[Imc-africa] preliminary thoughts about the imc-africa convergence (3)

[terna gyuse]

[3 parts because i lack the patience to wait for moderator approval]

3) process. was. appalling.

i think our consensus process was a disaster. i think a general failure of
imagination, presentation and execution meant that our meetings were all
painful, ineffective and undemocratic - they did not successfully create
space for people to influence decisions, put forward ideas of their own,
whatever.

from my perspective (made extreme perhaps by how much time i was away
working, and/or sick), we never got beyond a kind of "pseudo-community" with
everyone just trying to say and do what was expected. some of the least
attractive things about North American anarchist-ish culture - proposals
thinly masked as questions (as though this disarms the power of the
speaker); every proposal met by counter-proposal before any discussion or
decision; strictly cosmetic efforts to create empowering space for the
marginal to speak.

it felt like a vaccination against consensus decision-making: expose people
to a weak (and irritating) variant to ensure they don't catch it in the
future.


from start to finish, the convergence lived in a situation of crisis -
broadband internet crisis, visa crisis, space at the stadium crisis, how
many t-shirts for the printing press crisis, armed robbery at the station
crisis, money for the Ugandan delegates crisis, it'slatecan'twejustgotosleep
crisis. crisis is an environment in which experts and bureaucrats flourish
their capabilities, and a particular kind of emergency community thrives
while democracy is postponed, an emergency community in which those who
typically have more power - due to race, class, a command of imperial
languages - consolidate that power.

crisis is so very common in Africa.

and it's no surprise that the convergence's decision-making was dominated by
our very own technocrats - facilitating, proposing, discussing, executing.
and it's not surprise that this technocracy was white. (i think we could all
have worked harder to avoid this - i know that i personally did very little
in this respect, trapped between having to leave the space to do my job1,
with being ill, but mostly by being unwilling/unable to ask some people to
be quiet more and so create space for other people to talk more. i left
feeling i had neither asserted myself fully, nor helped create space for
less-privileged people to do so.)

this too is so very common in Africa.


look: the "African crisis" is a permanent one - violent crime, problems with
infrastructure, bureaucratic bungling, unequal knowledge bases, bad
communications: short time and long dreams - none of this is exceptional in
Kenya, Uganda, Mali, Nigeria, Zimbabwe or even sub-imperial South Africa.

our managerial class repeatedly (though less and less as the days wore on)
said they didn't want to dominate, or to run things, but proceeded to talk
more than anyone, to push their agendas forward. short time, long dreams:
Africa's waiting - why not? and who could fault these agendas? transmitters,
radio stations, audio processing, interviews at the WSF, trips to the slums.

our horizontal structure consultant, CT, initially responded to the crisis
by taking a permanent facilitation role. frustrating for everyone involved,
and subsequently relinquished.



in some ways, this only mirrored the way in which discussions took place
prior to the convergence itself - that conversation privileged those with
ready access to English, those with technical knowledge, etc.

online in the months leading up to this, we were driven forward so urgently
that we could rarely wait to hear from the people in Kenya (who for their
part often seemed unable or unwilling to respond to questions, much less
make suggestions of their own) - and ultimately we were surprised and
dismayed by the realities on the ground (internet and the website, location,
visas, imc-kenya's participation).

the discussion about the future of kenya.indymedia.org continues in the same
spirit.



___ ___ ___


i don't write to point fingers - though i will certainly be avoiding some
people in the future.

i suggest that the future of kenya.indymedia.org is for imc-kenya to decide,
and then work towards asking for help as and when they choose to. if we're
desperate to publish indymedia reports of the WSF, we each have any number
of indymedia websites to publish on.

i suggest to fellow independent media activists in Africa that we organise
direct exchanges in 2007 and 2008, to follow some of the issues and
questions that were not taken up at this convergence.

i am interested in organising a round of visits that would see 1 or 2 people
from each of Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa visit one of
the other countries, carrying examples and stories of our respective media
work, working together for a week or so on local projects. we are thinking
about setting up an occasional regional newsletter in Southern Africa.

imc-ct thanks the convergence process and Prometheus for our unfinished
1-watt transmitter. at our training meeting 2 weeks from now, we'll be
finishing it off and - with a little research - figuring out how to test it
and build an antenna. we have lots of ideas as to how to use it.

i also thank John Bwakali for all the work and running around that he did to
make the convergence possible. my criticisms don't take away from my
appreciation of your effort - i hope we will work together closely in the
next couple of years.




___ ___ ___


as a postscript - it strikes me that the global indymedia collective is in
some fundamental way broken, when gaining access to the kenya indymedia site
presents as many problems as it has so far, when the open-publishing
software itself is an obstacle - i wonder if the present indymedia model and
infrastructure is not at the end of its useful life. i'm somewhat
indifferent to the answer - indymedia websites are not a particularly
important part of independent media practice Africa, and if/when they become
more important, i think it will be based on more easily accessible and
understood underlying software and organisation.i
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