Africa Is a Country

Outsourcing Protest

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Outsourcing Protest

By
Sean Jacobs

You fill out a form on a Dutch NGO's website and it "gets a bunch of Africans to protest for you." It is not a joke.

A still from one of ActieLab's outsourced "protests"

This is either a bad joke, a brilliant art project or another Dutch viral campaign. A group called Actie Lab (translated: Action Lab), based in Amsterdam, has found a way for Europeans to “help” Africans by outsourcing protests to Malawi and South Africa. Basically you don’t have to do protesting anymore. You just fill out a form on Actie Lab’s website and Actielab “gets a bunch of Africans to protest for you.” They also do birthday greetings.

In this video, which prompted this post, a group of Africans do an on-demand protest around the Chinese government’s imprisonment of artist Ai Wei Wei. (He is now under house arrest.)

Since they started the “service” in May this year, Actie Lab claims to have had more than a few clients.

Not everyone thinks its a joke. For example, What’s Up Africa!, thinks it’s real and skewers it in the latest episode of the weekly Youtube broadcast.

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From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans—one from the south, the other from the north—set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?