Internet Aids Free Expression
And Links African Diaspora

The Internet belongs to everyone, and more Black people in Britain and abroad are having their say on everything from "What's happening, brother?" to minority rights protests and guerrilla journalism.

In Britain, BLINK, the Black information link, spreads the word about Black issues in politics and voting. Afro-Caribbean student societies speak to each other from more than thirty university campuses. Servicemen, entrepreneurs and civil servants talk to friends, relatives and colleagues in the Americas. Congo London speaks to Africa, and The New Advocate journal sponsored by Zulu publications talks to Black Britain and the Black World.

Creativity
The Internet is put to use in ever-widening and creative ways in many parts of the globe, information technology expert Adam C. Powell told journalists and web publishers at a conference in London early this year. In America, Black men in prison plead their cause for justice using lap top computers connected to the Internet. In Africa reporters become guerrilla journalists on the Internet. Babafemi Ojudo, a banned journalist, created a mobile newsroom with his laptop, moving from one hiding place to another and filing stories to the Internet after the printed version of his newspaper was suppressed by the country's former regime.

At the vanguard of net-linked Black voices are journalists, community groups, business leaders, political activists, and academics and students. You can add to their number the web sites of development aid and human rights organisations battling poverty and racism.

Alternative views
Black-led web sites in Europe promote respect for diversity and democracy, and are part of popular struggles against human rights abuses. Many groups use the Internet to project alternative views about the laws and social practices that affect black people. They offer a means of directly stating their own views uncensored through the prism of other parties, however well-meaning.

The opportunities for truth-telling are limitless. For the first time, say advocates for social change, "we can monitor and show the problem areas of our communities live on the Internet". Live cameras - probably costing no more than £75 - stationed at the frontlines of institutional racism can expose contested actions by authorities as they happen.

Dynamic expression
The Web sites of the African Diaspora are transmitters of social and cultural values like Africa's griots, Caribbean calypsonians, and Black American blues singers. When in future the far-flung Internet web sites are linked together, many different Black communities will be able to communicate across the Diaspora and with Africa in a seamless dynamic narrative.

Black innovation is boundless. For example, despite no telephones in rebel-held eastern Congo, there is the Internet, according to an Associated Press article. E-mails are sent via short wave radio between Goma and the Uganda capital, Kampala, where it is connected to a standard telephone line, and available to the wide world. The future possibilities for peaceful purposes are immense. Villagers and peasants, and widely dispersed migrants and asylum seekers, can link together across vast distances, and indeed across continents.

Unique quality
The beauty of the Internet is that online communication, unlike any other form of information diffusion, is nearly impossible to contain or restrict. True there are problems. Equipment and access to the Internet cost money. Continued high charges by Internet providers and telephone companies favour corporate business and better off clients. Governments often attempt to cripple free expression in many African and Caribbean countries.

Nevertheless, whatever restrictions and barriers are erected, ultimately there is no way to stop web information transmission by you or reaching you - whether you live in Brixton or Harlem, in the sprawling suburbs of Lagos, in the shanty towns of Luanda and Sao Paulo, or the yards of Kingston. According to experts like Adam Powell, it is unlikely there will ever be a successful attempt to censor Internet communication. All you need is a PC, a web browser with a printer - backed-up with a scanner and plenty of photo-copiers.

See new web sites reporting diversity, free expression and human rights in Expand Your Universe archive.