 Welcome everyone to this group discussion of Alternative Form of Protest. I work at the Centre of African Studies here, so I'm very pleased to introduce these great speakers, which I want to thank very much for taking part in this RAM table, and who will help us understand a bit more about what's happening in some areas of the continent and what implication both locally and globally these experiences of Alternative Form of Protest can have. I just wanted to briefly mention at the beginning that this panel has been kind of the result of a joint effort with the Royal African Society, and in particular with Kaelin Pearson, who was supposed to be the co-chair, but she's doing camera, and next time with Swarth, and James Warren as well, to explore this theme. And we hope this is the beginning of a longer series of future debates and research around this topic. So this is a bit more informal, as you can see, compared to the rest of the panel discussion, because we kind of want the audience to participate a bit more. We'll try to keep our kind of intervention, more brief, so then we can have a more interesting discussion with everyone, because I know people in the audience as well have a lot of interesting experiences or case studies that they can bring also to the discussion. First of all, I would just like to welcome Dr. Jenny Fatoumubay from City University of London, who kindly agreed to join us with a very short notice that I'm very grateful for. She's a lecturer in cultural and creative industries, and her research interests focuses on urban popular music and cultural economies in Francophone, West Africa. She will bring in the perspective of musicians and artists, and their role in fostering alternative form of protest, and will expand on this. Then I'd like to introduce Nantala Nyabola, who some of you might have already heard speaking or chairing, actually chairing the last panel, so thanks for running from one panel to the other. She's a writer and researcher from Kenya, with particularly interesting politics and social media, marginalized voices and gender. You might have heard her speaking at the group discussion on knowledge, production, already about some of these topics on social media and their importance, especially in Kenya. So she will bring this idea of the impact of social media in figuring and organizing alternative form of protest. Professor Steven Chan, of course, is our in-house professor of the International Relations Department here, saw us, a honorary professor visiting a fellow in many other universities across Europe and Southern Africa, and he will be key in anchoring our discussion with a historical perspective in order to understand the continuities and discontinuities within the process of protesting across the continent. Last but not least, on my left, let me introduce James Wan, journalist, and the editor of the Royal African Society website or blog, do you say website or blog? What do you prefer? Website, I got it right. African arguments. He was previously acting editor of African Business Magazine and senior editor of Think Africa Press. James will have the responsibility to kick off the discussion, presenting a sort of general overview of some of the most interesting alternative form of protest that have been happening on the continent in the recent years. So, over to you. Cool, thank you. Yes, I'm going to try and describe a few forms of alternative protest to get the discussion going. So, I think that most typically when we think of protest, at least in the West, we tend to think of things like people taking some streets or placards, chanting slogans. We might also think of kind of sit-ins and strikes and acts of civil disobedience. And often the kind of call to arms is stand up and be counted and make your voice heard. But in many cases, that's not really feasible. So, particularly in repressive regimes, public demonstrations can bring very real and immediate personal risks. And there are many countries, particularly in Africa and Asia where security forces are not at all afraid to use violence against protesters and where being known to be a dissident can be dangerous not just to oneself but to one's friends and family. Moreover, there are many indicators that suggest that civic space on the continent and in the world more generally is shrinking. There are many governments that are kind of increasingly clamping down on freedoms of association and assembly and speech. And this makes, I suppose, what you call more like traditional forms of protest more costly and more risky. But there's a whole variety of strategies through which it's possible to protest, through which it's possible to show dissent, to push for change, to cultivate solidarity and to kind of broaden the political imagination. Now, the kind of theory of change behind them, the audience, the type of engagement of those involved might be slightly different to marches and public demonstrations, but I think they're fulfilled in aim of the same goals of kind of opposition, of solidarity and change. And as Anna said in the last few years in Africa, there's been a really wide range of kind of very interesting and creative strategies that have been employed. And some of you is kind of new technologies in digital spaces, and Jali can talk a lot more about some of these kind of cultural forms that Jenny can talk much more about, but some of us simply rely on kind of low cost kind of creative thinking. These might not have the same immediacy as say marches and might not go under the same kind of coverage, but I think they're really important in understanding what protest is and what it can be in very difficult environments. So I thought to flesh that out, I'd present kind of four examples, four specific examples of these kinds of protests. One from Chad from Berlin, one from kind of all over and one from Ethiopia to kind of paint the picture. So the first that I wanted to present is, came from Chad. So last year around the 2016 elections, people wanted to kind of mobilise to insist on free and fair elections and also protest against what they saw as injustice, nepotism and impunity. At the same time, in the months leading up to the election, the government was kind of ramping up its strategies of oppression and its restrictions on freedoms of speech and assembly. So one campaign group came up with the idea of what they called the Citizen Whistle. The Citizen Whistle. And what they did was they called on people to get up at 4.30 in the morning and go into their courtyards or lean out of their windows and just whistle as loud as they could for 15 minutes. And then they did a similar thing at a very specific time, 15 minutes in the evening. And actually a few years previously campaigners had organised similar protests but had been kind of banging together pots and pans rather than whistling. So for the people involved, particularly kind of the towns and cities, this was meant to be a kind of emboldening experience. It was symbolically a powerful challenge. It was a way to demonstrate the extent of their discontentment in kind of no uncertain terms. But at the same time, it was low risk. It was safe. It was anonymous to an extent. People didn't even need to leave their homes. The second alternative protest strategy is from Benin. So in 2013, there were many indications that President Jair Bonney wanted to amend the constitution to remove term limits. So a group of campaigners came up with what they called the Red Wednesday Movement. And they called on people who disagreed with the President's plans to just wear bright red every Wednesday. Sometimes this was accompanied by traditional protests that people would also march in the streets. But many people just wore red on that day to show support. Some would wear it more kind of surreptitiously to show support in a more kind of subtle way. And again, this was a way to kind of build solidarity, to build momentum in a kind of sustainable way. It was visible, it was collective, but it was also kind of low cost and low risk. The third example may be kind of more immediately familiar, and it's more like ghost town or shutdown or v-walt in French. And that's when people are encouraged to just stay at home for the day to express their discontent. So from street vendors to civil servants to miniboss drivers, the idea is that everyone just stays at home and brings the whole city to a halt and kind of render the streets empty. And this has been done, this strategy has really kind of spread quite far and wide in the last couple of years. And it's been conducted in several places, particularly in kind of repressive regimes. So just in the last kind of year or so, these have been attempted to bearing degrees of success in Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brasileville, Zimbabwe, Managasca, Ethiopia, Chad, Nigeria and I'm sure other places as well. And this strategy has high impact both economically and that it brings everything to a halt. But also symbolically. Again, it's a necessarily collective endeavour and sends a strong message of dissent. But in many ways it totally kind of inverts the more traditional forms of protest. So you're showing dissent and you're showing some agrarian through your absence rather than through your presence. And again, the cost is at a risk and to an extent it is anonymous. The fourth and final strategy I wanted to describe that I think really shows the diversity of possibilities in Ethiopia. So for the last few years there have been tensions between the government and the Muslim community who accuse the government of interfering in religious affairs and of treatment of marginalisation. And there have been a number of demonstrations in which security forces have violent repressed the demonstrators and several Muslim leaders have been imprisoned. So it was in this kind of environment in 2015 that a group decided to call on people. They came up with this kind of innovative strategy and they told people basically to just stop spending coins. They told people to not use coins but to just board them. And the idea was that this would take a lot of cash out of circulation and the people behind it kind of disagreed on what the exact economic effects of this would be. But the idea was that it was something that could be done collectively and solidarity, anonymously and safely but still was being kind of destructive and subversive. So I think this bunch of examples kind of shows the diversity of ways in which it's possible to do the things that protests aim to do, of cultivating solidarity, pushing for change, demonstrating opposition and broadening the political imagination. And to me it kind of raises certain questions that hopefully we can kind of discuss afterwards which are things like to what extent are these alternative protest strategies, to what extent do they have impacts in it themselves and to what extent are they useful in that they cultivate the kind of conditions that allow for more traditional protests that may still be necessary to actually push for change. Another question I have is how quickly kind of protestants can innovate. It feels like kind of as civil space shrinks people find little gaps and exploit them. The governments are always finding ways to close those gaps and have far more resources than most protestors and would it always be possible to find these kind of existing spaces of civil space? The final question I have is kind of how, whether we should think of these as like alternative and new forms and see them as a kind of novel response to today's conditions or whether they've always been these more kind of peculiar forms of protest that they've just not been given as much attention. And if that's the case, what can African protestors today learn from kind of historical examples and also more broadly what can African protestors both teach and learn from protestors beyond the continent? Thank you very much. Actually, if you want to address some of the issues that maybe James wrote up and also talk about starting with the role of social media because you were mentioning already yesterday that there's been already some cases of impact that Twitter has triggered some movement that has brought to loads. Yeah, so maybe you can... Maybe not necessarily the right response, but I think that one of the... Okay, so the movement that I wanted to talk about today is a movement that I mentioned yesterday, my Dress My Choice movement, is I think it really signals how people can either overall underestimate the impact that digital spaces will have on life offline. In Kenya, we tend to be, just like many other places, people tend to be very disparaging of the digital spaces of Twitter Warriors. There's all this hashtag, what they call hashtag heroes in Twitter Warriors. And there's a whole lexicon of derogatory terms for people who do their activism online. And it's very easy to underestimate what's possible. And at the same time, it's very easy to overestimate what is possible. And I think the My Dress My Choice movement shows how very key strategic decisions within movement-building can actually be used to capitalize and to turn something that is an online conversation into a real cultural moment and a political moment. The My Dress My Choice movement, it has roots in feminism. And in Kenya, feminism has always been a dirty work. To identify yourself, self-identify as a feminist, certainly in my lifetime, and definitely in my mother's lifetime, was to just basically say you're a man-hater. You hate traditional marriage. You hate everything about, you know, the Hessian momentum, lifestyle. If you're a horrible person, go stand in the corner and think about what you've got. And I certainly grew up believing that feminism was a terrible, terrible thing because we were told that this thing was disrupting the way in which African societies are supposed to function. And, you know, some of our greatest heralds, Nogaraba Bay, very powerful, very popular feminism, widely disparaged in Kenya. When she came back after receiving the Nobel Prize, nobody went to the airport to welcome her back. So there's this real disconnect between the fact that Kenyan women are strong and are very representative in public and political life, but struggle to self-identify with this label that's very much associated with the radical feminism of the West in the 60s and in the 70s. So what has social media done for Kenyan feminism? It's a made it cool to be a feminist because suddenly you have all these young women who are being very visible and very vocal about their feminism and being very active in public life and wearing that brand confidently. And the more cool it has become to be a feminist, the more young women have wanted to identify with the label. And then, at the same time, it's allowed these women who have maybe previously felt isolated. When I say that I'm a feminist in my household, I certainly get a lot of flack for that. I am, too, the brothers of my love, but yeah. And, you know, my high school classmates who are strong, independent, very well-driven, intelligent women who have achieved a lot in their personal professional life wouldn't take on that label. And then suddenly I'm online and I'm tweeting about feminism and someone in Mombasa says, hey, I'm a feminist, too. Let's talk to each other. What social media did is it made it possible for women who identified this way to reach out and communicate with each other in a digital community a space in which it would not have been possible to do that offline. It would not have been possible for us to be having these conversations offline. And so, and then the other thing is that something that James alluded to is the constraints that make it impossible to organize offline. It is very difficult for women to organize offline in Kenya for various reasons. The movement, the social movement that was initially put in place in the 50s and the 60s, the Mindanao Yawanawaki movement, the Beijing 1985 conference that also led to a form of organization were all appropriated by power. So Mindanao Yawanawaki was supposed to be this movement for, it literally means progress for women. It was actually subsumed by the ruling party during the one party rule era and became unofficial, kind of like the modern union of the one party state. And that meant that women who want, and then it became all about these developmental narratives. It became about women as mothers of the nation and women as your job is to protect the family and preserve the family and do all of these things. And in a young country, 60% of Kenyans below the age of 35, most women are not mothers. And there's no space for young women within this developmental narrative to express their fullness of their existence because it's like, well, I'm not a mother. Some of us don't want to be mothers, but some people do but are not mothers yet. So how do I express my feminism and my pride and my identity as a woman in this developmental sort of captured mechanism? And so what, again, what online spaces have done is that they've made it possible for young women especially to create networks of support, of dialogue, of discourse away from this developmental captured discourse. And so now you can be a feminist and be a quote, unquote, cool feminist and you're not a mother. It's not that you hate motherhood, but it's not something that you are yet or maybe will ever be. Or if you're a gay woman, maybe you're not interested in heteronormative family structures, but you can exist and you can be proud of who you are and you can talk to other people who are the thing of the same, who are existing in the same framework. So online spaces have made Kenyan feminism possible in a way that offline spaces have struggled to comprehend. There is no space for me as a radical feminist to publish in the Kenyan newspaper about what I think about, you know, upending patriarchal structures. There's no editor in a Kenyan people who will touch that part of it. Like they wouldn't even touch it. What are you talking about? Meanwhile, you have women who can write, like Jackie Chegg is a famous commenter and she wrote an entire article about how torture feminists are dirty and disgusting. She hates our natural hair. She thinks we should all get leaves. She literally said this and it was published in one of the best selling newspapers in the country and it went viral. And that's what you're up against. So what social media has done for Kenyan feminism is important. It's beyond hashtag heroes and online warriors and all of that. It's made it possible to build a community. And this is what the My Dress, My Choice movement builds up on. It's not a new thing. It has happened. Every time we have very serious political turmoil in Kenya, violence against women spikes and public violence against women. So it happened in the early 90s. It happened again in 1997 when we had the economic collapse. It happened again in 2012 after 2013 after the previous election. Kenya has always been one of the more conservative, certainly Christian country societies in Africa. I didn't notice this when I started to travel. I go to Madagascar and I see women walking around the streets of Teneribo and hot pants and sleeveless tops. You can't do that in Nairobi. It's always been very socially conservative society. And we sometimes, people, men, take it upon themselves to be the enforcers. We don't have a morality police like in Saudi Arabia, but sometimes men, young men especially, take it upon themselves to enforce this unspoken moral code. And so in this period that I've mentioned, what tends to happen is a young woman will go into the Central Business District of Nairobi or in Mombasa or wherever wearing a sleeveless top or not even a mini skirt, like a short skirt. And she will be evicted to be assaulted. She will be stripped publicly. Strict, publicly. And, you know, called for prostitution, etc., etc., etc. and go back and get dressed and whatever. And, you know, fashion has ways, periods. And so in my lifetime I can say we went from super conservative people pushing the boundaries, pushing the boundaries. Because again, Kenya is nominally a secular state, predominantly a Christian society in the sense that there is no cultural, written cultural code about dress. It's all just quotes that people kind of know. When you come to Kenya and you ask me can I wear my cut-off jeans? I would probably say no. You probably shouldn't do that. It's not something that's written down anywhere. But anyway, so as people started, in the 2000s people started women, young women especially, started to push the boundaries of what people thought dress code-wise was possible in public spaces. The Central Business District is also a very formal space. Think about Nairobi as a racial, Nairobi has a history as a racially segregated city. The Central Business District is the only place where everybody meets and it's a formal space. Men wear suits when they go to town, say going to town. Men wear suits. You don't wear flip-flops. If I wore these shoes I would probably get eye rolls, but I don't care because I love my converse trainers. And so this is the space in which women started to push the boundaries and started to wear the sleeveless tops and the dresses got a little richer to as fashion became more risqué. And in 2013, we had this really interesting phenomenon whereby suddenly you try to hear the stripping became a thing again and they started to tell women don't wear this, don't wear that. In the past, women would have said I would have actually gone back and said I'm not going to wear that because that's not acceptable. But there was one incident. I write about this in my research where I call her where I'm going to protect her privacy, where the story came out that she had been dressed in a certain way and therefore was assaulted. And so the narrative had already started that, yeah, women shouldn't dress like this. Women shouldn't dress like this. But actually on deeper investigation what had happened is this woman was selling eggs, boiled eggs as a snack and this Matatu tout had taken the egg and refused to pay for it. And she told him that he had to pay for it. She insisted that he had to pay for it and he started to call her in prostitutes and he hit her. And then the other men thinking that it was because of the way she was dressed jumped in and she was stripped and she was so badly beaten she ended up in hospital. And her sister was also there trying to protect her and she got beaten but she didn't wear him or went into a coma the other lady was just badly beaten and didn't. And so this triggered this massive debate online especially because they were 50, I would say 50% of people mostly men saying yeah, women shouldn't go out dressed like this. But suddenly for the first time you had women who had been organizing over a number of years this online conversation and they say screw that women should be able to wear whatever they want. And there was this push back this conversation between these two and you know one of the most prominent male bloggers in Kenya tweeted out and said if you come into my house dressed indecently, best believe I will be the first to strip you. This guy has 600,000 followers on Twitter. And so my dress, my choice this organized movement of women started the hashtag to say actually women should be able to do to wear whatever they want in the spaces that they occupy. It started from a small conversation on Facebook it became a hashtag on both Facebook and Twitter and then it led to an offline march that took over the central district in which women of all religions all ages or whatever showed out and said even I there's a powerful picture you can find online even I as a conservative Muslim woman in a Jalab believe that my Christian women compatriots should be able to wear whatever they want it was like a very representative of the religious, ethnic political diversity of Kenyan women and so they had the protest offline and then also really just relentlessly harassed the deputy public prosecutor online and just tweeted at him prosecute, prosecute, prosecute, prosecute we're not going to let this go and what happened? Number one the laws on assault were reinforced so the deputy public prosecutor the House of Parliament could not ignore this movement and said, hey we're actually going to tighten these laws up and so if you strip a woman in public in Kenya today there's a penalty that in the past in the 1997 wave of stripping the 1992 wave of stripping was never enforced it was always the woman's fault that she was dressed a certain way in there for she was deserved to be the violence that she endured so the law was enforced there was a case the decision came down the day before yesterday because I am against car seriality because they gave them the death penalty and while I do think assault is very serious and I think the courts should take it seriously I think giving someone the death penalty is a disproportionate use of force by the state so there's a whole other ethics about that but the point that I would make in this framework is the combination of being able to shame public institutions on online spaces and to compel them to respond in a way that wasn't possible 10 years ago that's something that's really important and that people are really harnessing in Kenya right now we're getting people to react and if you go online you see what is a road is a campaign where people take pictures of protocols in Nairobi and they tag the governor and say what is a road and that's the whole thing and the county council to respond and it ties into something that James said there's also the risk factor a bunch of women I as a feminist woman I've actually done this in my lifetime I've organized a protest where nobody else showed up and we sat outside parliament when I brought heat stroke it was really hot and I'm wrapping again it's scary but what it's done is that it's made it less scary because there's other people who will show up even if there's 12 of us and to me that's really important and that's why I'm trying to capture my research is social media doesn't make a movement but it's become really important in shape Jenny if you want to bring in the aspect of artists and musicians in the discussion so best of all for having me I'll be joining at the late stage it's a pleasure to hear all the different perspectives I shall be speaking from an experience of someone who's looking to cultural entrepreneurs in a specific urban culture which is hip-hop especially in front of West Africa and especially more particularly in Senegal and to the question that you raise at the end of your intervention whether we're talking about new forms of protest and to the comments that you made regarding the impossibility of prisons offline or actually the great challenge that you can represent what I can share with you is quite conventional in a way we have in Senegal a relatively active civil society a space where civil society can express itself and one of the most crucial moments in our recent history where that has been expressed is during the 23rd during the last presidential election that's the one coming up now now but the one before where the then president what tried to you know juggle with the constitution making sure that his son would be able to take his throne fortunately we are in a democracy and so this didn't skip the attention of artists especially hip-hop artists so here I'm very much interested in this intersection between politics political culture which is very much present in a type of urban cultural expression that isn't about negotiating identities but that is also very much about speaking truth to power in its variegated forms whether it's we're talking about the Senegalese case or elsewhere and in this experience of the 23rd of June and the group Emergent Group we had the information of new actors on the political sphere people who used to denounce and contest and protest through lyrics through songs but who suddenly felt the need to take those song lyrics into another space which was a street space which was outside and which was offline and that's really resonated with the majority of the population who really joined the forces you could see from the cross generations marching and it wasn't peaceful it was there were some obviously altercations but it managed to stop what was to be about a breach of the civil rights of the democracy we have all those forms and again still looking at hip-hop artists in Senegal but also elsewhere on the African continent of this political figure that is the artist I was very touched this morning for the intervention that reminded of the importance of arts, cultural production such a film as a tool to change the continent or art being at the heart of our nation not just about entertainment and why focus so much on this new generation of cultural actors, cultural entrepreneurs is because they were expressing this in different ways so in very explicit and conventional ways as the example of Yonah Ma but also in more subtile ways for instance in 2013 the development of internet product that was wrapped to the news by two hip-hop artists who have been very vocal and volubile about the political sphere and the democracy and the role of citizens and the place in the nation and this human and Katie who developed this five minutes section on internet first where they were debating in a vernacular that was approachable that was accessible to the majority of the population the current news, current affairs of the country and beyond and this is where since then this internet product was taken on to the national TV it was transformed into a live performance that toured and they are now starting their fourth edition, their fourth season thank you what leads me by looking at this last example to maybe try to conclude, wrap up because I've been sent this signal and I have so much to share so you can control, soft control the name it's a form of maybe if I form of everyday activism or everyday forms of protest a protest that takes shape in an everyday practice, I give you an example we are in Senegal in a context where for instance art and culture don't benefit from an appropriate policy framework that anchorage a form of protest which I found that really attract my attention and maybe that I would like to understand as agent or cultural agent of transformation, of change not necessarily development I think we need at some point to also step out of this taking for granted term but to my transformers we all had this cartoon at some point maybe my cultural transformers who on every day make daily protest through the actions, through the identities so examples speak better I give you the example of the Afriky Chirban which is a used centre located in the periphery of Dakar in the popular neighbourhood of Piquin which took place in a depleted centre of the city which was reappropriated reinvested by first a hip-hop artist Matador who decided that well, we are citizens this is an institution of the state supposedly for us let's talk about public service if it's really what we are talking about so if they don't take action maybe we can refurnish it it's literally a trash space so let's clean it empty it and reinvest it and ten years later they created a library they created the first dj in school they created a festival that celebrated the 13th edition and they created a space for the use as it was supposed to be what is interesting and that's why I'm making this link is that last year a similar organization a similar structure emerged in the core of the city of Dakar Maison de Piquin Jouvel so the house of urban cultures which was kind of a replicate of what this institution created by active informed concerned citizens but at the initiative of the mayor who recognised the added value of those agents of change those cultural, creative transformers and I need to end here a few minutes ago one final point here is that we may also be inclined to recognise if we're talking about governance if we're talking about language and the capacity to speak to different communities and to be optimistic every day every day citizen we may need to also look at the role of civil society in its social responsibility and its capacity to not only speak back but explain to our public institutions how they can intervene in a sector how they can approach the sector they are key in doing an occupying function in the sphere of culture and art and creativity at the urban level I stop there so we heard about offline online influence if you have to say it from an historical perspective do you see an evolution that has something to change or are we going back to square one but there's certainly been an evolution particularly with electronic means you can't deny that but it's very incoate and it's very uneven and it's a mixture of both old means and modern means in today's protest but just to rip off the last point music has already and always been part of protest or at least of symbolic defiance so in 1955 for instance on the eve of the freedom charter the Congress of the People in Soweto in South Africa the presentation of Louis Armstrong's trumpet a jazz solidarity across continents was recognized by the people who could be as the Congress of the People silent the freedom charter there's a major act of solidarity and defiance there were no words in the jazz of that day I remember about an instrumental form of expression a very much an expression that was in contradiction to receive forms of structured more classical western music and amazingly creative things came out of the southern African jazz experience we Skokia which has certainly become one of the great jazz classics was actually composed in Budaweb in what is now Zimbabwe by a local Budaweb musician and that was taken very very much as symbolic but I wouldn't over egg this so that almost everyone here would know of the music of Kofi on a midi for instance when you translate some of the vernacular lyrics he's selling advertising space to political figures that we would deem reprehensible Kofi is going through a bad financial moment he needs the cash this can work both ways so don't forget that again we look at the experience in Zimbabwe right now where you have a spin doctor who's often out of favor sometimes in favor very often he's regarded as the Goebbels or at least as Peter Magnuson from Zimbabwe politics generally called Jonathan Moyer who owes me a lot of money from the days when he was a democratic his ability to manipulate media is legendary we talk about the advent of electronic and social media means of protest that inputs both ways and I think it's very very dangerous to take certain examples of African protest and say well this becomes a model for the whole continent for 55 bloody countries and in very very different conditions so that we often talk very lazily in my opinion about Kharia Square and Egyptian uprising at the height of the Arab Spring as a social media revolution it was partly that we can't deny that that was very very much evident in part but very very much what was also at play in Egypt was the huge density and configuration of the city the huge critical mass the population that could be convened the great difficulty once they had convened of sending an arm of the military of these units to disperse them and all kinds of things to do with underground organization not only the Muslim Brotherhood but the university center which is simply not able to be replicated in other jurisdictions you put that combination together and it becomes impossible I stress that model of protest replicate anywhere else in Africa so I want to stress that every single situation is unique not only that but when you've got opposition parties in different parts of Africa who in some ways think history has stopped still so that they actually haven't learned how to mobilize their own supporters by new forms of social media it's a bad way it's very much a case in point and the point you've got are people trying to mobilize themselves perhaps through electronic means without a core message that is blessed by the opposition party who they may wish to support when you've got this disjuncture that we mostly call civil society and organized formal political forces it doesn't work that conjuncture is not made quite explicit there's nobody involving generalized cats to actually understand how this stuff works there's everybody involved who can't do that they're not worried about this because what they've got is in particular a vernacular radio that's their messaging to the rural areas where vernacular radio will still have far more penetration and reach for instance that forms of social media that depend on the internet it leads me to the point that when we do talk about this revolution of the internet it is a very very dangerous fund for generalizations after the report, French magazine for which I write now does an annual survey not only the normal indices of the government like GDP it's the capital income level of literacy and that kind of thing which is standard now but cell phone penetration now that's a very very indicative measure when you go through that list of countries and there was a difference between cell phone penetration in one country and cell phone penetration in another can be astounding but even that can be misleading but what you want to do is to marry those statistics with web coverage no one having a smart phone where you can't get decent coverage for instance so even in southern Africa you've got Sababu which is actually why not very very well and better than Zambia in the north you've got actually an electronic space which is capable of messaging in a very profound way which is not created at bar to job by a professional political class in the opposition so that the very very great breakthrough in the 2008 2013 elections in Bagway which people now they won again and the book on that came out last week by now describing exactly how the ruling party did it by both fair means as well as it's all not just one way fair means also requires very very judicious use of modern means of communicating but the interesting electronic opposition to Robert Dyer for the election in 2013 actually gave the visitors in his own party it wasn't from the official opposition it was pretty much narrowed this down to people in the circle of Joyce Mujuru who was at that point in time Robert Mugabe's deputy president she's now been thrown out of the party and is one of the proposition leaders in a very fractured proposition but they put online on Facebook a new character called Robert and Robert basically posted many posts every single day just a cartoon figure and no one actually worked out for the time of the election just who he was but the amount of inside information that he was leaking of Mugabe's party's electoral plans and policies spoke the fact that he was an insider deliberately leaking and if they could be taken advantage of by equally sophisticated means by the opposition and what you would have had would have been the building up of the body of knowledge which would have been used to counteract government propositions, policies and party platforms through the election but that does not take that kind of job what you've got in South Africa is something which is even more primitive this really did stop at the moment of liberation in 1994 more than half of President Zuma's cabinet most of President Zuma's cabinet and almost none of President Mandela's cabinet could use email for this day more than half of President Zuma's cabinet can't use my estimates are that something like 40% of remissible public administration is not anchored in electronic communication they get as far as text messaging you've got all these fantastically beautiful smartphones and all they can do is send texts to all of us and of course the joke in South Africa is a lot of science has very heavy data to transmit to my colleagues at a university on the other end of the country by the time it downloaded on my colleagues screen on the other end of the country it's actually faster to reach a certain as a memory stick tied to the current vision we tried that once, it's true so even in the most sophisticated environments if you are not able to grapple with modernity if you are unable to utilize it and have on command the infrastructure that makes modernity work or you can be talking about as isolated so I can leave you with the old fashioned kind of process which is still very, very popular be caught in the middle of a lot of this it's not attractive if any of you have been out on the streets of Europe and you've been water cannon or tear gas we give you an indication the tear gas we use here in Europe is a very, very light form of tear gas we call that Tier 3 that will leave you feeling quite sick and nauseous but you're going to live and you're going to have stories that tell that you've been in time for many, many years after about how brave you were that you were popping up in a crime for a very short period of time Grade A tear gas made primarily by the North Koreans in the Israelis it's very hard to tell the difference in terms of potency both are just as nasty as the other are just going to absolutely incapacitate you and there's nothing you're going to be able to do with no matter how many wet towels you're going to carry around and kind of contract it no matter how thick your divers' goggles are that you're putting on you're just going to go down it's going to take very brave citizens to go out and face that when the crime is really on so when we talk about certain media as palliative and obstructive some kind of substitute for bravery in the streets what do you all hear there what do you all hear there when we're talking about protest we are still in an era where we're not going to have to talk about just faithful bravery in the streets thanks for your questions so I'm just going to open up a little question in my mind but I'm going to open up to the audience and bring up maybe we'll take three questions and see how well they have to be hand-perfect mine is very quickly can we have this kind of panel be more a part of the regular program rather than a kind of protest side show because I don't think that's important so maybe just as feedback yeah what I can say what I said at the beginning we will try to do at least here society will develop kind of other series other other meetings more regularly and in even more formal spaces but I don't know can you say it to me yeah governments are increasingly getting more worried about what people said they seem to be threatened by people power like what you said the Arab Spring they know that there's power in people and they are adapting but they are becoming more skillful they even have different cars of tear gas there's big tear gas and water cannons so they're becoming more brave and I would say that this seems to be an international convergence of this type of space they are sharing ideas about loads that they should adapt to close space and yet this seems to be an international defence for these mechanisms besides we have the likes of Donald Trump as president now and we have what is happening in Russia this seems to be an international convergence on closing down of civic space so my question is should we adapt what should be the space for what we do looks like it's noble let's take the last one for reflection you're trying to address the alternative form of protests and I think the key question here I believe is why the alternative is it to bring more results to be more effective or is it to evade danger and I think that the first question is right of high life for example I come from Ethiopia a country which witnessed numerous forms of protests consistent and persistent for the past four or five years and just to give you one I mean in the past two years the government killed more than a thousand protesters and I think it's the coverage because it's not Iran or Venezuela so I think Senegal and Kenya from the perspective of Ethiopia you're a democracy you are I trust the people that this is a very real lesson so I just want to have a more high life environment it's different sometimes people getting created in a negative way of protests to yield more results to be more effective but in a country like Ethiopia where there were numerous religious political ethnic non-national protests most of them complimenting each other because they're like the government they have to invent new ways of protests days that was torture and imprisonment I probably will try to respond to some of the things I think they're touching the same thing I think people are innovating because the space is shrinking because going out in the streets extremely economically personally, physically expensive people are getting killed and I think that to respond to the question about the shrinking space this is me being radical feminist capitalism needs an exploitative class there has to be an underclass of people to make things cheaply that we consume cheaply and what's happening right now is that African governments, African states are producing a lot of the people who make up this exploitative class I mentioned to the question that America has to be about the young men who are considered surplus in their own countries those young men and women are not leaving walking across the Sahara because they need a fresh air because their countries their states have made them surplus and they're trying to find a way of building lives of meaning elsewhere and another my country, Kenya I talk to people from Ethiopia and I do appreciate that there is a significant difference in the public space that's available in Kenya versus that's available in Ethiopia but in Kenya right now we're in the middle of the worst drought that we've had in the last 10 years and the state tells us there's no money and yet we just got a delivery of I think $14 billion worth of weapons from the United States there's always money for guns there's never any money for food there's never any money for education there's never money for health care there's never money for any of these things so a lot of this innovation is happening really in response to people realizing that we are creating an exploited underclass and the exploited underclass needs to figure out a way to navigate the space that's left and technology is one way which is why to me I have a personal resistance to or I think net neutrality because what happens when you create a fast internet for people who have to pay and a slow internet for people who can't pay the internet opens equal access it is one of the few things right now that is actually equally available to people yes you have to pay to get connected yes you have to buy the mobile phone but once you get connected me who is a poor working student will have the same quality of internet as the person who is loaded and living in their mansion it's all crappy but still you have it on the same level and that's why I personally am very opposed to things like facebook basis because what it's saying is let's give poor people a poor version of the internet and let's give rich people a different version of the internet which means what we are having different qualities of public engagement so to me I think those two things are quite related and yes on the point of the Ethiopian protest one of the things that I touched on in my research is internet shutdowns the reason why governments are learning how to shut down the internet is because they recognize that there is something happening there we've had 16 internet shutdowns in Africa in the last year and a half for the it's a complicated phenomenon not complicated, multi-layered phenomenon but part of the reason why the Ethiopian protests didn't get covered is because the Ethiopian government shut down the internet for almost three months or four months and social media for almost a year I think social media just got back to the point people were being arrested for facebook posts and disappeared I think there was a guy whose family in Addis was arrested for a thing he posted in Australia and so the challenge with Ethiopia for me is that the from my perspective Ethiopia and Sudan is that the police state is so well developed and so the obstacle for us as Kenya our biggest advantage honestly is that our government is extremely competent that's the greatest advantage that we have that they don't know the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing you don't have that problem the Ethiopian government the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing and so the space is completely different just briefly three final points the model for the future closure of civic space and civil society space is Erdogan's turkey that's going to be the model so you can look forward to the Turkish model variations of that being replicated in Africa the second point is that one of the things that activists wanting to use electronic means can utilize but have been very very slow to utilize is webcasting not just websites webcasting they can broadcast on the web vernacular messaging they haven't been doing that you can go on website after website in the country after country whereas the local content is vernacular it's all sort of western as it were replication the message is not getting through to joke logs in the countryside okay so that's the second point the third point is that when we look at civic space the future and as things shut down and open up in other spheres the churches and the unorganized churches the rough and ready churches that we don't think are actually churches the ones that get charismatic could get the word of God and do all kinds of nonaglossier and wonderful speaking in times that's going to give the future of citizen may not produce a second democratic society in a way that being recognized is certainly going to give a bit more space to what there is right now I think we're going to have to go to the last panel how can I claim the ten verse century in title I think it's a good place to end with a lot of questions a lot to think about thank you everyone