ONLINE VOICES

South Africa’s homeless turn cyber-warriors
By Thomas L Blair 20 May 2009

There’s an uncompromising web site paving the way for South Africa’s militant poor to lead a grass-roots Internet revolution in South Africa. Led by cyberactivist S’bu Zikode, the online voice of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Zulu movement has declared a radical challenge. It opposes bureaucrats and land speculators planning to evict thousands of shackdwellers to beautify the city in advance of next year’s soccer World Cup.

 
Cyber-militants took to the Internet with a full-throated cry — Umhlaba! Izindlu! Land! Housing! Winning viewers with a rich diet of people’s voices, photographs and stories, they affirm, “Shack settlements are communities to be developed and not slums to be bull-dozed”.

In the process, they forged a template for small group and grass-roots cyber action. First aired nearly two years ago, Zikode sensed a desperate need to broadcast the shackdwellers’s case. He condemned the Zulu-Natal Slums Act of 2007 as the forerunner of mass evictions and disenfranchisement.

Traditional legal housing rights of shackdwellers, more than half of Durban’s African population, were in danger. The Act enforced a heavy penalty. “No Land; No house; No Vote!” said the cyberactivist.

 

Then Zikode and his comrades used their online journalism skills to “help people gain control of the forces that affect their lives”. They trumpeted the success of community leaders, mass meetings and informal schools and health facilities.

 
Then came the time for action to reform or repeal the threatening Act. With the power of the web in their hands, Zikode and the shackdwellers carried the protest to the highest constitutional courts.
However, the KwaZulu judicial authorities denied this troublesome plea in 14 May 2009. (Too reminiscent, many say, of Verwoerd’s apartheid doctrine of the 1950s: “If the native is being taught that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake”.

 
This set back has not stopped the cyberactivity of the proud heirs of Chief Shaka Zulu, the revered political and military leader of the anti-colonial wars. It emboldens them. Cyber-community organisers rallied the shantytown people left out of the political system. Many live on the edge of poverty or are as badly off as their rural relatives earning less than two dollars a day.

Soon, the Abahlali baseMjondolo web site linked a network of “Internetworks” of the militant poor. One cluster of popular protests is the Landless People’s Movement (Gauteng). Another is the Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal). In addition, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign adds its online voice. Together, Zikode and his comrades form the Poor People’s Alliance, “a national network of democratic membership based poor people’s movements”.

Furthermore, publishing their “fight-back” mood in major languages — English, Afrikaans, isiZulu & isiXhosa — has attracted South Africa’s politically influential net-generation to the shackdwellers cause. These include online progressive political and language groups, urban planners, housing experts and lawyers. In addition, anti-poverty campaigners, civil rights groups and grassroots organisations are pledging their aid.

 

The audacity of the Zulu cyber-warriors has merit. Information is power; and online shackdwellers push us towards greater awareness of the social uses of the Internet.
Will this new class in the making forge new, more just policies for affordable housing, living wages and secure futures for their children? Will they build unity with the workers’ and trade union movements? Will students and the net-generation take up the cause of the shack dwellers?
Moreover, will “going digital” prompt action from diverse, minor political forces, for example the Pan Africanist Congress and the Communist Party? What will the KwaZulu-Natal’s prime minister and powerful African National Congress do? Will ANC leader Jacob Zuma, a Zulu himself, and South Africa’s fourth president, intervene?

Answers to these questions will determine the democratic future of South Africa and influence Internet campaigns for people’s empowerment in many other countries.

NOTE: Thomas L Blair publishes the Chronicleworld http://www. chronicleworld.org. Discover the Internet facts and common visions of the Black world in the author’s just published E-book The Audacity of Cyberspace: The struggle for Internet power by Thomas L Blair (Order from http://m-ybooks.co.uk/blair/default.html)

Women of the shackdwellers movement

The Audacity of Cyberspace — USA case study

Black experts add diversity to the hi-tech world

The evidence is that African Americans have matured in their Internet priorities as well as the ways they access and use the Internet. They know that overcoming the perils of information poverty is one of the essential tasks for future success. This fact is evidenced by the increasing growth of Black web sites shown in Prof Abdul Akalimat’s book The African-American Experiences in Cyberspace: A resource Guide to the Best Web Sites on Black Culture and History (Pluto, London 2004).

 

Furthermore, there is a welcome surge of interest in the hitherto unrecognised contributions of Black Internet innovators, computing scientists, media executives, and professors.  “Black kids might embrace technology with more enthusiasm if they knew someone like Dr. Mark Dean was already leading the way,” says Tyrone D Taborn of the Careers Communications Group, Baltimore, Maryland.

 

Dean is a trailblazer, says Taborn in US Black Engineer & IT magazine, “Hi-Tech’s Invisible Man,” Jan 17, 2004. He is a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is in the National Hall of Inventors. He has more than 30 patents pending. He is a vice president with IBM.”

 

Enthusiastically, he continues: “Oh, yeah. And he is also the architect of the modern-day personal computer. Dr. Dean holds three of the original nine patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon. And, Dr. Mark Dean is an African American”.

 

Further investigation reveals that Taborn’s comments are not an overstatement. “Blacks have played a pioneering role in the hi-tech world,” says the popular Black magazine, Ebony, “Black Pioneers in the High-Tech World,” 2 June 2000, Chicago, Il. Moreover, in 2002, researchers from the University of California-Santa Barbara, MIT and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center explored “race in digital space” and celebrated the work of Black activists, journalists, entrepreneurs, engineers and scholars using digital technologies (See http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/race/press.html). 

 

 

Ø  Info Point  Leading Black personalities in US hi-tech  also include:

·         John H Thompson, the first Black chief executive officer of a major Silicon Valley firm

·         28-year-old Darien Dash, who runs  Digital Mafia Entertainment, the first Black-owned publicly traded Internet company

·         US Air Force veteran Earl Stafford, founder of Unitech Inc, a multimillion-dollar military technology firm

·         Yvette Moyo, president of www.mobe.com, a forum promoting the use of information technology in the Afro-American market. See “Black Pioneers in the high-tech world,” Ebony Magazine June 2000; also Tyrone D Taborn, “50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology List” in Black Engineer www.blackengineer.com/events/50_ top_African_Americans_in_Technology.shtml

 

On the horizon

Soon, without doubt, more Black people will be attracted to using the Internet as income and educational levels rise, and as prices of computers and network access fall. Community activists will promote the survival and development of Black neighbourhoods, churches, schools, families and small businesses.

 

The tendencies towards change are apparent. The state of the information revolution in Black America is advancing in strength and purpose. Key factors in this advance were identified by Michael Marriott, in his New York Times article Blacks Turn to the Internet Highway, and Digital Divide Starts to Close”  March 31, 2006. They are:

 

·         Rising Black aspirations to get “wired up” for work, education, politics, leisure and social interaction, associated with

·         More computer and Internet accessibility in schools and libraries, and

·         Greater use of cell phones and hand-held devices that connect to the Internet

 

But the transformation to full access and use of the Internet by Black communities will not be easy. And, the signs are that the struggle for African Americans to get onto the 21st century information superhighway will not cease until their terrestrial rights are fully attained.

 

 

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A decade before Barack Obama’s “net generation” ignited his journey to the White House,  Black communities in the USA, Britain and sub-Saharan Africa went online for equality and social justice. Discover the facts, and their common visions and priorities in –

THE AUDACITY OF CYBERSPACE: The Struggle for Internet Power by Thomas L Blair  tb@thechronicle.demon.co.uk

 

 

 

THE AUDACITY OF CYBERSPACE

 

 Black demand for web-democracy predates Obama’s net-generation

By Thomas L Blair, tb@thechronicle.demon.co.uk, 20 January 2009 

Barack Obama’s “net-generation” ignited his journey to the White House as 44th President of the US – and its first Black leader. On the campaign trail, young “net-geners” attracted millions of donors and volunteer in a multicultural political coalition. 

The brilliant tactic of Internet social networking was clear, however, at least a decade before. Globally, the “net-roots” commitment for change swept the Black World – Africa and the Diaspora. Black communities were adapting the instruments of the digital age– the Internet and computers — for equality and social justice as early as 1996.

 

This surely must have impressed the young Obama, when organising community action in the politically volatile, working poor voting districts of Chicago.

 

 In Britain, online Black communities promoted “digital cities” that value citizen participation. African communities trained cyberactivists and challenge media companies and Internet providers to close the “digital divide” between the “info-haves and have nots”.

 

 In America, the early Black cyberorganisers were blooded by “dreams” for a changed America — from the civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X to Rev Jesse Jackson’s rainbow campaigns of 1984 and 1988 for jobs, education and health care.

 

Armed with the rousing anthem “We shall overcome”, and Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” may have provided the highlight, cyberorganisers preached the radical idea of “net-working with your neighbours”. They carried their Internet-based redemptive message into schools, universities, churches, clubs, beauty parlours, community halls and workers’ unions.

 

Obama’s net-geners and Internet-savvy voters inherit this demand for change and thrust the revolutionary idea of power sharing into electoral politics. From the rise of Obama 2006 to 2008, they forged the biggest user-friendly, special interest group in the nation. Undoubtedly, the first truly “wired” presidency owes its origins in no small part to the precursors of Internet social action, Black communities.  

 

Hands that once picked cotton now “internetwork” for social change and participatory democracy.

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Thomas L Blair publishes the Internet journal Chronicleworld.org and is the author of the forthcoming book Audacity of Cyberspace: The struggle for internet power. See book content and details at http://www.thomblair.org.uk/audacity.htm 

 

All enquiries, comments and expressions of  interest will be gratefully received tb@thechronicle.demon.co.uk

 

 

 

Cyberaction for Social Change

Citizen journals are a mighty force for Info-freedom

“Honest and unfiltered”. That’s the future of online journalism. Ordinary citizens will publish top quality articles, blogs and reports in “citizen journals”.

Some bloggers will watch-dog the work of conventional journalists, public relations agents, thought-controllers and spin-doctors.Others will challenge media chiefs, bosses and elected officials to monitor biases, inaccuracies and racial stereotypes in the mainstream press in print broadcasting and online.

That’s why I was so delighted to win this year’s highly-prized blogging competition sponsored by The-Latest, the citizen journal on the Internet.

The judging panel saluted my journal article, “Deaths expose France’s hidden racism”, as “A gripping and vivid blog”. It opened a new chapter in the debate “on what it means to be Black and French in the Land of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”. A challenge that is not without significance in all western nations.

Fierce competition

Speaking at the award luncheon in a London restaurant, Marc Wadsworth, editor of the popular UK-based citizen journal, said: “The competition was fierce. There was some excellent writing on issues ranging from improving London’s public transport to reporting on market life in China”.

Deborah Hobson, contributing editor, presented the journal’s award and said “the judges’ decision was unanimous”. She hoped to continue to attract innovative bloggers and make The-Latest “a real contender to mainstream media”.  Furthermore, citizen journalism is part of her winning strategy for the future. She wants to give bloggers more space for their reports and images. And, Hobson and her colleagues, hope that “getting more readers from overseas will put our journal on the international radar with some scoops in words and images”

Innovative blogging sought

Speaking of which, promoting blogging is close to the horizon of my own interests. But, as I insisted in my after-lunch remarks, blogging and citizen journalism, however well-intentioned, without firm editorial direction will run the risk of being merely a fringe element of how politics is done and communicated.

Warming up to the subject, I said that the rush for headline grabbin headlines and “breaking news” reported by bloggers hardly ever leads to beneficial social change. Moreover, much of what is offered in citizen journals is a crude mix of personality cult-ism, ad-hoc opinions, frivolous comment, unsavoury gossip and downright nonsense masquerading as journalism.

One popular complaint is that it is difficult for concerned individuals to find practical, concise, balanced information written in a user-friendly style about relevant issues. What is sorely needed, it seems to me, is a structured guide to promoting information freedom, especially to raise up the voices of the public, consumers, low-income workers and racially oppressed sections of society.

 Emerging social movement

Therefore, I welcomed the award not only for myself but as one of a growing number of bloggers for  information freedom. Political blogging and citizen journals can be powerful antidotes to media misinformation and political manipulation. Everywhere, they add to an informed, democratic political dialogue.

In this regard, we in western nations have a lot to learn from bloggers and citizen reporters in developing countries. Surfprisingly, in the vanguard are Black cyber-organisers, journalists, and Internet community leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, Europe and America. They aim to end the digital divide between the information-haves and the powerless have-nots (http://www.citizenjournalismafrica.org). They affirm that the way forward is using the tools of modern technology “to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others”.

The way forward
With this in mind, I welcomed The-Latest award as a tribute to the pioneers of a new Internet social movement. Partisans of the fledging movement are battling from a central premise: people talking to people, and sharing diverse perspectives, can propose honest answers to troubling questions using the new technologies.

Whenever and wherever they come together with a collective voice, striking a blow for information freedom, then that’s what citizen journalism in a digital world should be all about.

Copyright and author Thomas L Blair 2008

For further of exploration of these ideas, see http://www.chronicleworld.org, Archive 06, 10/12/05 “Taming the Internet. Excluded Black populations worldwide, once written off as orphans of the digital revolution, are using computers and the Internet to ensure their place on the information superhighway, new research shows”.