The Digital Disconnect and Misconceptions about "Revolution 2.0"

By Dibussi Tande

Since the mass protests that led to the toppling of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, there has been lots of conjecture and discussion about the probability of similar protest movements spreading to sub-Saharan Africa.

(c) everyday ritual

There has also been a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that it may be difficult for these protest movement to catch on in this region with its fair share of sclerotic regimes that have long gone past their expiration date.

In fact, since the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings, activists and politicians in a number of sub-Saharan African countries (Gabon, Cameroon…), have tried to replicate the Maghrebian model with little success. Undaunted, others are still planning to give it shot (Angola, The Gambia, Senegal, Uganda etc.) in the near future. In the case of Cameroon, activists, mainly in the Diaspora, used social media sites to try and nudge Cameroonians towards an Egypt-type uprising against the 29- year old regime of President Paul Biya. February 23, the third anniversary of the 2008 protests, was selected as the beginning of this protest movement. In the weeks leading up to that date, dozens of “Biya Must go” or similarly named groups and pages were created on Facebook.

In the end, the February 23 protests produced nothing but whimper to the dismay of activists who could not understand why their calls for mobilization on social media sites largely went unheeded to, and did not translate into mass mobilization on the ground in Cameroon. As one blogger lamented,

We Cameroonians should feel like lethargic, droopy junk. Yes, we should feel like a flesh-folded fat man watching his ripped younger brother prepare for a triathlon. Believe it or not, one has to presuppose that the triumph or failure of the revolution in many of these countries depends unreservedly on how ordinary people are ready to die in order to gain their self-determination.

Here in Cameroon, the majority of us can’t be bothered to surrender a bottle of beer and head to the streets at least for once after 28 painful years in bondage by the CPDM regime of President Paul Biya. Yeah, right! Even with the heightened attention of the international community.

The expectation of Cameroonian activists that social media could, on its own, unleash mass protests on the ground that would result in the overthrow of the Biya regime stemmed from a misreading of events in North Africa. This expectation was based on the belief that (1) the protests in North Africa were “spontaneous revolutions” against the status quo, rather than the culmination of sustained campaigns against these regimes which began months, if not years before, and (2) that these spontaneous protests, were indeed pure “Web 2.0 revolutions”, that is, virtual events remotely organized, managed and led to fruition solely from social media sites with little interaction with active forces on the ground.

No “Spontaneous” Revolutions!

The idea that Facebook can on its own lead to instant revolution and that all it needs is a month or 18 days (as in Egypt) to overthrow a dictator is very far from reality. As Egyptian blogger Hani Morsi has aptly pointed out:

The assumption that social media’s largest influence was during or shortly before the 18 days in which Mubarak’s regime was brought down is very naive. This has been simmering under the surface of the Egyptian political scene for a while, particularly since the Presidential “elections” of 2005. The boiling point was reached on January 25th 2011. What I refer to here as the virtualization of dissent is what happened when the popular desire for change was shifted from real space, where it was in long somnolence, and cultivated it in a space that the Patriarchs do not understand: virtual space.

Egypt, which has a long history and well established tradition of internet activism , has been described as the “home to the most vibrant blogger-activist community” in  North Africa and the Middle East.
Examples abound of Egyptians using social media over the years to promote a vast array of political and non political causes or to protest against the ills in Egyptian society, from police corruption to violence against women. In fact, in 2008, the Mubarak regime mulled over the idea of banning Facebook in Egypt after activists used a Facebook group called April 6 which had about 66,000 members at the time, to call for a general strike “to protest low wages and rising food prices in Egypt, as well as to make a more general show of disapproval of the Egyptian government, led by Hosni Mubarak”. These strikes which brutally crushed by security forces, particularly at the textile factory in Mahalla al-Kubra, but they set the ball rolling. It is significant that one report at the time described unsuccesful strike as a “dress rehearsal” for bigger events in the future rather than as a failure...

[Side note: On February 3, during the January uprising, Amal Sharaf one of the core members of the April 6 movement was arrested alongside 4 other members in Cairo – another example of the merging of online activism and offline engagement which is at the core of the success of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions – but more on that later...]

Talking specifically about "We Are All Khaled Said", the Facebook page created by Wael Ghonim, which is credited with initiating the January 25 the protest movement in Egypt, it is worth stressing that this page was not created in January 2011 as many believe, but some six months earlier, after Khaled Said was murdered by Egyptian police on June 6, 2010 for posting a video on Youtube showing Egyptian police in a drug deal. The death of Said instantly became a cause célèbre for Egyptian activists and human rights groups after pictures of his disfigured and mutilated body were posted on Internet. Within weeks, the Facebook page had over 200,000 users (it now has over one million members, and the English version, over 100,000 members).

It should be noted that – and this is key for would-be digital activists – We Are All Khaled Said was not just a motley collection of individuals whose “activism” ended with their joining the page, but consisted of members who used it to share information and ideas, develop strategies and actions – a veritable virtual public sphere. Although it started out with modest ambitions to campaign against police brutality, We are All Khaled Said quickly became a veritable online community which was able to transform its online engagement into offline mobilization, with small demonstrations at Tahrir Square in Cairo that were quickly and violently squashed by police, protests in the UK and US, and  “flash mobs” in Alexandria to draw attention to their cause while circumventing Egypt’s emergency laws.

And, unlike some earlier campaigns that did not venture far beyond cyberspace, this one has spilled out onto the Egyptian streets. In addition to the hundreds who attended Said's funeral, "flash mobs" have organised a number of successful protests. One of the most poignant was when thousands of people stood in a long chain along Alexandria's seafront – spaced five metres apart, in part to get around Egypt's draconian emergency law, which bans mass public assemblies – and stood silently or read their Qur'ans and Bibles. [The Guardian]

 
"If speaking up only brings more violence, then silence will have to articulate our grief." (c) We Are All Said Facebook page

 We are all Khaled Said also served as a platform for crowd-sourcing information on the rigged legislative elections of November 2010.

By the time We Are All Khaled Said began sending out the call for the January 25, 2011 protests, the page, which now had close to 400,000 members, had already become a solid online community with six months of intense on-the-ground activism under its belt; dozens of protest actions across Egypt and elsewhere, a solid understanding and familiarity with the tactics of the Egyptian security forces,  and links with other online groups and grassroots movements in the country – a formidable coalition of the virtual and the real ready to take on the Mubarak regime – the result of months of sustained and coordinated actions. 

Online Activism in Tunisia
Like Egypt, Tunisia also has a longstanding tradition of online activism along with one of the most vibrant cyber-communities in Africa and the Middle East. This community was the target of some of the most extreme and vicious censorship tactics during the Ben Ali years. This censorship campaign reached its peak during the December 2010-January 2011 protests when the regime engaged in a merciless cyber-war with activists, including launching sophisticated phishing schemes to access, take over, disable or delete their email accounts and Facebook pages.

Over the years, Tunisian digital activists used innovative censorship circumvention tactics to counter the censorship techniques of the Ben Ali regime. One of the first major campaigns to circumvent the regime’s online censorship was the 2008 “geo-bombing” of the presidential palace in Carthage after the government blocked the videosharinig site DailyMotion.com because it hosted video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners. The activist embedded the banned testimonies into Google earth and when anyone visited the Tunisian presidential palace, it was covered with the videos that had been banned on daily motion.

 
 
Like their Egyptian counterparts, Tunisian activists quickly realized that online activism alone was not enough and made efforts to translate their online activism into offline engagement. One notable case being the planned May 22, 2010 protest against censorship. After the organizers of the event – Yassine Ayari and blogger Slim Amamou – were arrested and forced to cancel the demonstrations, activists resorted to the use of flash mobs to make their point – Another side note: Amanou’s arrest at the height of the protests on January 6, 2011 (which the world became aware of thanks to his ingenious use of social media ) was another watershed moment that helped give international visibility to the Tunisian uprising. Upon his release was appointed minister of Youth and sports in the post Ben Ali regime.

Again, just as in Egypt, by the time Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, there was already a core group of online activists who had honed in their skills, and in the process built a solid community extending from the virtual to the real world, and all that was needed was a spark. The death of Mohamed  Bouazizi provided just such a spark and within a month, Ben Ali was history…

Social Media: Tool for Incremental Change Rather than Spontaneous Uprising
Social Media’s supposed power to foment revolution on its own is largely exaggerated, if not inaccurate. Its true power is in its ability to make information reach a critical mass in a very short time and at little or no cost, to build communities that span different geographies ,and also to shift discourse from a restrictive public space controlled by authoritarian regimes to an open virtual public sphere which these regimes neither control nor master. To borrow from Global Voices Online article, “Rather than looking at [social media] as a cathartic outlet for the oppressed”, its real value is “in making an otherwise impossible popular political discourse possible” – discourse that can lead to an offline mobilization to press for political reform or outright revolution.

From this perspective, those Cameroonian activists, many of whom are fairly new to digital activism, had and still have rather unrealistic expectations about their ability to change the status quo in Cameroon via their keyboards, and are committing that cardinal sin of confusing social media tools (notably Facebook and Twitter) with their strategy and/or the goal (i.e., political reform and institutional change in Cameroon). The widespread demobilization that occurred within Cameroonian activist circles after February 23 is a clear indication of this – many of the Biya Must Go pages have gone silent; they have become virtual ghost towns inhabited by dejected netizens disillusioned by what they believe was a massive failure.

Nothing Comes Overnight!

Revolutions are rarely clean cut events or precise surgical actions. In fact, they are almost often messy businesses that begin as a trickle before developing into a gush that sweeps away the status quo – sometimes they even go dormant for years only to be revived by an unanticipated event or an unforeseen opportunity.

In this context, the February 23, 2011 protest movement in Cameroon, which received more international press than the flash mobs did in Egypt eight months ago, will ultimately be considered a failure by history if and only if activists view this event as an end in itself rather than as the first salvo in a long and sustained campaign that may go on for months or even years. Even if a million Cameroonians had poured into the streets on Feb. 23, Biya would still have been in power the next day... Lest we forget, the 1991 civil disobedience campaign that paralyzed Cameroon for nearly six months and posed an existential threat to the Biya regime at the time was in the making for at least a year before it officially began. So digital activists, if they are serious, should maintain the momentum while waiting for the next opportunity to go into action. 

The Digital Disconnect

In any case, understanding the strength and limitations of social media and incorporating these into any strategy is the easy part. The real challenge to digital activists in Cameroon and most of sub-Saharan Africa with low Internet penetration rates is what I describe as the “digital disconnect”, i.e., the fact that the digital civil society in Africa is operating in a largely unwired continent, and that the bulk of Africa’s digital activists live out of Africa and do not share the same geographical space as the people they are representing or trying to influence.

That will be the focus of Part II…

Comments

[Nii]

Spot on Dibussi!

[Gan Charles]

You cannot organize the kind of turnout as seen in Tunisia through Social Media in Cameroon. For starters, despite the prevalence of cell phones, many people with cell phones cannot read SMSs. Access to computers are limited to mainly University students and graduates who frequent cyber cafes. Most other visit just to retrieve emails from loved ones or check 419 progress. In short the size of the population that such digital disposition will reach is very small as would be required to mount a meaningful protest.
Forgetting digital methods, Cameroonians have other well traditional means of disseminating information - village town crier, churches, meeting groups etc.
The problem with protest not picking up is not a question of communication channels but of complacency. Many groups in Cameroon do not believe there is anything to fight for. Granted, the economy is bad and people are hurting but they can still eat and drink. They still do not believe that they hurt enough to put their lives on the line. Until the majority of groups internalize the cruel disenfranchisement, nothing will happen in the like of mass protest and nothing will be done about it.
Diaspora may think that they are doing those back home by protesting and sending a message to the international community. In Cameroon most of those protests have no credibility. There is no effective co-ordination between the protest abroad and the movement at home. Nothing on ground to gauge , mange and promote activities.
You find all these organizations abroad claiming to be fighting for and representing change in Cameroon but they have no community involvement in the country. They community views them with suspicion because they have no programs in place to educate the community as to the agenda and provide services that are better than what the government is providing. You need to gain the hearts and minds of the people. In so doing you gain their trust and just maybe you begin to understand why all the movement for change has been a failure so far. It takes time. I bet that if all the groups seeking change had spent the past 28 years establishing community outreach programs they would have seen more success in rallying people to their cause. You can't just come in as a "stranger" expect your ideas to be embraced and expect people to die for it - even if everyone agrees that change makes sense.

[cadmun]

Well said Charles.
Let us wait for part II of the report to see how the reporter solves the puzzle. Enough of this lecture on Egypt and Tunisia, please propose practical solutions that reflect the aspirations of the Cameroonian people.
What are their grievances?

[Bwana]

Birmingham

[Louis Egbe Mbua]

Nope Gan. Your analysis is inaccurate. This is just an excuse! The Egyptians and Tunisians have food to eat! To believe that a protest must follow food is mistaken in the modern world. I live in England and they protest every day. Are the English starving? And for your information, the British drink more than Cameroonians. This false concept about Cameroonians eating and drinking is to underestimate a people; and at worse an insult. I was in Cameroon twice two years ago and never saw the alcoholism you are trying to paint. People were merely going about their business. To believe that the Diaspora is not in touch with Cameroon is naive. Without the Diaspora, the Cameroon economy might as well collapse. So, please, this bad-mouthing of Cameroonians in the Diaspora is a government ploy to divide the Cameroon people.

The Revolution of PAUL BIYA MUST GO has just started. The 23rd Feb demonstration has left a deep and fatal scar on the totalitarian regime; and has entered the psyche of Cameroonians. You may not require an entire nation to change or alter the cause of History.

Paul Biya must go even if it takes but 500 people to-do the job.

Cameroonians know their relatives abroad. Do not be fooled by the Tchimora lies. It is like saying living abroad means one must not be in touch with friends, relatives etc. This is inaccurate as the Diaspora continues to pay hospital bills in a system with no health care, send money for tuition fees and liaise with human rights and pressure groups.

Mbua

[Paul Murphy]

Superb article. Thanks for your insightful views on the matter. It's enlightened me much about the protest movement in Africa.

[Kwame CheFanon]

Good initial analysis. The question is what next? How were the ghost towns organized and held up, years before there was any such thing as social media. Back then conference calls and fax machines were the best we could do in terms of technology.

It is offensive to think that Cameroonians are incapable of revolution. The SDF led ghost towns disprove that. The UPC revolt of the 50s-60s disprove that. The events of 2008 disprove that. The people have taken severe body blows from one of the most repressive police states in Africa and survived. They will rise again with the right plan

Cameroonians are every bit as capable as the Egyptians, but the organizers need to go back to the basics. One book that comes up frequently in the Egyptian revolutionary circles is the Two volume "Politics of Non-violent Action" by Gene Sharp. The importance of books such as this is that they help people not to reinvent the wheel and to innovate where innovation is needed. The 1973 book is a leapfrogging device.

[Elung]

Hi Kwame,

Without reading the second part of this article, I think the answer to your "what next" is already in this text along with your querry about the success of the ghost town without social media. - Social media - just like the fax machines that allowed opposition forces to be in constant touch or allow Fru Ndi to keep the world abreast while under house arrest were seen simply as tools, quite different from the overall strategy or goals. Today, those not familiar with online activism easily confuse the tool with the strategy and believe the tool is a strategy in itself. Wrong! So "going back to basics" simply means doing what was done back in the 50s and 60s and in the 1990s - i.e., connecting with the grassroots with social media simply serving as a echo chamber, a means to optimize and mobilize and connecting activists within and outside cameroon in a way that was never possible in the 1990s, and in the process bypass state censorship in a manner too that was not also possible before.

[m.tennu]

Interesting stats that I just stumbled on that make the case for Dibussi's argument that revolutions don't happen overnight:

"between April 2009 and May 2010, there were 169 sit-ins, 112 strikes, 87 demonstrations, and 63 protest marches in Egypt."
http://jilliancyork.com/2011/04/14/republica-11-noha-atef-on-egyptian-social-media-stories/

Cameroonians, on the other hand, gave up the anti-Biya protest campaigns after just 1 failed rally...:-):-)