The revolution in Black Africa won’t be played out in the streets

It all started on December 17, 2010. A young Tunisian college graduate, Mohamed Bouazizi, who couldn’t find a job and was making do selling vegetables on the roadside in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid, doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire in protest after a police officers prevented him from selling vegetables on the streets and confiscated his cart. He was rushed to hospital.

Bouazizi’s suicide set off protests over lack of jobs in the town, which is in one of the poorest regions of the country.

Then, on January 4 this year, Bouazizi died in hospital. Hundreds of students took to the streets that morning in solidarity with the youths of Sidi Bouzid.

Then the protests swept the country. Ten days later, Tunisia’s dictator, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, stood down amid a state of emergency declared following street protests in the capital Tunis and other cities.

By dinnertime on the same January 14, Ben Ali was jobless. He had fled into exile to Saudi Arabia.

A few days after Ben Ali took off into exile, protest noises could be heard in Egypt.

A young man sprinkled himself with fuel in central Cairo, and lit a match. The fire was put out and he was rushed to hospital in critical condition.

In Mauritania, another young man set himself on fire a la Bouazizi as a means of protesting against the government. And in Algeria, four youths also self-immolated.

It seemed the revolution was spreading down to the south of Africa. It didn’t.

Instead, it turned north again and settled in Egypt, where within a week the country’s strongman, President Hosni Mubarak, was desperately resisting pressures for him to go, promising that he will not run for office again in September and seeking to bribe protestors off the streets with half-hearted concessions.

Instead of moving south, the tremors from the “Revolt on the Nile,” as the TV channel Al Jazeera called it, were instead felt far away from Africa in the Middle East.

In Jordan, a nervous King Abdullah rushed to sack his government and appoint a new one, which he tasked to improve economic conditions.

A little closer, but still out of Africa, in Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in power as long as Egypt’s Mubarak, sought to appease thousands of protestors, who were expressing solidarity with the Egyptians, by announcing that he would not run in 2013, and urged the government to take measures against unemployment and ordered that social security coverage be extended.

So should we hope that the revolution will spread to sub-Saharan Africa? The answer is “Yes’ and “No.”

The protests are mainly against high youth unemployment, tough economic conditions, corruption, and general repression.