AfricaIs aCountry

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

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.