/ 11 March 2011

The pop culture revolution

It's not just social networks that are helping to take down regimes in North Africa, it's also a youth fuelled by popular culture and ad slogans.

With a steady diet of advertising taglines, popular culture and stock phrases, the youth in North Africa and the Middle East have digested what they’ve learned and are now employing the slogans in an attempt to take down the status quo in real time.

Impossible is nothing
Decades ago, boxer Muhammad Ali said in his witty style: “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men — Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion — Impossible is nothing.” It was a line later adopted by sports equipment giant, Adidas, and was especially apt when Greece, the team they clothe, won the Euro 2004, the only football trophy it has ever won.

Likewise, the toppling of the authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia fits into the “impossible is nothing” mantra. The fall of the two autocrats surprised even the most astute watchers of the regimes. The police state of Tunisia was the first to fall and erudite analysts rushed to explain that “Egypt is not Tunisia”. Another went on al-Jazeera to state confidently: “Egyptians are not a revolutionary nation.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Just do it
Youths on the Arab streets have surely seen the Nike advert with the simple exhortation, Just Do It. And so they just did it. They congregated in Tahrir Square and declared that they were not leaving until Mubarak walked, and certainly not the kind of walking Johnnie Walker advocates in its advertising campaigns. As it turns out, walking dictators out of town might be easy, so easy you curse yourself for not doing it all along. But the actual governing may be a tad complicated.

Yes we can
It is the catch phrase on which Barack Obama, the United States’s first “black president”, based his campaign for the White House. The “Yes We Can” slogan (also the title of a Fela Kuti album) seems to have found faithful adherents among Libya’s youth and defected soldiers who, using guns, anti-aircraft missiles and whatever weapons they looted from state armouries, are echoing Malcolm X’s maxim “by any means necessary”.

Indeed, they aren’t buying into Gaddafi’s notion of jamahiriya (literally translated as “the state of the masses”), a nebulous concept in which Gaddafi seeks to immerse himself in the Libyan populace. To clear the confusion once and for all — Libyans are now in an armed rebellion. And Gaddafi, who deposed King Idris when he was in his late 20s, might prove that the old-school dictator regime has a lot more ­stamina than the instant gratification ­generation.

The revolution will be tweeted
In the 1970s Gil Scott-Heron achieved fame with a protest song, the lyrics of which, “the revolution will not be televised”, have become part of our global vocabulary. When Scott-Heron wrote those words he actually meant people can’t sit on their couches watching TV at home and expect the revolution to happen. Technology, though, has sprinted ahead and the medium has become more important than the message.

One internet analyst asked whether Tunisia was the first Twitter revolution, while others still speculate whether Tunisia is the world’s first Facebook revolution. The truth nestles somewhere between these two extremes: Twitter and Facebook were important in mobilising the disaffected youth but the conditions for a revolution were already there.

The revolution will be televised
Today’s revolutions are executed in front of the camera, held by both revolutionaries and news professionals. When the technologically savvy revolutionaries aren’t uploading videos to YouTube and other social networking sites they try to rush the revolution before the global networks tire and head off to the next trouble­spot — a lesson for Ivorian Alassane Ouattara, whose claim to the presidency has been eclipsed by the upheavals in North Africa.

After all, the first shots in the Zimbabwean revolution were fired in 1966 and independence arrived only in 1980, a decade-and-half later. In the 1960s Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith declared that there wouldn’t be majority rule in his lifetime, “not even in a thousand years”.

The Tunisian revolution was achieved in 28 days. The Egyptian revolution began on January 25 and on February 11 Mubarak was forced from office. One hopes today’s dictators are not repeating the primal mistake of a life presidency because today’s youth measure time differently. Once it took us years to remove a government, now it takes us days.