The Arab world is not yet done with the Arab Spring. While the Egyptians and Yemenians have refused to give no quarter to their respective military dictators, the people of Bahrain whom I thought chickened out are showing us that they have only made a tactical retreat. Once again, they came back to haunt the anachronistic medieval kingdoms in the entire region. The courageous rebellion of Syrians which is continually exposing the brutal nature of the Assad family as well as the usual double standard of the “international community” that always fails to react uniformly against human rights violations, is another historical phenomenon that I feel lucky to witness in my lifetime.

Syria's anti Assad demonstration

Since I felt that witnessing the making of history but not recording it is a shame, I also became a chronicler of these events in my own way.Thus, I churned out a series of missives such as the one titled “The Maghreb Revolution; is it also an indictment against globalization?” In doing so, however, I had no idea that an opportunity might come to take me to the place where all these earth-shaking revos started by rattling the Arab establishment which has been so smug for so long.
Yet, that’s what happened a couple of weeks ago, thanks to the African Media Initiative/AMI/which invited me to attend the 4th African Media Leaders Forum/AMLF/ in Tunis. So I considered the prospect of going to Tunis which at one point in the infectious revolution was portrayed as The Arab Gdansk as a boost to my luck whereby I was accorded an opportunity to be a tourist of revolutionary sites. What’s more, as the theme picked by AMLF was “Empowering citizens through social media and technology adaptation,” I concluded that I was travelling to a pilgrimage.

PM Zenawi and President Museveni

As I am a denizen of the Horn of Africa, namely Ethiopia who got the “good fortune” of migrating to the Great Lakes Region, namely Uganda, the first thing that struck me in Tunis, was the disparity of living standards between the people of these various African countries. Although,Tunisians have had their own level of desperation that led to the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouaziz, one can see the gap from the highly advanced infrastructure and the healthy skin color he sees everywhere on the citizenry without referring to statistics, data or indexes to tell about better conditions in Tunis compared to that of the lot in Kampala or Addis. Of course, unlike Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda whose road conditions have become so lamentable to even discuss about the existence of any road, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia has been quite busy constructing roads and fly-over which one astute commentator described as roads that take you nowhere. This same commentator known for his satirical column was forced to flee recently after writing “Road is shining while we’re dying of a soaring cost of living.”

Yet, despite this disparity of living standards that put Ethiopians and Ugandans in abject poverty compared to Tunisians, they revolted and overturned the old order in their country ahead of us. In other words, there have always been plenty of causes to drive the people of Uganda and Ethiopia to rebel against their respective establishment than the Tunisians. So whenever I am puzzled by the dynamics that make society tick in a different way, my mind tends to ascribe what Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote about people in servitude to our condition. He said “Slaves, in their bondage lose everything, even the desire to be free. They love their servitude even as the companions of Ulysses loved their life as brutes.”

On the other hand, when I recall the fearlessness and determination of Ugandans who participated in the Walk to Work/W2W/ and similar other actions of civil disobedience that followed it, I remind myself that it took Tunisians too some 27 years to overthrow Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Concerning my fellow countrymen, the defiance of Ethiopians in the face of lethal forces unleashed by the direct order of Meles Zenawi that gunned down over 200 unarmed protesters in 2005 is still vivid in my memory. Brutal dictators such as Zenawi may delude themselves that they would crush the spirit of the people through a bloody massacre of civilians. Quite the contrary, it’s creating more and more dissidents and peaceful protesters who are unafraid to die for the cause they believe in while shunning all forms of violence unlike our dictators who went to the bush and killed thousands in the name of “liberation and revolution” only to become the worst kind of despot. It’s these types of militants who embraced Satyagraha without any fuss that sends shivers down the spine of our rulers from Cairo via Addis to Kampala. People are simply tired of being ruled without their consent. They are no longer willing to cooperate to a ruler who hasn’t sought their counsel and consent. Rather than continue to live under this form of indignity, they prefer to die honorably for which they began to draw inspiration from Mohammed Bouaziz, the hitherto faceless Tunisian who galvanized the Arab Spring by setting himself on fire.

While I was beset by the decision of a young Ethiopian teacher who killed himself Bouaziz style in order to rouse Ethiopians out of their fear and kick them into action; and while I was disappointed that his martyrdom did not bear any fruit right away like in Tunisia, I took it as a good omen that Yenesew Gebre’s martyrdom which is listed as a political self-immolation by Wikipedia dovetailed with my sojourn in Tunis.Yenesew set himself on fire on November 11 which was the last day of the African Media Leaders Forum in Tunis. Also to balance my sense of history, I always marshal the immortal words of Trotsky whereby he said “Insurrection is a machine that makes no noise.” The number of people who prefer to die honorably rather than suffer indignities under repressive systems like Mohammed Bouziz, Yenesew Gebre; and the number of heroes like the Chinese young man at Tiananmen Square who defiantly faced a tank are rising in the Sub-Saharan Africa to explode in a big bang of revolution in its own respective time. That’s my consolation as a denizen of the Sub-Saharan Africa.Meanwhile; I advise our tyrants to better shape up or ship out.

Kiflu Hussain
Email:kiflu.hussain08@gmail.com

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Kiflu Hussain is an Ethiopian Human Rights Defender exiled in Uganda.

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