African regimes and bloggers at internet crossroads

The internet is coming to mainstream Africa via handhelds, not computers – and local media will thrive

THERE’S NOWHERE in the world that is looking more closely at this spring’s Middle East uprisings than the governments of sub-Saharan Africa, be they dictatorships or democracies.

I’m sitting in a windowless conference room in Johannesburg, South Africa, with some of the continent’s bloggers.

As I’ve said before in this column, if there’s anywhere that is about to experience a sea-change in media production and presence, driven by yet another net revolution, it’s Africa.

The drop in the price of smartphones, the continent’s already impressive mobile telephone infrastructure, and the upgrade to 3G and 4G networks mean that the net is coming to mainstream Africa via handhelds, not computers. That’s unheard of in the rest of the world: but probably prefigures what is inevitable for all of us.

I have no idea what it all means long term, but my medium-term guess is that it will result in a resurgence of local media in Africa, which could lead to a revitalisation of the image of African nations in the rest of the world, and in its own eyes.

Generalising about a continent is always impossibly inaccurate, but (to do so anyway, because I’ve already dug myself that hole) the high costs of printing and transporting traditional publications across its roads, and the dominance of its television and radio output by state-run media have meant that African media has often struggled to survive.

The dominance of western news sources over domestically produced media has been particularly cruel.

Elsewhere in the world, real stories are frequently ignored, while a repetitive, depressing and inaccurate narrative of famine and failure is constantly broadcast back at it by supposedly global sources.

But if al-Jazeera, with its critical but homegrown analysis of the Middle East, was the godfather of the Arab Spring, it’s Africa’s bloggers who are presaging a new era of a domestic African free press.

They’ve done so often at incredible personal cost. While there’s no blogger currently in jail in Africa, plenty have found themselves threatened, randomly detained, or unceremoniously blocked in their own country for their writings.

Many bloggers at this Johannesburg meeting, which was organised by my employer, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the bloggers’ network Global Voices Online, and Google Africa, chose not to identify themselves. Some were unable to attend because they were prevented from leaving their country. One went to get his passport stamped for the trip, only to be thrown in jail for a previous charge.

And all of this from countries that still have relatively small internet penetration figures. Countries see Egypt and Tunisia as a potential, and, for them, worrying, development.

De facto dictators such as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe have prosecuted citizens just for reading Facebook pages, let alone publishing their own comments on the net.

In Ethiopia, traditional newspapers such as Addis Neger have been forced into exile and online in an attempt to evade intimidation and imprisonment.

Meanwhile, nervous governments in Rwanda and the Ivory Coast have begun building the infrastructure to censor and block news websites from their domestic audience.

Despite these threats, everyone I spoke to was optimistic.

If there was a universal worry, it was that the internet might be ruined before African governments even get to it.

Bloggers were concerned about countries such as the United States backtracking on their commitments to internet freedom, leaving an internet that was balkanised and censored before the mobile net revolution made it to mainstream Africa.

Online journalists took notes about the same free data-mining and graphing tools that the most forward-thinking American and European news corporations have been adopting.

They plotted how to adopt them themselves to investigate and illustrate their own national stories.

No one in the room was unaware that one of the biggest visualisation tools – Ushahidi – was created by and for Kenyans before it was adopted by global news sites such as al-Jazeera.

The mobile phone companies will have far greater influence than even the largest media moguls.

They will know who is reading and writing what, and when, and where.

No matter how competitive the market, there are always only a handful of mobile phone companies in a geographical area, and to get licences, they will need to remain on good terms with the national government.

That’s a bad enough combination in the modern telecommunications world, in stable democracies.

In countries whose leaders are terrified of an Arab-style internet revolution, and who want to stamp it out before the net takes off, it’s a recipe for disaster.

We’re learning that the net is more of a multiplier of existing pressures of societies than a universally positive or negative transformer of them.

Right now, Africa’s governments, and its online journalists and bloggers, have a chance to choose which direction they will take.

The governments will be wise to ride the mobile net revolution to a richer and more informed society.

But to do that, they’ll need to trust their own people to take them there.