How young Africans found a voice on Twitter Siyanda Mohutsiwa
It began with one question:
If Africa was a bar, what would
your country be drinking or doing?
I kicked it off with a guess
about South Africa,
which wasn’t exactly
according to the rules
because South Africa’s not my country.
But alluding to the country’s
continual attempts
to build a postracial society
after being ravaged
for decades by apartheid,
I tweeted, #ifafricawasabar South Africa
would be drinking all kinds of alcohol
and begging them
to get along in its stomach.
And then I waited.
And then I had that funny feeling
where I wondered if I crossed the line.
So, I sent out a few other tweets
about my own country
and a few other African countries
I’m familiar with.
And then I waited again,
but this time
I read through almost every tweet
I had ever tweeted
to convince myself,
no, to remind myself that I’m really funny
and that if nobody gets it, that’s fine.
But luckily,
I didn’t have to do that for very long.
Very soon, people were participating.
In fact, by the end of that week in July,
the hashtag #ifafricawasabar
would have garnered around 60,000 tweets,
lit up the continent
and made its way to publications
all over the world.
People were using the hashtag
to do many different things.
To poke fun at their stereotypes:
[#IfAfricaWasABar
Nigeria would be outside explaining
that he will pay the entrance fee,
all he needs is
the bouncer’s account details.]
(Laughter)
To criticize government spending:
[#ifafricawasabar South Africa would be
ordering bottles it can’t pronounce
running a tab it won’t be able to pay]
To make light of geopolitical tensions:
[#IfAfricaWasABar
South Sudan would be the new guy
with serious anger management issues.]
To remind us that even in Africa
there are some countries
we don’t know exist:
[#IfAfricaWasABar
Lesotho would be that person
who nobody really knows
but is always in the pictures.]
And also to make fun of the countries
that don’t think that they’re in Africa:
[#IfAfricaWasABar Egypt, Libya,
Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco
be like “What the hell
are we doing here?!!"]
(Laughter)
And to note the countries
that had made a big turnaround:
[#ifAfricawasabar
Rwanda would be that girl
that comes with no money and no transport
but leaves drunk, happy and rich]
But most importantly,
people were using the hashtag to connect.
People were connecting
over their Africanness.
So for one week in July,
Twitter became a real African bar.
And I was really thrilled,
mainly because I realized
that Pan-Africanism could work,
that we had before us,
between us, at our fingertips
a platform that just needed a small spark
to light in us a hunger for each other.
My name is Siyanda Mohutsiwa,
I’m 22 years old
and I am Pan-Africanist by birth.
Now, I say I’m Pan-Africanist by birth
because my parents are
from two different African countries.
My father’s from a country
called Botswana in southern Africa.
It’s only slightly bigger than Germany.
This year we celebrate
our 50th year of stable democracy.
And it has some very progressive
social policies.
My mother’s country
is the Kingdom of Swaziland.
It’s a very, very small country,
also in southern Africa.
It is Africa’s last complete monarchy.
So it’s been ruled by a king
and a royal family
in line with their tradition,
for a very long time.
On paper, these countries
seem very different.
And when I was a kid,
I could see the difference.
It rained a lot in one country,
it didn’t rain quite as much in the other.
But outside of that,
I didn’t really realize
why it mattered that my parents
were from two different places.
But it would go on
to have a very peculiar effect on me.
You see, I was born in one country
and raised in the other.
When we moved to Botswana,
I was a toddler who spoke fluent SiSwati
and nothing else.
So I was being introduced to my new home,
my new cultural identity,
as a complete outsider,
incapable of comprehending
anything that was being said to me
by the family and country whose traditions
I was meant to move forward.
But very soon, I would shed SiSwati.
And when I would go back to Swaziland,
I would be constantly confronted
by how very non-Swazi I was becoming.
Add to that my entry
into Africa’s private school system,
whose entire purpose
is to beat the Africanness out of you,
and I would have
a very peculiar adolescence.
But I think that my interest
in ideas of identity was born here,
in the strange intersection
of belonging to two places at once
but not really belonging
to either one very well
and belonging to this vast space
in between and around simultaneously.
I became obsessed with the idea
of a shared African identity.
Since then, I have continued
to read about politics
and geography and identity
and what all those things mean.
I’ve also held on to a deep curiosity
about African philosophies.
When I began to read,
I gravitated towards the works
of black intellectuals
like Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon,
who tackled complex ideas
like decolonization
and black consciousness.
And when I thought, at 14,
that I had digested these grand ideas,
I moved on to the speeches
of iconic African statesmen
like Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara
and Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.
I read every piece of African fiction
that I could get my hands on.
So when Twitter came,
I hopped on with the enthusiasm
of a teenage girl
whose friends are super, super bored
of hearing about all this random stuff.
The year was 2011
and all over southern Africa
and the whole continent,
affordable data packages
for smartphones and Internet surfing
became much easier to get.
So my generation, we were sending
messages to each other on this platform
that just needed 140 characters
and a little bit of creativity.
On long commutes to work,
in lectures that some of us
should have been paying attention to,
on our lunch breaks,
we would communicate as much as we could
about the everyday realities
of being young and African.
But of course, this luxury
was not available to everybody.
So this meant that if you were
a teenage girl in Botswana
and you wanted
to have fun on the Internet,
one, you had to tweet in English.
Two, you had to follow more than just
the three other people you knew online.
You had to follow South Africans,
Zimbabweans, Ghanaians, Nigerians.
And suddenly, your whole world opened up.
And my whole world did open up.
I followed vibrant Africans
who were travelling around the continent,
taking pictures of themselves
and posting them
under the hashtag #myafrica.
Because at that time,
if you were to search Africa
on Twitter or on Google
or any kind of social media,
you would think that the entire continent
was just pictures of animals
and white guys drinking cocktails
in hotel resorts.
(Laughter)
But Africans were using this platform
to take some kind of ownership
of the tourism sectors.
It was Africans taking selfies
on the beaches of Nigeria.
It was Africans
in cocktail bars in Nairobi.
And these were the same Africans
that I began to meet
in my own travels around the continent.
We would discuss African literature,
politics, economic policy.
But almost invariably, every single time,
we would end up discussing Twitter.
And that’s when I realized what this was.
We were standing in the middle
of something amazing,
because for the first time ever
young Africans could discuss
the future of our continent in real time,
without the restriction of borders,
finances and watchful governments.
Because the little known truth is
many Africans know a lot less
about other African countries
than some Westerners
might know about Africa as a whole.
This is by accident,
but sometimes, it’s by design.
For example, in apartheid South Africa,
black South Africans
were constantly being bombarded
with this message that any country
ruled by black people
was destined for failure.
And this was done to convince them
that they were much better off
under crushing white rule
than they were living
in a black and free nation.
Add to that Africa’s colonial,
archaic education system,
which has been unthinkingly
carried over from the 1920s –
and at the age of 15,
I could name all the various causes
of the wars that had happened
in Europe in the past 200 years,
but I couldn’t name the president
of my neighboring country.
And to me, this doesn’t make any sense
because whether we like it or not,
the fates of African people
are deeply intertwined.
When disaster hits, when turmoil hits,
we share the consequences.
When Burundians flee political turmoil,
they go to us,
to other African countries.
Africa has six of the world’s
largest refugee centers.
What was once a Burundian problem
becomes an African problem.
So to me, there are no Sudanese problems
or South African problems
or Kenyan problems,
only African problems
because eventually, we share the turmoil.
So if we share the problems,
why aren’t we doing a better job
of sharing the successes?
How can we do that?
Well, in the long term,
we can shoot towards
increasing inter-African trade,
removing borders
and putting pressure on leaders
to fulfill regional agreements
they’ve already signed.
But I think that the biggest way
for Africa to share its successes
is to foster something
I like to call social Pan-Africanism.
Now, political Pan-Africanism
already exists,
so I’m not inventing anything
totally new here.
But political Pan-Africanism
is usually the African unity
of the political elite.
And who does that benefit?
Well, African leaders, almost exclusively.
No, what I’m talking about
is the Pan-Africanism
of the ordinary African.
Young Africans like me,
we are bursting with creative energy,
with innovative ideas.
But with bad governance
and shaky institutions,
all of this potential could go to waste.
On a continent where more
than a handful of leaders
have been in power longer
than the majority
of the populations has been alive,
we are in desperate need of something new,
something that works.
And I think that thing
is social Pan-Africanism.
My dream is that young Africans
stop allowing borders and circumstance
to suffocate our innovation.
My dream is that when a young African
comes up with something brilliant,
they don’t say, “Well,
this wouldn’t work in my country,”
and then give up.
My dream is that young Africans
begin to realize
that the entire continent
is our canvas, is our home.
Using the Internet,
we can begin to think collaboratively,
we can begin to innovate together.
In Africa, we say,
“If you want to go fast, you go alone,
but if you want to go far,
you go together.”
And I believe that social Pan-Africanism
is how we can go far together.
And this is already happening.
Access to these online networks
has given young Africans
something we’ve always
had to violently take: a voice.
We now have a platform.
Before now, if you wanted
to hear from the youth in Africa,
you waited for the 65-year-old
minister of youth –
(Laughter)
to wake up in the morning,
take his heartburn medication
and then tell you the plans
he has for your generation
in 20 years time.
Before now, if you wanted to be heard
by your possibly tyrannical government,
you were pushed to protest,
suffer the consequences
and have your fingers crossed
that some Western paper somewhere
might make someone care.
But now we have opportunities
to back each other up
in ways we never could before.
We support South African students
who are marching against
ridiculously high tertiary fees.
We support Zimbabwean women
who are marching to parliament.
We support Angolan journalists
who are being illegally detained.
For the first time ever,
African pain and African aspiration
has the ability to be witnessed
by those who can empathize
with it the most:
other Africans.
I believe that with
a social Pan-Africanist thinking
and using the Internet as a tool,
we can begin to rescue each other,
and ultimately, to rescue ourselves.
Thank you.
(Applause)