CHANGE IS YELLING. ARE YOU LISTENING?
support and action. Her existing blog account www.akmosaic.blogspot. com became the space where she started putting her thoughts together. “It was January 23rd of the year 2000, 6 months after the passing of my beloved mother. I was 15 and in standard 7 (9th grade) of high school…. About halfway through the drink, I wasn’t feelinh good at all, dizzy and nauseous… so I excused myself and went inside the house to the bathroom…R led me inside and suddenly the door shuts with a bang and he was in there with me…the room was spinning, my heart was hammering at my chest and my legs were about to give in when I was jolted into shock, as he reached under my skirt and frantically tugged at my underwear… ‘No’ wasn’t getting me anywhere…I said it again…He pushed me to the ground in the corner of the bathroom… I was ever so grateful for the pain on my back which was helping me not to concentrate on the burning sensation coming form him entering me…minutes passed and he got up, zipped his pants, bent down and kissed me on the forehead…. I went to school the next day and didn’t say anything to anyone about what happened…” Akona’s story became the catalyst for thousands of young women to come and share their own experiences of violence. The hashtag #JulesHighRapeSurvivor got a new life and a larger focus. Her call at the end of her blog post – “‘let’s march, let’s shout, let’s petition, whatever! Let us please do something….” found an instant resonance with her 2,000 followers on Twitter, who immediately retweeted it and started responding to it. A new hashtag #ISaidNo came into currency and inspired people who would otherwise have never associated themselves with such a campaign, into taking action. As one of the followers tweeted, “#ISaidNo is the first time I’m taking initiative. I’ve just grown tired of feeling impotent and decided to use the momentum created by Akona. I managed to get website for the campaign sponsored by a hosting company”. Something had clicked.
Different people had different motives for engaging with this movement. While it is impossible to trace all of these motivations, what is significant to note is that people were moved, not just emotionally but also into action. People who only had opinions and light discussions to offer around what happened to somebody else, started forming stronger bonds by looking at how it can or it has happened to them. An entire community started conferencing with Akona about how to bring about change. She received countless messages of advice and people offering help. A voluntary task force made out of people who only knew each other on Twitter, including well-known South Africa media professionals and personalities emerged. Celebrity Twitter handles championed her cause and helped spread the word around, mobilising large numbers of people to disseminate the information. On the 19th November 2010 they hosted an #ISaidNo Twitterthon (60 hours of non-stop tweeting against sexual violence), calling out for sponsors. 1440 Twitpic poster views later, the steady-growing campaign has a theme-song called #Powa that a well-known South African poet-emcee, Tumi Molekane recorded and performed in a live music TV show - on South Africa’s leading channel. The song is available on a few websites for free downloading. The campaign has received the attention of traditional media. Word spreads. The signal lives. The story continues to find new supporters. For me, this is the power of digital storytelling. It can lead to physical action, but the physical action is sometimes secondary. What is important is that the stories we tell in our Twitter and Facebook timelines, are stories that produce a change at the level of the individual and the personal. Not everybody will eventually join the campaign and demand for better policies. Not everybody will engage with the physical processes of demonstration, protesting and negotiating with the law. However, in this one instance of storytelling, the entire country was listening, reading, downloading, scanning, and sharing the same story over and over again. Something in their heads had change. They saw themselves as not mere spectators to an event but as
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