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.

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.