Highway Africa

By Glorious Sefako (South Africa) and Caroline Njenga (Kenya)

Blogging is supposed to be a free way of expressing one’s opinion without being bogged down by rules and laws. But this is not the case in many African countries.

The discussion on whether blogs should be regulated was one of the agenda points at the Digital Citizen Indaba, underway in

Grahamstown, South Africa.

Rhodes

University’s Journalism department head Guy Berger presented a paper on the ongoing debate on whether blogs should be regulated, citing a case of a South African blogger called “skye”. Under his blog, “SA male prostitutes” he wrote about how he “serviced well-known news editors, television presenters, politicians, sportsmen, singers, actors and more”. As the drama continues, “Skye” named 14 of his so called clients.

The debate is whether this is true, and further that than, whether the privacy of the named individuals had been invaded. “Skye’s” blog led to politician Patrician De Lille, who is also reportedly a blogger, calling for regulation of blogs.

According to Berger, the blogging community reacted strongly to De Lille’s call for the regulation. Calls for regulation included: censorship, registration of bloggers’ true identity. This was received with anger from bloggers.On the other hand, Brenda Burrel, a delegate from Zimbabwe spoke on the challenges facing bloggers in her country. She says bloggers in “oppressive societies tend to censor themselves” before publishing their blogs for fear of prosecution. She urges cyber activists to “drop the anonymous disguise and stand up for who they are”.

Habtamu Dugo  from Ethiopia spoke about how the Ethiopian government is restricting bloggers from communicating and expressing their views . Dugo a student at

Rhodes

University said that “Cyber activism and bloggers have been crushed in the bag and there is strict access to the internet and online media since 2006”.