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You say you want a revolution? If you’re carrying around pictures of the Pirates, nice

Thursday July 20 2017
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Demonstrators are doused with water cannon by police during riots on July 8, 2017 in Hamburg, northern Germany, after the leaders of the world's top economies gathered for a G20 summit. PHOTO | AFP

By ELSIE EYAKUZE

So, about that elusive revolution. I thought that in the African experience, the nation-building projects of the immediate post-colonial era would provide all the political clarity we need for several generations to come. Now I am not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong: The intentions remain good and hooray for us but there is something squiffy going on that may not be just a localised “African” problem. We are reducing poverty... for some... by the safe metrics of GDP growth and suchlike. Things that can be pointed at as evidence of progress are increasing: Trains, planes, automobiles, factories, roads, telecommunications sales figures.

But. Did you see the recent footage of a crowd of hundreds overwhelming a goldmine in North Mara, claiming their right to benefit from the mineral wealth of their country? Deja vu.

We’ve been here before, certainly in North Mara repeatedly and other mines, in the south of the country around oil and gas... and then there are the mobs of young people who get “mobilised” around election time, or who riot over the slightest increase in the price of basic goods, having come to the cities to pursue dreams of prosperity.

Furthermore, at the core is there a difference really between a Tanzanian in North Mara chanting songs of economic nationalism telling the foreign investors to go flip themselves and an American chanting “Build the wall” to keep them Mexicans and them Chinese and other foreign criminal types away from their God-given jobs and their womenfolk?

Or angry native European men frightened out of their wits about the browning of their continent, joining right-wing movements that reassure them their fatherlands are still theirs to dominate?

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If America is experiencing its first gerontocratic, nepotistic, foreign-policy-disaster of a president – their own Mugabe, if you will – we can honestly say that We Are The World has come true: Just not in the way we hoped it would. And all of this happening at a time when the world has never been richer or more capable.

That is why it is imperative to worry and maybe even act on these complex issues locally – but with an eye to the global. How does one develop politics for this brave new world we are venturing into? Especially as it is becoming apparent that we can’t rely on the philosophies from the 19th and 20th centuries to handle contemporary problems?

There are some “fringe” movements that are starting to gain traction here and there that are exploring new iterations of freedom in an increasingly controlled and controlling world.

You know the sinister cyber-bullying that I was ranting about the other day: Those forwards about how the Government Is Watching You? Well, that’s a universal concern. The last frontier of anarchy – the Internet and its spawn social media – is being colonised. So imagine my delight when I came across the Pirate Party of Iceland, which made a reasonable presentation at their last elections.

This loose collection of somewhat anarchic types who just want the Internet to stay free, and people as well, are engaged in cheerful dissent. They are not up to much more than that since, being Pirates, apparently coming up with anything more of a platform flies in the face of their basic, and perhaps quite healthy, laziness.

When we’re talking about politics here, we rarely bring up dissent as a service to democracy, yet where does one start reorganising if you don’t come from a place of visceral dissatisfaction?

I want to raise this because it may be that the Pirates and other movements to pacifically disengage from politics and business-as-usual provide a credible if underdeveloped alternative to what’s available now. I forgot to mention: Direct democracy is a major component of this venture into the unknown. No more excessive reliance on over-concentrated power.

This approach can’t conceivably keep people from rioting in Tanzanian mines or yelling racial slurs at immigrant and naturalised citizens in the northern hemisphere, but if we’re here, then clearly retreating to the familiar won’t do the trick either – and hasn’t for the past half century or so.

It turns out that the revolution really is going to have to be a mental one to begin with, grounded in the embrace of dissatisfaction as a great jump-off point for positive thinking and definite anti-conservative change. Oh, that and of course freedom to say “Aaaaaaargh, Matey!”

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]

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