A surprising number of people I meet in Swaziland and who are readers of this blog site (Swazi Media Commentary) are puzzled about how you put a blog together.
There seems to be a misunderstanding that it is a difficult thing to do. It isn’t. Swazis are a bit surprised when I tell them you don’t need anyone’s permission either. You just find a computer with an Internet connection and away you go.
A ‘blog’ or more correctly a ‘web-log’ is in the simplest terms a website that is created by an individual person so that he or she may put on the Internet their thoughts on any subject they wish. You are reading this on a blog called Swaziland Media Commentary.
I think this seems like some kind of miracle to some Swazis because they are so used to living in a society where information is not free. Most of the media are state controlled to some extent or another. And the supposedly ‘independent’ media are as supportive of the king – and therefore the status quo in Swaziland – as any of the ‘controlled’ media. Add to this the fact that ‘traditionalists’ and ‘elders’ don’t like Swazis to have opinions, so the idea of just writing or saying anything they feel like is totally alien to them.
I have been trying to encourage people in Swaziland to have a go and create their own blogs (at the end of this post I’ll give you some links where you can set up one of your own). People in Swaziland face some problems when it comes to setting up a blog, but these are mostly technical and to do with the small number of computers available and the poor Internet connections in the kingdom.
But if you are reading this and you are in Swaziland I have to assume you have some access to the technology.
I was interested to see who in Swaziland already has a blog and what bloggers were saying about Swaziland, so I did what we could term ‘observational’ research. That is to say I went and had a look at what was around on the Internet over the period of one week.
This is a piece of ‘qualitative’ research – that is I am interested more what people are writing about rather than a ‘quantitative’ piece of research which is also interested in how much is being posted.
To make the search I used the Google specialist blog search engine (click here). This is a separate search engine from the general Google search (click here) that most people who have any experience of surfing the Internet know. I first searched the word ‘Swaziland’ and then I searched the word ‘Swazi’.
(Incidentally, for people new to the world of blogging, another excellent blog search engine is Technorati which can be accessed by clicking here.)
In my research I could not find a single site that was written by someone who was obviously a Swazi. The sites I did find were from people blogging about Swaziland who either don’t live in Swaziland or at the very least were ex-pats living and working in Swaziland.
Most of the blogsites were written either by travellers (i.e. people on their way to Swaziland or presently here but just passing through) or ‘missionaries’ or other church workers who were in Swaziland working on some kind of project they considered to be ‘humanitarian.’
Among the church related blogsites I found were Morning Coffee which was writing about AIDS orphans, and Ben Rodgers writing about Children’s Cup Swaziland and the 22 women of women who just turned up and decided to ‘accept Christ as their personal Saviour’.
None of the travellers’ sites is of any great interest, but If you want to read about train delays in Dar click here. Or for the latest from the Out of Africa shop at Jo’burg airport click here.
Apart from travel and the church, one of the more interesting sites is Caroline in Swaziland written by a Canadian videographer who is spending four months in Swaziland to produce videos for several non-profit organizations. She came to Swaziland with help from Canadian Crossroads International.
The lack of blogsites from within Swaziland is disappointing, but not unexpected because there are a number of obstacles to stop people in the kingdom getting online.
The Internet World Stats (IWS) website puts Internet ‘usage’ in Swaziland at 3.7 percent of the population or about 41,000 people. IWS defines a user as someone who has access to an Internet connection point, and has the basic knowledge required to use web technology. The term should not be confused with an Internet Subscriber, which is anybody with a paid access to the Internet.
The African Media Barometer – Swaziland 2007 published in January 2008 by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Swaziland Chapter reported that Internet is still unaffordable for most Swazis and is limited to the main towns. Most Internet cafés charge at least E20 (about 3 US dollars) for 15 minutes. Broadband is still not available, as the government is yet to license operators, so connections are slow and unreliable.
Add to this the fact that about 75 percent of the people in Swaziland live in rural areas and electricity doesn’t reach all of them, and that about 70 percent of the population live in abject poverty on an income of less than one US dollar (E7) per day, and more than half the population presently rely on food aid from overseas organisations to stop them starving, the availability of an Internet connection is not an important consideration in the lives of most people.
But, if you do have access to a computer and an Internet connection it is very easy to set up a blog. It costs no money to do (unlike a commercial website) and importantly for most of us who have limited skills in this regard, you don’t need any technical know-how. There are a number of websites where you can create your own blog. All of them give very simple instructions on how to do it.
If you want to have a go yourself click any one of these links
Blogspot
amagama
myserver
Then email me here and tell me all about it.
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