Dissent Made Safer

摘要

"Sokwanele" means "enough is enough" in a certain Bantu dialect. It is also the name of a Zimbabwean pro-democracy website whose bloggers last year published accounts of atrocities by Robert Mugabe's regime and posted Election Day updates describing voter intimidation and apparent ballot stuffing. You can visit Sokwanele's "terror album" and see photographs: of a hospitalized 70-year-old woman who'd been beaten and thrown on her cooking fire (she later died, the site says); of firebombed homes; of people with deep wounds carved into their backs. You can find detailed, frequenuy updated maps describing regional violence and other incidents. You will be confronted with gruesome news, starkly captioned: "Joshua Bakacheza's Body Found."rnBecause this horrific content is so readily available, it is easy to overlook the courage it took to produce it. The anonymous photographers and polling-station bloggers who uploaded the Sokwanele material remain very much in danger. In a place like Zimbabwe, where saying the wrong thing can get you killed or thrown in prison on treason charges, you take precautions:you're careful about whom you talk to; you're discreet when you enter a clinic to take pictures. And when you get to the point of putting your information on the Internet, you need protection from the possibility that your computer's digital address will be traced back to you. Maybe, at that point, you use Tor.