China unblocked a bunch of previously filtered porn sites this week, just in time for the 21st anniversary of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
China unblocked a bunch of previously filtered porn sites this week, just in time for the 21st anniversary of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Cunning gamble to pull netizens away from dangerous online discussions of political repression? Technical glitch? Attempt to placate the country’s growing population of young males?
Check out my post on the OpenNet Initiative blog and tell me what you think.
On the eve of Sudan’s 2010 presidential elections, I interviewed Fareed Zein, who heads the citizen election monitoring project Sudan Vote Monitor. On Wednesday I checked in with Zein to get his thoughts on the project now that the elections have ended.
My next post is up at Global Voices Online:
On the eve of Sudan's 2010 presidential elections, I interviewed Fareed Zein, who heads the citizen election monitoring project Sudan Vote Monitor, for the Technology for Transparency Project. Zein was hopeful that the project would bring greater transparency to the country's first democratic elections in more than two decades. “There was basically no idea what was going on on the ground” during previous political events, Zein said at the time. “What we're hoping to do is shine a light and give people access to events that are occurring at remote election centers.” On Wednesday I checked in with Zein to get his thoughts on the project now that the elections have ended.
I’m headed to the 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in 10 days. Between now and then, I’ve been asked to put together a short overview of citizen media in Uganda, something I’ve had the opportunity to watch evolve from the pre-happy hour days to the citizen coverage of last September’s riots in Kampala and the burning of the Kasubi tombs.
Blogren, I hope I’ve fairly represented our community. If there’s anything you want me to add, let me know by May 4 and I’ll do my best to share it with those at the summit.
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Stories about citizen media often focus on things gone wrong: disputed elections, natural disasters, or, on a smaller scale, neighborhood potholes. When I first began covering the Ugandan blogosphere for Global Voices, I wondered why the bloggers I knew weren’t writing about Parliament or peace talks with the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. I wasn’t alone: fellow expatriate Scarlett Lion asked where all of Uganda’s political bloggers were, and blogger Henry Owera berated his compatriots for not paying more attention to political events.
But when I started listening, really listening, to what Uganda’s bloggers were saying, I saw that the country’s citizen media are quite vibrant. They share stories about their childhoods. They take pains to define Ugandan slang for outsiders. They are creative writers. One is a communist; another is a reverend.
Fewer than one in ten Ugandans has access to the Internet. This puts a distinctly urban spin on the Ugandan blogosphere, which is made up primarily of students, journalists, and those who work in Uganda’s rapidly expanding tech sector. Most of Uganda’s rural bloggers are either expatriates or supported by external organizations, but there are a few exceptions, including aforementioned Reverend Willy Akena, who has been blogging since November 2006.
In 2007, a group of Danish filmmakers made a documentary about Uganda’s blogosphere as part of an MS Action Aid Denmark competition:
One of the video’s themes is that Ugandans feel relatively free to write what they want. Blogger 27th Comrade once declared, “Uganda is not one of them countries where bloggers are dissidents, telling the World what’s happening behind the stone curtain.” For the most part, this is true — despite occasional challenges to press freedom, Uganda’s media are largely free to criticize the government and to report unfettered. Bloggers, rather than being the sole source of uncensored news, provide additional nuance and depth to mainstream news. Last September, however, the situation changed.
On September 11, 2009, riots broke out in Kampala. The government instituted a media blackout, banning political programming and pulling radio stations off the air. In the absence of mainstream media coverage, Uganda’s bloggers became one of the only sources of information. Many of them were bewildered by the attention. During TEDxKampala last November, blogger Solomon King said, “One day I wake up and there’s an armored personnel carrier right outside my house. I tweet about it, and the next thing I know I’m a citizen journalist.”
The government has since eased restrictions on the media, but bloggers have continued to serve as citizen journalists, reporting on the burning of cultural heritage site Kasubi Tombs and the country’s impending anti-homosexuality bill. This doesn’t mean, however, that they have stopped writing poetry or discussing music. Uganda’s blogosphere is a rich and varied place, and there is room for both creative writing and, when the need arises, crisis coverage. As the Internet continues to spread more Ugandans are coming online, blogging about movies, telling jokes and wondering about the upcoming presidential elections. All of these things are equal parts of life in Uganda, and thanks to citizen media, we have the chance to read about them all.
I just finished writing a paper on Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni for a class on African political economy. The starting point for the essay was an article by Harvard professor Robert Rotberg, in which he claims that “African leaders perform adequately during their early elected terms and then, in their second terms or beyond, become despots.”
Museveni’s currently serving his third elected term after an initial four ten-year “interim period” between 1986 and 1996. An examination of his 26 years in power shows that he’s done great things for Uganda’s economy while becoming increasingly authoritarian.
Kampala Road, 2006.
Photo courtesy of peprice on Flickr.
It just so happened that as I was in New York, paging through a mountain of books and articles, Never Man was on the streets of Kampala wondering about the same things:
I remember when nights in the city were dark because there were no neon signs commanding us to buy things, when there was nothing to buy and even if there was, there was no one to buy it. We were all broke.I remember when nights in the city were silent because no one in their right mind wanted to be outside their homes after sundown, when the nights in the city were silent except for the occasional gunshot.I never thought we would ever become this.
I walk pavements up to the zebra crossing and wait for rude and pompous drivers in luxury saloon cars to pass so that I can walk again, across the firm and permanent tarmac of Kampala Road. All around me there are people talking to each other in loud, boisterous voices, arguing, joking, haranguing, talking on cellular phones about how expensive life is these days, because it doesn’t occur to them to think how much better it is than the days when life was cheap.
…
I try to imagine that I am invisible, just watching and not being seen, and I let the gratefulness overwhelm me, allow myself to be surprised that out of mounds of smouldering earth, we made this: pizza, and multi-storeyed glass-walled towers, and modern cinemas, and phone booths and cocktail bars and satellite TV and GQ magazine vending stalls.
And I try to stifle the sense that this is a fragile beauty, that it cannot last. That one day something will happen, something will happen to bring it all crumbling down and we will be back to 1986, and that when it does I will shake my head and say, “Shit. It was just a matter of time. It couldn’t last.”
I woke up early last Monday morning to interview Philip Thigo of the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool for the Technology for Transparency Network. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun asking someone questions.
I woke up early last Monday morning to interview Philip Thigo of the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool for the Technology for Transparency Network. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun asking someone questions.
If you listen to the podcast, you’ll hear faint sounds of Nairobi in the background: horns honking, people walking around. As Philip chatted candidly with me about the successes and struggles of encouraging greater transparency in Kenya’s national budget, I imagined him in his office, the door propped open, curtains blowing in the breeze.
Can you tell that living in New York has made me a bit desperate for sunshine and perhaps a return trip to Kampala?
Anyway, the noise makes for an interview that sounds less than studio-produced, but it also makes me happy. The sounds of life in east Africa, Philip’s laughter and his enthusiasm for his work all combined to create an awesome interview experience, and I highly recommend that you read the full case study and listen to the podcast.