Why so many chose to die

I was invited to speak at the Society for International Development’s (SID) Congress in Washington, DC in July on the subject “New Approaches And Tools for Engaging Citizens; Lessons From Youthful Rebellions”.

Until then I had been mostly mesmerised by the Youth Revolts in Tunisia that ousted the country’s strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali after just 10 days in January, and those that, a few weeks later, felled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. These two revolutions gave birth to what is now known as the Arab Spring.

In February, a similar revolt broke out against Muammar Gaddafi’s oppressive and corrupt 42-year rule in Libya. But this was to be a bloody war that eventually ended in the capture of Gaddafi in October and his slaughter in a revolutionary frenzy that went amok.

The victorious, and now ruling, National Transitional Council (NTC) says about 30,000 people were killed during the war and at least 50,000 wounded — 20,000 of them seriously.

The Washington presentation forced me to think more deeply about the meaning of the Arab Spring, but most importantly, to examine more closely what was actually happening in other parts of Africa.

I was nearly stunned by the number of similar Arab Spring-type actions that had taken place in the rest of Africa but had not made international or continental headlines, in part because they were smaller, and also because they didn’t succeed in toppling any African Big Man.

But the demands were largely the same. And the tools of mobilisation — the Internet, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and Short Message Services (SMS) — were the same too.

One reason, apart from the scale and dramatic effect which made the world focus on the Arab Spring, is that the last place anyone expected such a movement to start from was in the Arab world. And less so, Arab North Africa. Since independence, none of these countries had a record that suggested that revolts would break out there.

If we consider the smaller uprisings in the rest of Africa, then it becomes clear that there is a movement on the continent that has only just begun, and that will most definitely not end in North Africa. What it is we quite don’t know fully yet, but we can describe some of its symptoms.

A few examples will help:

Biya’s 30-year-rule tested

Last March in Cameroon, a service that enabled mobile phone users to send SMSes and post Tweets mobilised mostly young men and women to protest against President Paul Biya’s government’s failure to rein in rising food prices was shut down by the government. The act drew huge protests and angry Tweets, forcing the government to back down and allow back the service 10 days later.

Earlier rumbles in Mozambique

Even before the Arab Spring, in August-September of 2010 there was unrest over high prices of food, electricity, and water in the Mozambique capital Maputo. Over 13 people were killed and 400 wounded in the ensuing police crackdown.

The government shut down an SMS platform it claimed was being used to “mobilise youth to riot”.

In Angola, tweeting is terrorism

In Angola in April, attempts by activists to drum up demonstrations rattled the Dos Santos dictatorship, which rushed to pass a law that defines terrorism as including any ‘electronic message’ sent with the intent of endangering the function of state institutions.

Though few of these protests grabbed world attention, and failed in unseating despots, in common they all resulted in changes and concessions, even though some were small. It would seem the African youth have learnt that it pays to test the system, however vicious it is. That you get nothing if you don’t sneak your head out and make some noise on the streets.

And so we return to Libya. There was a recent documentary on the Al Jazeera TV network entitled The Long Road to Tripoli.

It is a powerful documentary that views the Libyan war from a perspective we didn’t see during the dramatic days of conflict. You see the young people, the sacrifices they made, and their pain.

What was striking was just how many Libyans in exile left successful businesses and families in the UK and US and dropped out of elite universities to go home and fight Gaddafi — without the certainty of success.

That so many of them gave up a good and safe life to put themselves at great risk was just another indication of how much the world had not fully appreciated the depth of resentment against Gaddafi. But also, when people who have all the material things a person would need give them all up to join a war, then they are looking for more than a job and salary.

What could that be? When the youthful Libyan rebels captured a significant building, for example Gaddafi’s palace, they took away the dictator’s possessions — his pistols, his outlandish uniforms and hats, and statues — as victory trophies. They also did something else; they covered whole buildings in graffiti of political slogans, freedom proclamations, and denunciations of Gaddafi.

Graffiti was also the signature of the Tunisian revolutionaries. In October, I finally encountered post-revolution Tunisia.

To find the monument to the revolution you need to go the St Louis Cathedral in Carthage, the dream suburb of Tunis. To the left of the Cathedral are ruins and artefacts from the Roman era, some more than 2,000 years old.

In the yard in front of the cathedral, two new monuments have been added. They are two cars that were wrecked in the revolt, and they too are sprayed all over with graffiti.

Graffiti is a rebellious urban art born out of the angst of youth tribulations in the big cities. It can be a constant battle against power — and subversive too. When the authorities clean it, the people return and spray it again.

One of the distinguishing features of these times is that, as more and more people in the world, especially in highly industrialised societies, choose not to have children, there is a growing global children-hating industry. Young people are increasingly painted as worthless, a pain in the neck, lazy, criminal-minded, drug addicted, and a menace to the public.

In the protests, the young people seemed to have made the point that the adults are wrong. That they are not TV-and-Internet-addicted slobs who dream only of fast cars, tattoos, bikini-clad girls, rappers, and hunkish men (for the girls), and inheriting their parents’ money.

That they too want free and democratic societies, and want it more than the adults who despise them because they are willing to pay a price the elders cannot to get it.

In the process, they are bringing with them a whole new form of social organising that is not paternalistic, is anti-hierarchical, and doesn’t require one to organise a rent-seeking political party; that is social media and SMS.

It is a counter-narrative that is not probably as complicated as it is sometimes made out to be. The youth just want to be free, respected, and to live in dignity.