Saré Knoope
The nationwide student protests in South Africa evoked images of the 2011 Arab uprisings, which have left an impact on the African continent’s social movement landscape. Yet, the so-called “Arab Spring” has not been confined to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as protests have erupted across the African continent south of the Sahara.
The protests in South Africa following a proposed increase in tuition fees, but fuelled by young people’s sense of grievances relating to inequality and social exclusion, differs from the protests in many Arab countries in one important aspect.
While South Africa’s youth are taking the street as a result of high levels of dissatisfaction and disappointment in leadership, they are not fighting an illegal state. Despite significant pitfalls and the need for fundamental transformation, South Africans are dealing with a democratically chosen government, whereas the Arab youth were contesting the legitimacy of the existing state.
While one’s validity does not surpass the other, the political climate that these movements operated under differed substantially.
According to academics Zachariah Mampilly, of Vassar College in New York State, and Adam Branch – senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, who are co-authors of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change– more than 90 popular uprisings in more than 40 African states have taken place in the last decade.
However, to refer to these uprisings as a mere extension of the “Arab Spring” is to oversimplify matters.
The recent political instability in countries like Burundi, Burkina Faso and Nigeria have been depicted as embodiments of a so-called African Spring, instigated and inspired by their Arab neighbours to the north. Despite a superficial resemblance of the turmoil in African countries south of the Sahara to uprisings in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, one should not overlook the complex and particular nature of the winds of change blowing across the African continent.
As Carnegie Endowment vice-president for studies Thomas Carothers and Richard Youngs, a leading analyst of European democracy support, have argued, “major protests have occurred around the world with increasing frequency since the second half of the 2000s”.
“Yet it is, in fact, the heterogeneity of this current wave of protests that is its defining characteristic.”
Protests resemble and inspire each other; the last decade has been characterised by youth movements using the same means, notably social media, and language to bring about substantive and durable political transformation. However, their unique dimensions need to be highlighted and recognised in order to gain a deep understanding of the unfolding events.
Unlike in most of the Arab countries, the calls for change in many African countries build on decades of democratic institution building. While 2011 marks an important turning point in the history of the MENA region, sub-Saharan Africa begun its long walk on the democratic path long before, with civil uprisings in Sudan overthrowing military dictatorships twice, first in 1964 and again in 1985, and South Africa having its first all-race democratic election in 1994, following sustained nationwide protests.
Where Arab protesters sought the instalment of democratic institutions, many Africans have taken the street to strengthen and deepen their flawed, existing governance institutions. Accordingly, the recent unrests on the African continent represent a renewed but familiar call for democratisation, possibly triggered but not driven by the example set by Middle Eastern countries.
As protesters all across the MENA region demanded the fall of their regime, the calls for change in one place resonated across the region and invoked solidarity in neighbouring countries. However, interestingly enough, this sense of togetherness and unity across the region has been far less pronounced among African countries.
While similar problems exist across the African continent, including high youth unemployment, persistent corruption and limited participation in the decision-making process, this lack of solidarity could be a result of the protests in sub-Sahara Africa being primarily triggered by single-issue, local and country-specific concerns.
The particular colonial pasts, as well as the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, have contributed to the shaping of the current protests, while the ethnic cleavages in Burundi, stemming from Belgian colonial policies fostered by several events that have followed since, impact upon the consolidation of democratic governance.
As a result of the diverse nature of protests all across the continent and the history of democratic institution-building on the African continent, one cannot capture the complexities of the current events in a country by simply referring to it as a successful or failed “Spring”. If not only because the Arab Spring narrative no longer represents a single story, and consequently it cannot be utilised as a template for comparison.
If we do not acknowledge the uniqueness of the protests taking place across continents and cultures, we might actually miss the point. This time around, we cannot allow ourselves to overlook what is happening on the ground.
While highly diverse by nature, the current protests represent a global call for deep and profound change, which needs to be understood in a much more nuanced manner.
l Knoope is an intern in the Justice and Reconciliation in Africa programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town