YouTube: spending Africa Day where it is needed

By: Christine Davis – Africa Alliance of YMCAs Volunteer

This year, in celebration of Africa Day, I found myself working doggedly behind a computer to launch the new YouTube space of Africa Alliance of YMCA’s (AAYCA). Which is particularly ironic, since the task we were performing, was to create a webspace for Africans to converge and share, with the full realisation that many Africans won’t be able to access the website in the first place. This represents a larger problem than many realise. A critical problem in fact. Africa is falling far behind in the opportunities presented by information technologies, and attempts by media and communication specialists to keep Africa present in the new virtual world are a drop in the ocean of what is needed to ensure African growth and stability.

At the core of the Africa-ICT debate is the long-held belief that information communication technologies are a necessary luxury – that when food security, health and infrastructure development are priority concerns, high-speed computer and internet technologies seem like a luxury. A luxury, even though African leaders will quickly acknowledge, when it suits them, that ICTs bring improved education, health, political transparency and financial access to the world.

It is a complicated divide that few have found a way to reconcile because of the multitude of social development concerns that seemingly take priority, not the least of which is to maintain political stability and control in regions that experience regular civic conflicts and human rights violations. At a superficial level, the question is always asked: how can it be more important to improve the internet gateway in a country than its hospitals and medical facilities? How do you justify the allocation of resources to developing substantial ICT strategies and infrastructures when the education system still fails to meet a minimum standard? If you do provide the technologies, the question then becomes, what will people DO with the new technologies that will help feed them?

For many social activists, the message, and the right to convey that message is key. It is our single biggest priority when attempting to improve the lives of others and of our society as a whole. All human communication can be crystallised to what is being said and what is being heard. We have become exceptionally good at finding ways to manipulate and control this exchange to suit our own needs. We have turned this exchange into a power-control game that has had massive repercussions for our individual well-being. Ideally, the exchange should be balanced but when one participant in the exchange has more knowledge, they retain more power and control. When one participant in the exchange has more power, and has actively worked to control what is being said by the other, then the communication between the two is controlled not by speaker but by the listener. The speaker is only given that space because those in control have already determined what will be said. This is the ultimate root of a lot of Africa’s problems. In a continent where education, social policy, press freedom and governmental control are often designed to ensure that messages spoken and heard only serve to support the doctrines of the country’s leaders, the information exchanged is essentially the same message. And that message is decided by people who serve their own interests.

On Africa Day, although some might see a lack of action because the AAYMCA were sitting behind computers, we see instead a determined purpose, born out of months of planning and preparation, because of the realisation that the one thing Africa needs right now is a space where messages cannot be controlled, manipulated or subjected to a dominant influence. A space where people, in our case Africa’s youth, are able to meet and provide their own messages while freely listening to those of others. There is learning in this process. There is inspiration and the development of unity and purpose. 

 

Perhaps, this is the real reason the ICT strategies and education are so under-supported in Africa. Not because resources are scarce, but because ICTs offer a tool which cannot easily be controlled. Even press freedom across the continent is fraught with fundamental and critical failures. In some countries, the media expect to be paid by the subjects of their reports for their presence at events, while in others, press freedom is constrained within the borders of government policy. Messages outside of these doctrines need to be bought and paid for as if freedom were a luxury product few should be able to afford. In some, women are not allowed to write, speak or be seen, and issues of gender, sexuality, reproductive health and rights over the body are taboo. In these countries, the internet is a threat and giving citizens access to the internet limits the amount of domination any one organisation or individual can have over them. Importantly it potentially turns the dominated into producers of their own power, and provides them with the knowledge, options and means to reject the controls they have always been subjected to.

This is then the entire purpose of the AAYMCA’s Subject 2 Citizen (S2C) project, the YouTube arm of which we were launching on the day Africa celebrated her African-ness.  On Africa Day, we were determined to create and support one place that we could ensure is free of control. And even for those who cannot access this space, we are determined to ensure their messages are present and shared.

The S2C project intends to simply take youth from positions where they are subject to control, and reposition them as citizens who take responsibility for the direction of their lives. The citizen becomes an agent of change, an agent with the knowledge and power to speak freely, to agitate and demand effective improvements to their community and society from those who dominate and control. The S2C YouTube space then becomes a crucial tool of awareness, education and motivation and is controlled by the youth themselves, by the very people who are learning to speak against the influences and dominations that marginalise them. And it is working. 

In the two days the space has been live and available, we have seen an appreciation for the opportunities it provide that goes beyond our expectations, an awareness of what this will mean, coming from the youth themselves. We stood by our youth on Africa Day and sowed the seeds of a social evolution because change needs to come, it is long overdue and we can no longer stand back and allow control to go unchecked. We find faith that the time of change is now, not because we have determined that it is so, but because we have heard the call from those who whisper afraid but defiant in shadows and who can now speak clearly to a worldwide audience.

As Reginald crabbe, a user of the S2C YouTube space said:
“When the struggle for Africa's freedom from imperialism and colonialism started in the 50's songs were sang to constantly remind the freedom fighters of the course and focus of their efforts. The songs composed by South Africans during Apartheid were ways to communicate with each other about the struggle information and inspiration. This S2C song [YouTube] is the beginning of a legacy that young people in the YMCAs across Africa are today leaving for this and other generations to come. The cry for the renewal of Africa! This is a song of HOPE, FAITH and ACTION of seeing a new Africa, a continent endowed not only with resources but the human and institutional ability to maximise the dream of engaging her new birth through the civic empowerment of her greatest resource - "youth". Lets stand together!”

 

Picture: A screenshot of the music video for the song Subject 2 Citizen, by Chemphe feat. African YMCA Youth which is available on the AAYMCA YouTube page.

 

The AAYMCA YouTube space can be found by visiting: www.youtube.com/user/4rmsubject2citizen

 

---