Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
They turned off the Internet shortly after I left Harare.
I don’t think the two events were connected.
And they didn’t really turn the net off, despite alarming reports to the contrary. Like many reports about Zimbabwe, the truth is a bit more complex than the headlines.
There are at least a dozen ISPs in Zimbabwe. They all purchase access from three gateways – connections to the international Internet. The largest of these gateways is run by Tel-One, the country’s monopoly provider of line-based phone service. They lease a large satellite circuit (17Mbps) from Intelsat, which provides satellite data and voice services to many African nations. Tel-One owes a lot of money to Intelsat – about $700,000 USD – which must be paid in hard currency, which is in short supply in Zimbabwe. Tel-One has requested this sum from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, but the money hasn’t been authorized of yet.
So Intelsat is radically throttling Zimbabwe’s access to their satellites. This doesn’t mean, however, that Zimbabwe is entirely cut off. I’ve been receiving email from friends in Zimbabwe since I returned. But it does mean that access through the remaining two gateways is quite slow and that web use within the country is likely to be pretty painful.
According to the website of ZISPA – the Zimbabwe Internet Service Providers Association – this situation has been going on since late August, when Intelsat disconnected the circuit for non-payment. This means that my Zimbabwe internet experience was the “disconnected” experience that’s being widely reported. And actually, the connectivity I experienced in the country wasn’t that bad. I was able to browse sites, use GMail and GTalk. I didn’t test Skype, as I was afraid of using all the available bandwidth in my hotel or the office where I borrowed a connection from friends, but did test Tor, and was able to load pages without too much delay. Upload speeds were terrible, but download wasn’t too awful. I’d expected worse.
Specifically, I expected to see some evidence of site blocking taking place on the Zimbabwean internet. Given the strident anti-government tone of some Zimbabwe-focused sites and the fact that blocking is very possible (with only three gateways to control, you only need to change configuration on three routers), I expected to see some sites being blocked. But I was able to access sites like NewZimbabwe.com, Human Rights Watch and Tor… and they weren’t any slower than other sites I was attempting to reach.
While I wouldn’t be surprised to see Internet filtering take root in Zimbabwe, the odd thing is that the government may not need to filter the ‘net – threatening to may be sufficient.
There’s a bill pending in Zimbabwe’s parliament – the Interception of Communications Bill – which would establish a government center for the interception of communications: email, web page downloads, instant messaging, financial transactions, as well as postal mail and courier services. The Chief of the Defence Intelligence, the Director-General of the President’s department on national security, the Commissioner of the Zimbabwe Republic Police and the Commissioner-General of the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority would be able to apply to the Minister of Transport and Communications to intercept communications – requests will be granted if the minister has reason to believe “a serious offence has been or is being or will probably be committed or that there is threat to safety or national security of the country.”
To comply with the bill, Internet Service Providers would – at their own cost – have to install hardware and software to allow such communication interception to take place. Because of the financial burden this would put on providers – and because they’re concerned about the loss of privacy of Internet users – ZISPA is challenging the bill and has written a detailed response to the bill.
Jim Holland, head of ISP MangoNet and board member of ZISPA, met with the committee drafting the legislation and with Minister of Transport and Communications Christopher Mushohwe. He told me that he emphasized the fact that Ministers and MPs would be subject to the same type of surveillance, reminding them that most had certain conversations they’d like kept private, either concerning business transactions, or concerning their “small houses”, a term for mistresses. He argued that the legislation would be cripplingly expensive for ISPs, and ultimately would be ineffective, as the legislation doesn’t address encryption. (The new agency could always seize a communique, then arrest the recipient, holding her until she revealed her key. But this is unlikely to be useful in the case of an encrypted webpage download – most of us don’t memorize the SSL session keys issued when we buy a book on Amazon, for instance.) Finally, he pointed out that two other pieces of legislation that had tried to intercept communications had been declared unconstitutional. And Jim felt like the panel and the Minister had been somewhat responsive – there’s likely to be provisions for judicial oversight added to the bill.
But the mere introduction of the bill is already having an effect on Zimbabwean internet usage. Jim tells me that users are emailing him and asking “Is my email being monitored?” Specifically, users are worried about receiving information that could get them into trouble: news stories critical of the government and political jokes. They’re unsubscribing from mailing lists that provide Zimbabwean news from foreign sources, some of which might be considered illegal under Zimbabwe’s strict media laws.
There’s a widespread belief that communications monitoring is already taking place, and that the Chinese are assisting the Zimbabwean government to monitor communications. Because the Chinese are widely believed to have advanced surveillance technologies, the assumption is that the government probably is already reading everyone’s mail and recording everyone’s browsing habits. I spent a lot of my time in Zimbabwe talking to activists about what groups like the Open Net Initiative and Human Rights Watch had learned about censorship in China – what was and wasn’t possible. I also did dozens of informal trainings on ways to use https-protected webmail interfaces to prevent email from being intercepted… if any actual interception is taking place.
I find it hard to believe that a government which can’t pay its bandwidth bill is systematically monitoring the internet communications of half a million people. But threatening to monitor those communications creates a panopticon effect – by telling people they’re under observation, many (most?) will behave as if the government’s watching. And in a country where transgression can mean indefinite detention and abuse while in custody, it’s hard to blame people for wanting no remain firmly on the right side of authority.
A fascinating detail about Jim Holland’s project, MangoNet – it’s primarily a FidoNet service. FidoNet, as some of the greybeards amongst us remember, is a network designed to enable communication between different Bulletin Board systems, allowing both one to one communication and Usenet-like discussion groups. Gateways allow routing of mail from FidoNet to traditional TCP/IP mail services.
FidoNet continues to be popular in some corners of the developing world because it runs on very old systems, including DOS machines, using the Frontdoor APX client. 98% of Jim’s clients see the internet through Ifmail, a popular FidoNet/Internet gateway… and they pay an affordable price – about $0.20 USD a month – for the service. Needless to say, the ISP is a labor of love for Jim, not a profit-making entity. But for a country where half a million people are accessing the Internet through overloaded, undercapitalized circuits, FidoNet is very much “appropriate technology”.
This post is part of the Holiday in Harare series.
I’d been warned that my laptop could be searched when I entered Zimbabwe. I correspond with a few folks in Zimbabwe regularly and had a few documents on the laptop – previous blogposts, primarily – that reference the nation. So I spent half an hour or so in the Johannesburg airport, putting potentially sensitive files into innocuously named folders: “Fred”, “family photos”, gzipping them into archives and encrypting the archives to myself with GPG. I renamed and refiled the encrypted files to look like they were part of system libraries, hid the USB key in a corner of the lining of one of my checked bags and concluded that this would probably protect me and my correspondents even if the laptop was seized, copied and inspected at leisure of Zimbabwean customs officials.
But then I started to worry about the newspapers I had with me. The Mail and Guardian – South Africa’s excellent newsweekly had a story about Chinese military advisors training the Zimbabwean military. Would that be seized? How about my copy of The Economist? (After all, this is a publication that once ran a story that began, more or less: “Robert Mugabe is a snappy dresser and an enthusiastic fan of cricket. That previous sentence is the only sentence in this article on Zimbabwe which could be published in that nation.”)
No one looked at my luggage as I entered Zimbabwe from South Africa. The procedure to obtain a visa didn’t involve a single form – just passing $30 USD across the desk to an official who entered my name and passport number into a notebook and handed me back a shining new Zim visa. (The immigration form does include two unusual questions – an inquiry about precisely how much cash I was carrying, and a query whether I or anyone in my family had ever been charged with a crime…) No security forces demanding my root password so they could copy my hard drive or wielding black markers to sanitize my newspapers. It was oddly disappointing.
(This is not to say that people aren’t searched when entering Zimbabwe, just that I’m not one of them. I suspect that if I were a known Zimbabwean activist, my movements would be followed more closely and my luggage checked more carefully.)
I was amazed to discover that both the Economist and the Mail and Guardian are available in Zimbabwean newsagents. However, they’re so expensive that they’re not read by the vast majority of Zimbabweans. This characterizes much of the situation regarding the press in Zimbabwe – it’s free for people who can afford it, and is little more than naked propoganda for those who can’t.
Broadcast television in Zimbabwe consists of a single channel, which alternates reruns of “The Golden Girls” with locally produced programs that include such hard-hitting programming as “Media Watch”, which consists of a gentleman in a suit reading headlines from government-owned newspapers. (One of my favorite headlines: “Mugabe blasts ‘Stupid Democracy’”. The accompanying photo features Mugabe, Lukashenko and Chavez sharing a laugh at the summit of non-aligned nations. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that gathering.) You can see other programming in Zimbabwe via Multichoice DSTV (Digital Satellive TV, based in South Africa) – the Multichoice bundle includes CNN and BBC, both of which feature critical coverage of Zimbabwe. But it costs roughly $55 a month – paid in foreign currency – a huge sum for most Zimbabweans, and as a result, only a fraction more than 1% of Zimbabweans have access to this type of programming.
(That said, Multichoice can turn up in surprising places. Rashweat Mukundu, national director of MISA (Media Institute of Southern Africa) tells me that rural bars sometimes subscribe to Multichoice so they can broadcast football games. Because they’ve paid for the whole service, this sometimes means they’re watching CNN or SABC in the middle of the day…)
One reason Zimbabwe permits a small number of citizens to receive programming from Multichoice is that the operator pays the Zimbabwe Broadcast Holdings for the right to broadcast their programming to the rest of the continent – critically, these payments are in hard currency.
The situation with radio is a bit more complex. The Zimbabwean government has made it virtually impossible for private companies to enter the radio market. A group called “Capital Radio” applied for a broadcast license in 1999 and had their application denied – they appealed to the supreme court and won, but still not allowed to begin broadcasting. Since then, the regulations regarding media licensing have gotten yet more complex – foreign investment in media is controlled almost to the point of prohibition; owners of media companies can’t have more than 10% of the shares of the business, forcing companies to build large consortia of investors. And no independent stations have yet been licensed. (TVRadioWorld has an excellent list of radio stations in Zimbabwe. You’ll note that all the stations that actually broadcast are part of the national broadcaster, ZBC.)
The organizers of Capital Radio moved to London and reorganized as Shortwave Radio Africa, broadcasting into Zimbabwe from outside the nation. Unfortunately, they don’t have many correspondents in Zimbabwe, and shortwave radios are scarce, limiting their listener base. Reaching a wider audience is Studio 7, a US-government funded radio program produced by Voice of America. Broadcast from the US, via a repeater in Botswana, the program is available for two hours in the evening, and boasts a listenership of over a million. Friends involved with the project are proud that the station offers a range of voices, including individuals affiliated with the ruling ZANU-PF party as well as opposition figures. But they acknowledge that two hours a day isn’t enough to balance the 24 hour coverage on government stations.
The government evidently thinks that two hours of Studio 7 is plenty. There are many reports that the station is periodically jammed, allegedly with Chinese assistance. (Censorship is the sincerest form of flattery.)
A third alternative radio voice is the subject of an ongoing court battle. Voice of the People Radio has been producing radio content in Zimbabwe and sending it to the Netherlands, where it is transmitted via satellite to listeners throughout the southern hemisphere. Despite the fact that no transmission is taking place in Zimbabwe, the government has taken the founders of Voice of the People to court, alleging that they are illegally operating a radio station. My friend Isabella Matambanadzo is one of the ten defendants – she points out that the media ownership laws are designed to guarantee that a large set of people are required to take a risk to start a media venture, and that since those people are Zimbabwean, they are vulnerable to the sorts of charges she and her colleagues are now facing. Should they be convicted later this week, they’ll each face two years in prison for their alleged transgression.
The effect of suits like the case against VOP is to scare the heck out of anyone who might be tempted to engage in media broadcasting. But innovators are still testing boundaries. Unable to get a license for a community radio station, Radio Dialogue in Bulawayo is creating programming and disseminating it on cassette tapes, which they hand out to the drivers of minibuses. The bus drivers play the tapes on their runs, “narrowcasting” to their passengers and avoiding most reasonable definitions of broadcasting. Still, the reach is small and Radio Dialog like others would prefer to reach the airwaves, not just the highways; as their site puts it, “Radio Dialogue is a non-profit making community radio station aspiring to broadcast to the community of Bulawayo and surrounding areas.”
Zimbabwe’s most diverse media is the print media. This diversity reflects the history of media evolution in the state. Prior to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, Zimbabwe’s broadcast media was controlled by the Rhodesian Front, and later the Rhodesian state. When Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, the state owned broadcaster moved from one state owner to another without becoming a public broadcaster.
But there had been competitive newspapers in Zimbabwe since the early 1900s, and that situation continued after independence. The new government received a six million dollar investment from Nigeria to allow the purchase of several newspapers and the regional affiliate of the Africa News Agency, but numerous other papers competed with those state-owned outlets. In early 1990s, publications like the Daily Gazette and the monthly magazine, Horizon, challenged official accounts of events, especially those of The Herald, the main government paper. In 1998, the Daily News – founded by the independent firm Associationed Newspapers of Zimbabwe – started challenging the Herald head on.
But the media environment in the late 1990s became increasingly difficult for independent papers. A proximate cause was Zimbabwe’s involvement in the DRCongo’s civil war – roughly 11,000 Zimbabwean soliders backed Laurent Kabila’s forces against the rebels supported by Uganda and Rwanda. The war was extremely unpopular in Zimbabwe – as one friend told me, “It was our Vietnam. We’ve got no cultural ties with DRC – we speak English, they speak French. We were colonized by different people. No one had any idea what we were doing there.”
What they were doing there had a great deal to do with financial deals between Kabila and Mugabe to reward certain Zimbabwean businesses with gold and diamond deals for the support during the war. Reporters covering these stories discovered that their efforts were often blocked by the Law and Order Maintenance Act, a 1960 law from pre-independence Rhodesia, which provides for the prosecution of journalists making statements which might cause “fear, alarm or despondency” in the country.
The irony of using a law passed by Ian Smith’s supporters to prevent ZANU-PF from accessing the press was not lost on Mugabe – ZANU-PF eventually replaced the law with a very similar bill, titled the Public Order and Security Bill. But no matter what the name, LOMA/POSB was a strong tool against independent journalism. In 1998, Ibbo Mandaza and Grace Kwinjeh of the Mirror were charged under LOMA for writing a story about a Zimbabwean solider, killed in the DRC, whose head was returned home without his body. The editor of the Standard, Mark Chavunduka and reporter Ray Choto were arrested and allegedly tortured for a story about an attempted military coup.
Attacks directly on papers discouraged independent journalists as well. The Daily News offices were firebombed four times in 2002 – the paper eventually retreated to South Africa. This has become a popular strategy for many figures in the Zimbabwean press – The Zimbabwean is written by authors in South Africa and the UK, printed in London and distributed in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. At least 10,000 copies a week come into Zimbabwe – because the paper is produced outside the nation, it would require a modification of trade regulations to prohibit its distribution.
Other “independent” weekly papers exist, though their degree of independence can be debated. The Financial Gazette, once one of the more critical papers, is now controlled by Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s central bank. (Depending on who you ask, it may also be controlled by the CIO, Zimbabwe’s clandestine intelligence services.) But there’s no alternative daily paper, and with government control of the print, radio and TV, there’s little opportunity for the opposition to counter official accounts of events.
An example is the protest by the Zimbabwe Council of Trade Unions on September 13th. According to most media accounts in Zimbabwe, a small group of trade unionists were assembling for an illegal protest, and were dispersed by government forces – the official word implied that the protests were small, disorganized and evidence of the disarray of the ZCTU and the opposition MDC party. Foreign news reports focused on the mass arrests of participants and the brutal treatment of the organizers while in custody. Walking around Harare, rumors were spreading that the protests had been massive and succesful, closing off much of the south side of the city.
Who’s right? I don’t know. The foreign stories tend to skew towards painting the government as brutal and irresponsible; the domestic stories have factual gaps and sometimes don’t cover events at all; the rumors are rumors. Without the presence of outside journalists on the ground, it’s very hard for any events in Zimbabwe to avoid turning into Rashomon.
(A note – one of the most interesting and critical comments about the rally and the arrests comes from Mavis Makuni in the Financial Gazette. When my friend Dumisani Nyoni argues that there’s an independent press in Zimbabwe, these are the sorts of voices he’s pointing to.)
Many of the journalists who used to write from within Zimbabwe continue to write from outside the country on websites designed to report events from a critical perspective – New Zimbabwe and ZimDaily are two of the most prominent. These sites are accessible from within Zimbabwe – at least when the net’s turned on. But it’s only a limited set of Zimbabweans who can afford to access this information.
My activist friends in Zimbabwe are unanimous in their diagnosis of the media situation: Zimbabwe needs an independent daily newspaper and a radio station so that the general populus can get information critical of the government. They’re experimenting with alternatives – community newsletters printed on A4 paper, distributed in “high density suburbs” (townships) from person to person; news programs and activist songs distributed on CD and cassette.
But if they were suddenly given a license to broadcast or publish a paper, there would still be obstacles. The Zimbabwean economy is so fragile that there’s very little advertising support for papers. The history of harrassment, imprisonment and torture of journalists makes many writers fearful to report certain stories. Criminal libel law means that libel can carry jail time as well as fines, which helps prevent attacks on public figures. And the fact that journalists must be licensed and must renew their accreditation every two years helps keep pens down as well.
What’s really going on in Zimbabwe? I don’t know. Neither do you. And neither do most Zimbabweans, whether they live at home or abroad. Reading the BBC or CNN won’t help – they’re not on the ground here either. And like every other situation in Zimbabwe, it’s both better and worse than you’ve heard.
“Dancing Out of Tune”, a history of the media in Zimbabwe, written in 1999 by Richard Saunders as the companion to a film by Edwina Spicer is indispensible as background on the current press situation in Zimbabwe – unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available online. MISA Zimbabwe is an amazing resource for anyone interested in the Zimbabwean media. So is the Weekly Media Update produced by the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe – unfortunately, this resource is a bit hard to access at present due to the bandwidth restrictions the country is facing.
Mark Glaser from Mediashift has an excellent interview with independent Zimbabwean journalist Frank Chikowore, who I was lucky enough to meet with while in Harare – for media outside of Zimbabwe looking for a brave and smart correspondent in the country, Frank’s a great guy to start with.
Unsurprisingly, some of the best voices in Zimbabwe are the ones you can access online. Kubatana is a great place to start for news on the NGO community and general news on freedom of expression. Sokwanele and their blog This Is Zimbabwe provide a critical view of events on the ground. Zimpundit, who covers the country for Global Voices as well as maintaining her own site, is a must read. Eddie Cross is more than a little controversial, but is also very much worth reading.
This post is part of the Holiday in Harare series.
Shopping center and parking ramp, Harare, Zimbabwe
I’ve posted some recent photos from Harare on Flickr…
This post is part of the Holiday in Harare series.
There’s a sign over the front desk in my hotel which reads as follows:
“Non-Zimbabwean guests must pay their accomodation charges in foreign currency.”
I’ve been to several countries where it’s been forbidden to denominate salaries or prices in a foreign currency – you had to pay in the local money, helping ensure that you didn’t end up with two parallel economies (one in dollars or other “hard currency” and another in a local currency), leading to black market trades between the two.
But this sign reflects a much more dire reality. Zimbabwe is desperately short of foreign currency, and their own currency is in an inflationary free fall – CNN reports an annual inflation rate of 1200%. For businesses like my hotel, which makes a lot of purchases abroad to feed guests and keep us in clean sheets, it’s critical to have dollars on hand, since few vendors will accept payment in Zimbabwean dollars. And it’s hard to buy dollars, and probably impossible to buy them at the official exchange rates. So the hotel needs me to pay them in dollars so they can buy the goods to run the hotel for the guests who pay in a currency that’s losing its value every day.
There’s another reason as well. Since the hotel can’t be seen dealing with foreign exchange at black market rates, they are changing dollars at $250 Zim = $1 USD, less than half of the street rate. This means that, to pay my $100 hotel bill, I could change a US $50 on the streetcorner, come back in with $27000, pay my bill at the official rate and have change left over…
(In truth, the opposite happens. The hotel charges me for breakfast in Zimbabwe dollars, then asks me to pay the bill in US dollars, doubling the real cost…)
All of this means that one of my goals for this trip is to leave Zimbabwe with as few Zimbabwean dollars as possible. For one thing, they lose value by the day. For another, they might expire before I come back.
I’ve never seen currency with an expiration date on it before. The bills I carry are, technically, “Bearer Cheques”. They read:
“Pay the bearer on demand Twenty Dollars on or before 31st July 2007 for the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Issue date 1st August 2006.”
In other words, good luck getting my $20 – (about two and a half US cents at today’s black market rate) after August 2007 – the currency is technically worthless at that point. (Friends tell me that previous currency marked like this has been “extended” by legislative act to maintain its worth.)
This currency looks temporary, too. It’s got one ink color (as opposed to the multicolored fantasy of earlier bills) and no security thread. Given how much it costs to print money, how little the bills are worth, and how fast they’ll become worthless, it seems no surprise that a government scrambling to make ends meet might cut some corners in the national mint.
Speaking of cutting, the major innovation in the recently issued bills is the removal of three zeros. This means that the currency is trading at roughly 500:1 to the dollar, rather than 500000:1, which can get a little awkward. Reserve Bank chief Gideon Gono claims that the change was made because the size of the sums involved was beginning to break Zimbabwean banking software… but many speculate that the change was designed to distract people from the relentless pace of inflation.
Many folks still refer to the price of things in terms of how many million something costs. It’s taken me a while to mentally translate “million” as “pound sterling”, which is a rough equivalent. Others seem to be having translation issues as well – banks have this helpful poster outside designed to let you convert from your millions to your thousands. (Note the slogan: “Zero to Hero”)
(An old joke is that Mugabe had succeeded in making all Zimbabweans into millionaires, since that illustrious status used to involve having more than $2 USD. The ugliness of the joke – unless something changes, lots of Zimbabweans will find themselves millionares again soon.)
Even with a big, thick stack of funny money, you’ll have a hard time buying petrol in Harare. Most stations have signs out from that say “Direct Fuel Import Refuelling ONLY”. That translates as “we don’t accept Zimbabwean currency”. To legally purchase fuel, your best bet is to visit a site like Mukuru.com and purchase fuel vouchers using dollars or pounds. You end up receiving a digital voucher, which you can trade in for a quantity of fuel coupons from the Mukuru office in Zimbabwe, which you can then turn into fuel at stations, 20 liters at a time. What you’re doing – technically – is importing fuel from abroad for your own use, not paying for fuel in Zimbabwe with foreign currency, which would be illegal – hence, “Direct Fuel Import”.
And if you don’t have internet access and foreign currency to buy petrol? You buy black market petrol from the back side of the petrol station, paying a sharp premium to the vendor for his willingness to break the law.
Legal petrol is 52 pence a liter, 50 pence in large quantities – close to $2 USD a liter. Bottled water is only slightly less expensive, at $1.50 a liter. This, I suppose, is only fair – bottled water is a commodity bought mostly by tourists and the wealthy. But it’s odd to spend more for two liters of water than for lunch. I’m considering brushing my teeth with beer instead which is, thankfully, about half the cost of bottled water.
My friends tell me that prices of all goods change rapidly – which is to be expected, when the currency is halving in value over the course of a month. I got a taste of this at the psuedo-Texan steakhouse I made the error of having dinner in last night. The menus were glossy and professionally printed… but lacked prices. The prices were printed on a separate sheet of paper, xerox’ed and placed in a laminate folder. I’d expected prices to have been scratched out on menus – the decision to print without prices at all seems like a reflection on a state used to the notion that their currency is in free fall and won’t be landing any time soon. (This proved to be true at every restaurant I visited, save the South African Steers chain across the street from my hotel, including room service in the hotel. It’s a bit like being the guest at a fancy restaurant – pick what you want and try not to worry about the cost.)
To review – signs that your economy is in trouble include:
- You can’t use your own money to purchase essential goods and services.
- Critical goods, like petrol, can be purchased by average citizens only if they’re willing to break the law.
- Prices change so fast it’s not worth printing them.
- Your currency includes an expiration date, and may well be worthless before that date.
And it’s probably not good news if you’re brushing your teeth with beer, either.
Cathy Buckle’s August Letters from Zimbabwe includes some powerful and important reflections on the currency situation.
This post is part of the Holiday in Harare series.
It’s a long way to South Africa, and I try to limit myself to one trip a year. So the goal is to accomplish as much as possible on a single trip, visiting friends and colleagues around the region. I’d thought I might have some meetings in Cape Town and booked my ticket to South Africa with enought time to accomodate those meetings. They fell through, and I found myself with a decision: pay to change the ticket and go home, entertain myself in South Africa, or find somewhere else in the region to visit.
That one was easy. Harare it is.
I enjoy being wrong when I travel. There’s something doubly satisfying about having travel adjust or correct your perceptions – not only do you know something new, you “unknow” something wrong. As an American who reads and writes a great deal about Africa, I’ve read a lot about Zimbabwe. And there were lots of preconceptions to correct in travelling to Zimbabwe… and others that turned out to be more or less accurate.
I spent less than three days in Zimbabwe, never left Harare and spent almost all my time in the company of different flavors of civil society activists. So I got a very brief and one-sided picture of the country. Still, I learned a lot – most centrally, I learned a little about why people who have the option to leave continue to live in Zimbabwe: it’s one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been to, and the Zimbabwean people I interacted with are some of the smartest, bravest and friendliest folks I’ve ever met.
Which doesn’t mean that I’ll be hurrying back. The ways in which Zimbabwe is broken are deep, profound and would be intolerable to most people around the world. The fact that Zimbabwe continues to exist – that people go to work, to the market, to the bars and cafes – is a tribute to the resilience and flexibility of the Zimbabwean people. I’d snap, within days or weeks.
Over the next couple of days – as I make my way from Harare to Jo’burg to London to New York to the blissful calm of Lanesboro, MA, I’ll try to share some thoughts, impressions and photos from a very dense three days. Thanks to everyone who was willing to talk with me in Harare, and especially to my wonderful and gracious hosts who packed my days with a wealth of fascinating people to meet.
This post is part of the Holiday in Harare series.
Well, hot damn. The fine folks at the Knight Batten award for innovations in journalism have seen fit to award their grand prize for 2006 to Global Voices. The folks at Knight Batten seem to understand the full picture of what we’re trying to do – in issuing the award, the judges said, “An extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from underreported parts of the world.”
That single phrase includes two of the biggest ideas behind our work – the blend of editorial control and weblogging, and the focus on the developing world. It’s two of the ideas that we work hardest to explain to people, and it’s great to see that Knight Batten realizes that those factors are a big part of what we do well. Another major feature that demands mention: the amazing team that makes the whole thing possible. There’s at least a 100 people in any given week who make the project possible, and the whole thing would fail utterly without support from such an amazing team.
I’m at the end of a long road trip – I’m leaving Harare tomorrow morning for Johannesburg, London, New York and, god willing, home by Wednesday night. Lots to tell you about my brief visit to Zimbabwe, which I’ll post tomorrow midday from Jo’burg. The theme of this trip – there’s thousands of people out there who want to find a way to share their voices with the wider world: activists, journalists, students, NGO workers, people living outside their home countries, proud South Africans, Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Ethiopians. I hope that as Global Voices moves into its second full year of life, we can focus on helping more people join the blogosphere, and help people in countries where freedom of expression isn’t assured gain their voices online.
The Knight Batten Award includes a $10,000 prize. We decided long before the prize that it would go towards bringing more Global Voices contributors to our annual meeting in Delhi. The major topic for that meeting? How we help encourage blogging throughout the world, so we can bring you voices from the corners of the world we’re missing now…
Thanks, Knight Batten, and big thanks to the sponsors, friends and especially to the amazing team behind Global Voices. I couldn’t be more proud.
Critics who worried that the Digital Citizen Indaba would be South Africa-centric, light on blogger speakers and have more white than black speakers were correct on all three counts. Organizers acknowledged all these shortcomings at one point or another during the event, and I suspect the next iteration of the conference – whether in Grahamstown or somewhere else on the continent – will be a hell of a lot more representative.
And they apologized for several logistical flails – a lunch few participants got to eat, no connectivity in the main hall (inspiring one of the presenters to scrap his original speech and give a rant about the lack of connectivity) and buildings that locked participants in or out by 5pm, leading to the strange sight of geeks huddling against the spring wind and falling temperatures as they tried to download their email or prepare their presentations.
And yet, it was a really enjoyable and useful conference.
One of the reasons the conference was so confusing was that there were at least three conferences going on. One was an academic conference on the phenomenon of blogging – this had the requisite bloggers versus journalists discussion, the pretty slideshows from the designers and vague speculation about the thin slicing of attention and whether the web is driving us all mad.
There was also a “business meets blogs” conference, the sort of thing we saw throughout the states about 18 months ago, with smart folks from the local technology scene looking at how web2.0 would transform how they do business – or not.
And then there was the pan-African activist blogging conference that many bloggers thought was being held. By the standards of that sort of conference, the Indaba was very white, very ZA-centric, excluded a lot of great bloggers and was probably held in the wrong location.
(Mike Stopforth has a nice analysis of the situation as well. He’s nicer than I am.)
But the intersection of these different groups in the same place made for some very interesting moments. The intersection of the “We Media”/grumpy white guys talk with the blog activism talk was a great one-two. When you start talking about defending the blogosphere from manipulation and misinformation created by “bad elements”, how do you create a definition that doesn’t turn activists like Alaa and Ory into people who would be banned?
Getting to spend time with old friends like Ory, Alaa, Emeka and Andrew, meeting bloggers I’ve long admired like Bankelele and Daudi made me realize how much I want someone – perhaps the DCI folks, but maybe Global Voices, maybe the Kenyan bloggers, maybe the World Social Forum in Nairobi – to organize a real continent-wide blogger gathering, focused on ways the different blogospheres can learn from one another. But I think it’s really important that the activist bloggers make their voices heard at conferences like DCI, complicating the conversation and making it clear that this isn’t just a space of academic interest or profitability – it’s the new frontier of free speech. Alaa and Ory’s speeches in particular have stuck with me. What’s most important for the Internet in Africa, in my opinion, is that it helps empower smart young activists to organize projects they’d have a tough time building offline. I hope they’re able to share their experiences and ideas at many other venues in the immediate future.
There are gradations of fame.
Personally, I never expect to exceed the fame my friend David Weinberger predicts for all of us: “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.”
But some of the folks I work with are likely to achieve so much more.
The scene: a toilet stall in the Media Matrix Africa building, the headquarters of the New Media department at Rhodes University.
The building is beautiful and new – it’s painted colorfully, and there’s wonderful art installations on many walls – colorful hats, homemade radios, vinyl records turned into world clocks.
So it’s hardly a surprise that the bathroom walls are covered with quotations from journalists and media thinkers. I scan a couple of interesting quotes, reading Hunter S. Thompson’s assertion that the reporter must be in the story more than once before I notice it.
And there it is.
Right above the toilet paper dispenser.
My friend and colleague Dan Gillmor is quoted, reminding us:
My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed.
You’ve made the big time, Dan. What more can a man wish for that to have his name immortalized on the wall of an African bathroom stall?
My Heart's In Accra by Ethan Zuckerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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