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WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Africa’s governments already treat the internet as protest infrastructure. Its courts have not caught up
Filed 55m ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk
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Banjos Unite
Alexander Nakarada · creatorchords.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Diplomatic Security Service from Washington, D.C., United St · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
A long-running monthly survey of African tech and media law finds more than 70 government-ordered network restrictions a year across 32 countries since 2014, a count independently matched by the Access Now KeepItOn coalition.
Angola's July 2025 shutdown, triggered by fuel-price protests rather than an election or war, left at least 22 dead by official count and 30 by civil society tallies, with more than 1,500 arrested.
The piece argues shutdowns get litigated as free-expression problems when they are really assembly problems: cutting a network does not silence an opinion, it stops a crowd from forming. African Charter protections on assembly carry weaker legal teeth than those on expression, a gap the analysis says states are exploiting.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A government that wants to stop one person talking writes a law and names a defendant. A government that wants to stop a whole street from gathering just flips a switch, no names needed, no trial required. The second trick is cheaper and so far the courts have let it slide, which is its own kind of answer about who the rules are really built to protect.
