Nawaal Deane
On Friday morning Robert Mugabe bashers will have the rare opportunity to squirt diesel in his face or throw darts at him.
All they will have to do is tune into a new youth website, www.gal.co.za, where Mugabe’s face will be bouncing around on screen. The player who scores the most hits in 120 seconds will set him on fire at the end of the game.
Get a Life-gal (the website) is a student initiative in which more than one million students from 30 universities and technikons are linked to each other online. It is a site which highlights the way the Internet can be used as a platform for New Age protests.
The “Mugabe campaign” will be launched on Friday, complete with an online petition, which can be signed by Internet surfers.
The online petition will take place in real time and, according to John Kuhn, the site’s founder, it will voice “the revulsion students and South Africans feel at the developing crisis in Zimbabwe”.
There will be funny and serious articles on the Zimbabwean crisis – and even Mugabe himself has been invited to log on to the site and participate. The results of the games and the petition will be e-mailed to Mugabe’s office and to the South African government.
“The apathy seen within students in the late 1990s is changing to a willingness to mobilise awareness of important issues,” says Kuhn.
“We are creating an accessible platform at www.gal.co.za where students whose opinions have been marginalised in the past are now able to express what they feel.”
The website is planning more adventurous games involving famous personalities and leaders, providing the opportunity for students to take protest to the virtual world.