Afrikan Sistahs Talk Radio  

How Bloggers Covered Kenya Violence, Deal with Racism, Sexism

by Sokari Ekine, 2:54AM

Mark Glaser is traveling this week, but we’re happy to have Sokari Ekine filling in as a special guest blogger. Ekine started the award-winning Black Looks blog in 2004, and covers challenging issues such as gender, sexuality and racism. Glaser will return to the blog next
Monday.

Within 24 hours of the outbreak of the post election violence in Kenya, Kenyan blogs were posting hour by hour reports. On December 31st there was a complete shutdown of the mainstream media. Erik Hersman reported:

The only way to get any up-to-date news for the past 24-48 hours has been through the blogosphere (like Kenyan Pundit, Thinkers Room, Mentalacrobatics) Skype and Kenyan populated forums (like Mashada). The traditional media has been shut out and shut down for all intents and purposes.

Within days, the online community and blog aggregator, Mashada had set up a SMS and voice main hotline calling for people to send in local news and opinions on what was happening. This was followed by Ory Okolloha (Kenyan Pundit) who suggested using Google Earth to create a mashup of where the violence was taking place:

Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something — any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?

This was the 3rd of January and by the 9th a group of Kenyan bloggers had put together a mashup and created Ushahidi a site for people to send SMS or email reports of acts of violence direct to the site.

Daudi of MentalAcrobatics explains the importance of Ushahidi:

We as Kenyans are guilty of having short-term memories. Yesterday’s villains are today’s heroes. We sweep bad news and difficult decision under the carpet; we do not confront the issues in our society and get shocked when the country erupts as it did two months ago. Ushahidi gives everybody, anybody, the opportunity to get his or her experience recorded. Through SMS, through email, through the Internet, through meeting an NGO worker who will write down what happened and share it with us. Ushahidi is a project that has to be owned by those who use it; they have to believe in it.

Why was the Kenyan blogosphere able to rally in such a positive and productive way in such a short time? What can we learn from their actions that will help others deal with local crisis? It will be interesting to observe how the African blogosphere as a whole and Zimbabwe in particular approach the elections of 29th March. What the Ushahidi project shows is that if you build a strong community then it is easier to come together in a time of crisis and take action.

Evolution of the African Blogosphere

Kenyan bloggers were the first group of African bloggers to create an online community, first with a webring and later in March 2005 the Kenya Unlimited site was launched. This was at a time when blogging in Africa was in its infancy.

I remember when I started blogging in June 2004 the number of African bloggers was quite small and most were in the Diaspora. There was also a substantial number of Westerners blogging on Africa. I used to have Darfur and DRC categories because there was hardly Africans writing on these at the time. Now I hardly write about either as there are so many Sudanese and Congolese bloggers who are far more knowledgeable than I am.

Interestingly it was around the time of the 2006 elections that I began to notice Congolese bloggers. There are now active blogging communities across languages — French, Portuguese, Arabic and Swahili — and across countries and regions. Nonetheless three countries dominate the blogosphere, South Africa* (see below), Kenya and Nigeria, and there is a tendency for bloggers to remain within their linguistic and geographical communities.

Some of the early blogs by Africans which are still published regularly are Chippla’s Weblog (Nigeria), Mshairi (Kenya), Timbuktu Chronicles (Nigeria), AfroMusing, (Kenya) and Thinkers Room (Kenya) to name a few. By 2007 the number of blogs had grown exponentially and continue to do so.

There are a number of landmark periods which I can identify with my own posts of the time. One was called “Where are all the African women bloggers” written in response to a piece “Where are all the women bloggers” in which I wrote:

Now all this talk of women bloggers, minority bloggers, bloggers of colour etc is great stuff BUT no one is talking about AFRICAN women bloggers, especially those blogging from Africa rather than the Diaspora. If anyone’s voice is lost it is that of the African women. When it comes to the mainstream media and even the “alternative” so called “progressive” media and that includes Blogger world, technologically we don’t exist - but actually we do.

The importance of this post was that it not only made non-Africans aware of African women but many African women including myself were largely blogging in isolation without knowing about each other. It was at this time that I discovered the Kenyan webring which was dominated by women. I also found there were a significant number of women bloggers who were not registered with any blog directory, did not have blog rolls and did not want any publicity.

The question where are all the bloggers was raised again more recently when a white South African blogger, Inside Candy wondered why there were so few Black South Africans blogging:

I realise that this is a potentially loaded question, but where the hell are all the black bloggers hiding? To date, I’ve only met one (I repeat, one) black South African blogger - Obakeng, “The Chief” of ONC Today.”

A simple Google search produced predictable statistics on internet usage and access in South Africa:

Black Africans (BA) make up 79% of the population v. whites (W) at 9% BA with higher eduction 5% v. W 95%
BA with landlines or mobile phones - 35% v. W 95%
BA with own computer 1.8% v. W 97%
Unemployment of BA 28% (has risen since 2001) v. 4% of W
Medium annual income of BA 12,000 rands v. 64,400 rands for W