HomeOld_PostsProtests don’t have to be violent

Protests don’t have to be violent

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SIMILAR to the discourse surrounding ‘prophets’ in Zimbabwe, which has seen even those of us in the Diaspora being caught up in the euphoria, protests have various levels of ‘anointing’.
Among the women folk, nuances are that prophets’ anointing differs and some have greater powers than others.
I digress, my subject is on the recent protests that rocked Zimbabwe, and how they are being played out as the much awaited ‘Zimbabwean Spring’.
Violent protests have become the in-thing for the developing world.
If a protest is not violent, then it’s not ‘effective’ in sending the message to the establishment.
Looking at past protests in Egypt, Tunisia and South Africa, the continent continues to reinforce the notion that Africans are a violent and uneducated lot.
Protests are not the preserve of Africans, this wave of protests came out of European countries and the US.
The Occupy Wall Street Movement, which once made headlines did not resort to burning vehicle tyres, looting shops and assaulting police officers.
I am not saying protests in the West, especially in US, are always peaceful.
In November 1999, Seattle was set to host the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference.
World governments were to descend upon the city to meet and discuss various trading rules.
Negotiations were quickly overshadowed by street protests that were part of the anti-globalisation movement.
Protestors in tens of thousands prevented delegates from attending the global trade talks by forming a human chain around the Seattle convention centre and shutting down the city’s centre.
Police in riot gear responded to the mostly peaceful protests by shooting rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. 
The jury is still out on how the events of August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, will go down in history.
While the rioting has died down, protests continue under the banner of #Black Lives Matter.
History shows that Western protests have always been peaceful and symbolic in their nature, unlike ours where we loot stores, kill helpless puppies and destroy properties.
As one of the four mounted heralds of the Suffrage Parade on March 3 1913, lawyer Inez Milholl and Boissevain led a procession of more than 5 000 marchers down Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association raised more than US$14 000 to fund the event that became one of the most important moments in the struggle to grant women the right to vote – a right that was finally achieved seven years later.
As a nascent union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), formed in 1935, had a lot to fight for.
During the Depression, General Motors executives started shifting workloads to plants with non-union members, crippling the UAW.
So in December 1936, workers held a sit-in at the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan.
Within two weeks, about 135 000 men were striking in 35 cities across the nation.
Although the sit-ins were followed by riots, the images of bands playing on assembly lines and men sleeping near shuttered machines recall the serene strength behind the movement that solidified one of North America’s largest unions.
Even though African-Americans constituted some 70 percent of total bus ridership in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks still had trouble keeping her seat on December 1 1955.
It was against the law for her to refuse to give up her seat to a white man and her subsequent arrest incited the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
One year later, the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision that made segregated seating unconstitutional.
Parks was known thereafter as the ‘mother of the civil-rights movement’.
More than 200 000 people gathered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 1963 to demand equal rights for African-Americans.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and roused a nation to action.
From an anti-war demonstration in front of the Pentagon on October 21 1967, organised by the National Mobilisation Committee to End the War in Vietnam, came images that encapsulate a decade of flower power.
Not even the National Guard was a match for mellow hippies looking to push change with nothing more deadly than a few petals.
Beatles legend John Lennon married his second wife Yoko Ono on March 20 1969.
Five days later, in lieu of a traditional honeymoon, the couple holed up in the bed of the Amsterdam Hilton’s presidential suite, welcoming media for a week straight to display their deep opposition to the Vietnam War.
They followed up a couple of months later with another bed-in at a Montreal hotel, where Lennon and a group of supporters recorded the song ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
Candlelight vigils, sing-along, sit-in and petitions are some of the protest tactics by American students and others.
At the end of the day, they all go home and no one has to file insurance claims for damages or be taken to the emergency room, while others will obviously go to jail for some minor charges that include civil disobedience.
With the advent of social media, protestors now do not even need to take it to the streets, all they do is push their hash tags (#) or petitions and influence the decision makers.
That’s Western protests for you.

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