurship. Eric suggested that top-down approaches to development miss some of the most exciting innovations on the continent, and that people would be well advised to watch new communication infrastructure in Africa to see what business models develop around it.
Asked about uniquely African innovations in telecoms, I offered four areas where I thought Africans were leading the rest of the world:
- Narrowband – innovative connectivity solutions that use very little bandwidth, like the Ghana “Javelin” project, or Fidonet nodes in Zimbabwe
- Localization – Translation of open source software into a wide variety of languages, especially through the help of organizations like Translate.org.za. Localization of software for challenging environments in projects like Ubuntu.
- Radio – Use of community radio for information dissemination, integration of data and radio in projects like Geekcorps Mali.
- Urban wifi, with huge wifi networks in Accra, Bamako and other African cities.
I wish Eric had an hour to work through his slides – his thinking on the topic is really strong, and I’m hoping he’ll take this dense slide deck and turn it into an article soon for everyone interested in this important project.
It’s too easy to pick apart the biased, inaccurate coverage of Zimbabwean state media. But there’s the occasional story so absurdly deceptive that it makes it worthwhile to shoot a few fish in barrels.
Let’s begin with the opening paragraph of a story from yesterday’s Zimbabwe Herald:
AN attempt by the United States government to play up the flopped Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) mass action hit a snag yesterday, when a five-member delegation from the US-based rightwing Coalition of Black Trade Unions (CBTU) was promptly deported after touching down at Harare International Airport yesterday afternoon.
I admit that I don’t understand much about the Bush administration foreign policy and that Condoleeza Rice rarely consults with me on matters of African policy, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that the US government isn’t spending too much time trying to undermine the Mugabe regime. If they were, it’s hard to believe they’d choose the Coalition of Black Trade Unions as their actor abroad. A member organization in the AFL-CIO, it’s hard to imagine what planet they’d be considered “rightwing” on.
Most of the coverage I can find on CBTU is in that noted rightwing paper, “The People’s Weekly Word“, which describes itself as follows:
The PWW is known for its partisan coverage. We take sides — for truth and justice. We are partisan to the working class, racially and nationally oppressed peoples, women, youth, seniors, international solidarity, Marxism and socialism. We enjoy a special relationship with the Communist Party USA, founded in 1919, and publish its news and views.
Just so you understand where they’re coming from. They reported a speech by Bill Lucy – CBTU’s president, and the leader of the banned delegation – in an article titled “CBTU Calls for Bush Defeat“, there Lucy outlined CBTU’s feelings about the Bush administration:
Lucy condemned the Iraq war as a “weapon of mass distraction – a distraction from the failed economic policies that devastated American families; a distraction from the fact that 2.4 million jobs have been lost in the last 29 months.â€
To repeated and enthusiastic applause, Lucy also criticized Bush’s handling of the national debt; attacks on affirmative action; tax breaks for the rich; attacks on civil liberties; and efforts to stack the courts with right-wing, racist ideologues. Lucy condemned what he called the “unchecked immorality of Corporate America,†aided and abetted by the Bush administration.
In a more recent speech (May 26,2006) reported on the AFL-CIO weblog, Lucy’s tone was pretty similar:
The failed policies of this administration are visible in every segment of our lives—jobs, education, health care, economic development, pensions and retirement security, Social Security, prescription drugs, trade, immigration. Unemployment is up and wages have been stagnant since 2001, forcing desperate working parents to get a second, and sometimes a third job, or max out their credit cards just to make ends meet.
(He’s talking about the Bush administration, not the Mugabe administration.)
The Herald “clarifies” that the BCTU weren’t always bad guys:
Formed as a progressive trade union movement to champion the rights of black American workers in 1972, the CBTU has since become embedded with the Bush administration’s policies of illegal regime change as it actively supported the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Right. All that talk about failed administrations is really a sinister form of “active support”. But the Herald has to acknowledge CBTU’s past because they were very active in bringing the anti-apartheid movement to the US, and Mugabe’s legitimacy is based on his revolutionary cred, his anti-colonialist legacy. He and CBTU were on the same side against apartheid – they must have gone the wrong way in the interim.
CBTU has announced that they’re planning on focusing on Zimbabwe, using progressive media in the US to bring attention to the conditions in Zimbabwe.
The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) has launched a major campaign to clip Mugabe of his “liberator†image in the African American community by exposing the thuggish actions of his regime against the Zimbabwean people.
The Herald attributes the quote to Dwight Kirk, writing in the “rightwing Washington Informer newspaper.” The Informer is an African-American woman owned weekly that refuses to publish crime news because it “reports only positive news” and covers crime by talking about community solutions and responses… typical behavior for a right-wing American paper.
If I were writing this story, I’d offer an opening paragraph that looked something like this:
In the wake of violent suppression of a demonstration by the Zimbabwe Council of Trade Unions, union leaders from the US were unceremoniously deported from Harare over the objections of the US ambassador. A five member delegation from the Coalition of Black Trade Unions, led by former anti-apartheid activist William Lucy, was denied entry into Zimbabwe without explanation by Zimbabwean immigration. CBTU is leading a campaign to call attention to the human rights abuses of the Zimbabwean government in the US labor movement. The trip was intended to display solidarity between the black labor movement in the US with ZCTU and to investigate violence against ZCTU members in the wake of 9/13 protests.
But hey, I’m not a certified Zimbabwean journalist, so what do I know?
The first time it happened, it was deeply disconcerting. I was sitting in a beautiful garden in suburban Harare in the shade of a flowering tree, chatting with a pair of passionate, committed activists. As we talked about how bad things are in Zimbabwe – a currency collapsing, 80% unemployment, a dysfunctional media, the lack of basic goods like bread and petrol, violent supression of demonstrations a few days earlier – we sipped our coffee, enjoyed the tropical sunshine and cool breeze and watched the children across the garden play with the tortoise ambling between patches of sunshine and shade.
From the statistics I read before coming to the country, I expected Zimbabwe to be a hell on earth. Instead, it’s a very pleasant place to take a vacation. The weirdness of this juxtaposition got less weird with repetition, but still caught my attention every time.
The only graffiti I saw in Harare. According to friends, this building gets bombd every night, repainted each morning.
Talking with my friends in the garden, I told them the story of the woman I sat next to, flying into the country. She’s a doctor, an immigrant to Zimbabwe 20 years ago – an immigrant Zimbabwean, not a Rhodesian who stayed through the transition. Her children are succesful professionals in the US, and she’s torn between continuing to practice in Harare and leaving the country, as so many other medical professionals have. She mentions “the situation” – “it’s horrible, it’s just gotten so bad.” I ask her what’s most difficult for her, what parts of the situation she finds hardest to deal with, and she switches subject, talking about her garden. It’s what we talk about until the plane lands.
I’d assumed that she didn’t want to tell me about her dissatisfaction, worried that I might communicate her dissent to someone in the government. My friends tell me this probably isn’t the case. “Lots of well-off people, who have money outside the country, are locking themselves in gated compounds and tending to their gardens. They’re keeping their heads down, waiting for the situation to pass.”
It’s not ignorance or indifference, my friends argue. It’s exhaustion. Activists are feeling it too: I ask one activist about an online project she’s involved with. The site wasn’t updated for a few weeks and readers around the world began to wonder whether she and others involved had been arrested. “We took a break. We’re so tired. We all needed a holiday.”
It’s easy to understand why the situation is so frustrating for activists. Harrasment of people in “the movement” is relentless. I have a beer with three young activists – one has just been released from central prison where he was held for three nights for distributing leaflets and posters prior to the abortive ZCTU protests on 9/13. I ask him how his family was dealing with his arrest. “They’re used to it,” he tells me. “It happens so often, it’s not really a surprise for them any more. And the lawyers call them.” One of the best organized aspects of the Zimbabwean resistance is the legal profession – groups like Zimbabwean Lawyers for Human Rights organize legal representation for people arrested by the police, alert their families and find medical support for anyone injured in custody.
The local alternative to razor wire. Hard to believe this would fly in South Africa, land of the electric fence.
So why aren’t strikes like the 9/13 event inspiring mass turn-outs? Zimbabweans know how to riot – they turned out in the streets in 1997 and 1999. A friend points out that there was a single figure – Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the ZCTU – who served as a rallying point for the opposition at that time. After losing the 2002 Presidential election as the head of the Movement for Democratic Change and surviving prosecution on two separate treason cases, one would expect Tsvangirai to be a powerful rallying point. But the MDC has split over tactics – whether or not to boycott parliamentary elections – and Tsvangirai was not one of the organizers of the 9/13 event. (Media sympathetic to the government used the disruption of the 9/13 protest as evidence that MDC is weak and disorganized.)
But Zimbabweans may also be avoiding the demonstrations because it’s just so hard to keep their families sheltered and fed. Operation Murambatsvina may have displaced as many as 2.4 million families from their homes; bread shortages are forcing the government to release hard currency to import wheat; petrol shortages make transport so expensive that some people can’t commute to work any more. These privations might inspire revolution in some countries. In Zimbabwe, it inspires people to “make a plan”.
The phrase is said as a single word – “makeaplan” – and reflects the incredible resilience of the Zimbabwean people. Power cuts mean the kids cannot study their books? Send the kids over to one house and light lamps, conserving expensive lamp oil. Can’t afford transport to your village? Trucks leaving Harare stop and load passengers on top of their loads, taking money to help with petrol costs. People who can’t afford prescription medicines – in short supply because of the currency crisis – make friends with people who travel to South Africa, who can smuggle medicines over the border.
Walking into town one morning, trying to find a taxi, I find myself in step with two young men walking to work. They tell me the taxis don’t come by here any more – it uses too much petrol to cruise for passengers – and encourage me to walk for another half an hour, into downtown, where I might find a cab. “It’s good exercise,” they tell me. “Look how strong we’ve become,” they say, laughing.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish by making a plan. My friend Kennedy Mavhumashava talks about a story she recently wrote for a Panos website. Despite AIDS donors deciding to cut programs in Zimbabwe, HIV prevalence in Zimbabwe is falling, both in the adult population and in mother to child transmission. What’s astonishing about this is that Zimbabwe spends much, much less on HIV care than other countries. Well-funded nations like Botswana spend $74 per patient per year – Zimbabwe spends $4. How?
Mavhumashava believes that the success reflects the robust infrastructure built under the Rhodesian government and under the beginning of the Mugabe years. This doesn’t just include roads and buildings – it includes education and training. Zimbabwe’s literacy rate is extremely high. Even with an exodus of doctors, the national health service operates clinics that help keep some of the population alive despite shortages of anti-retrovirals and other drugs.
“Make a plan” allows Zimbabweans to get up every morning, try to go to work and find enough food to survive the next day. But this resilience may mean that Zimbabweans aren’t inclined to take to the streets. Some complain that government ministers are making money on corrupt business deals, but it’s hard to believe that anyone’s getting rich in a country where the overall economy is 30% of what it was five years ago. The bravest ones print leaflets and newspapers, risking imprisonment to express their dissent. It’s hard to know how many people they’re reaching, and what they might be able to inspire people to do.
It feels like everyone’s just waiting for “the old man” to die.
There are an estimated 1.5 million Zimbabwean emigrees in the UK. Add in emigration to the US, Canada, South Africa, and there are 2-3 million “missing” Zimbabweans – a huge number in a country that has a population of under 13 million. Reading the news from Zimbabwe, you can’t help wondering why so many people have stayed.
Walking down Kwame Nkrumah, Harare
But walking down Kwame Nkrumah Avenue in Harare, lined with jacarandas in bloom, I think I understand that this could be a very hard place to leave. Or, as one friend tells me, hugging me goodbye, “I’m not letting that old man chase me out of my home.”
This post is part of the Holiday in Harare series.
My Heart's In Accra by Ethan Zuckerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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