The Youth-Led Protests that Continue to Reverberate Across Africa

“If it wasn't for Facebook, the revolution may not have had that big of an effect on the regime. People were seeing things there and organizing there, and then meeting on the streets,” Khaled Ghrairi, a Tunisian activist who advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, and anti-racism, tells OkayAfrica.

On December 17, 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated after being harassed by the police. Going viral, his desperate act ignited a protest movement amongst Tunisians who had been suffering from unemployment, inflation, and lack of political freedoms under longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Over 28 days of civil resistance, they ousted Ben Ali and began turning Tunisia into a democracy.

Cyberactivism, however, preceded the revolution. “The regime at the time did not give attention to the internet, because its main tool of propaganda was through TV and the media,” says Ghrairi. “In 2002, we had our first ‘martyr of social media’ Zouhair Yahyaoui.” Exposing the regime’s wrongdoings online, he was imprisoned and died as a result of torture and hunger strikes. A wave of online activism on YouTube and Twitter was met with censorship, which Tunisians referred to as “Ammar 404,” named after the message that would show up by the time the regime had blocked most websites. However, VPNs continued giving people access and when the protests erupted, the regime had no way of censoring the flood of content on Facebook and YouTube.

On January 25, 2011, the spirit of change took hold in Egypt where thousands of protesters marched against President Hosni Mubarak. “We were watching what was unfolding. The unique ability to engage was facilitated by Facebook and Twitter (now known as X),” remembers Ayat Mneina, a Libyan Canadian who researches women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa. Between Tunisia and Egypt, a group of diasporans around Mneina anticipated revolts in Libya. “We launched a digital platform called Chabab Libya, the Libyan youth movement, to monitor what was happening and let the world know,” she says. “We had seen how Egypt had Tahrir Square [and] a 24-hour live news feed that people could watch on TV.”

On February 15, 2011, Benghazi rose up against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. While Ben Ali and Mubarak resigned — after fighting the will of the people with lethal force — Gaddafi plunged his country into civil war before being killed by rebels. Chabab Libya collected eyewitness reports on the ground, translated them and reported them to the world, tweeting international news organizations to get their attention. “These kinds of information informed the UN Security Council resolutions that ended up leading to a no fly zone, and all of the things that took place, for better or for worse,” says Mneina. These strategies, which included raising funds for the injured or continuing to report through internet blackouts, would later be adopted by Sudanese revolutionaries in 2019, and OkayAfrica continued to follow the impact.

As networks connected the people on the ground with the diaspora, individuals identified their role in the movements. Hashtags became a tool for crowd-sourcing information, adding onto an archive that was growing in real time, and spilling democratic demands across borders. “During uprisings you don't really know what to expect or how to plan, so you have to keep responding to what's happening in a constant effort,” says Mneina. “That's the advantage of social media: it’s constantly changing.”

Multimedia journalist Abisola Alawode remembers the Arab Spring being discussed in Nigeria. “Strong men like Mubarak and Gadaffi were being toppled not by military force, but by the sheer will of the people,” he says. “It was shocking at first and it later became inspiring.” The Arab revolts ushered in an era of youth-led digital activism driving change across the continent, with #FeesMustFalltaking over South Africa in 2015 and #EndSARS protesters standing up to police violence in Nigeria in 2020 after years of online protests. “The EndSARS protests started online before becoming a nationwide issue,” says Alawode, echoing Ghrairi. “Thanks to social media platforms like Twitter (now known as X), Facebook, and Instagram, a lot of youths — who were the main drivers of the protests — were able to coordinate activities. I dare say the EndSARS protests happened because of digital activism.”

Most recently, young Kenyans took to the street to protest against the Finance Bill 2024 which would translate into higher taxes in a context of high living costs and a lack of governmental services. Wanjira Wanjiru, one of the demonstrations’ organizers, tells OkayAfrica that digital organizing was key in the success of the protests. It enabled people to translate the Finance Bill into vernacular languages and make it accessible on social media platforms as well as raising financial aid for victims of violence. “During the protests, we saw our brothers in Nigeria, Uganda and Mozambique having uprisings — Nigeria and Uganda had similar posters as us. Our brothers in Bangladesh finished the job and we are inspired by them,” says Wanjiru.

Fourteen years after the Arab Spring, a moment of hope and pain, North Africa has been overwhelmed by counter-revolutions. In Egypt, January has become a month of repression and mourning with military tanks stifling what is left of Cairo’s public spaces. Tahrir Square has been reconstructed into anonymity, its history buried by golden lamps and neat flowerbeds. Libya is still divided between rival governments, while Tunisia, the only country that initially succeeded in building a democracy based on a strong civil society that continued to organize through social media, is slipping back into authoritarianism. “The revolution is in the past now,” says Ghrairi. “Democracy is a lost dream.”

In 2021, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied signed Decree Law 54 which criminalizes online activism under the guise of combating “false information and rumours” on the internet. “The government started using social media as a tool to control the people and spread hate,” says Ghrairi. “People still use it to expose the regime’s lies, but it’s less effective, because social media is not about truth anymore.”

From being a movement of inspiration, the Arab Spring turned into a cautionary tale. When Sudanese took to to the streets to topple their three decade-long dictatorship in December 2018 under the banners of #tasgot_bas (Just fall, that’s all) and #BlueForSudan, Egyptians were anxious to warn them not to make the same mistakes that had ruined their revolution — choosing the wrong leaders, failing to plan for a democratic transition after the president’s removal, and placing too much trust in the military.

There are many lessons to be learned — first and foremost that cybersecurity and sustainable collaborations are a must for any contemporary protest movement. “The revolution failed because of people’s electoral choices and the corruption of our political leaders,” says Ghrairi. “But also because Tunisia was never going to be the only democracy in the region.” Mneina adds, “We’re a lot more similar than we are not. Our concerns are about basic humanity. It’s just a matter of time that our conversations in the region will be had in the rest of the world - do you want to ignore them and end up in the same boat as us, or do you want to address them and build a more equitable world?”