HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US

Swazi Media Commentary is four years old today (7 July 2011). May we reverse the usual tradition and send greetings to you on this day.

Greetings to all you people who click on to tens of thousands of pages of the blogs each month.

Also, to the hundreds who follow us on Twitter and to those countless people who ‘retweet’ our posts.

Salutations to those of you who read us on our Facebook sites – we have no way of knowing how many of you there are (Facebook is pretty hot on protecting your privacy).

Hello, to those who follow us on various Google or Yahoo networks, or who read us in Africa Contact’s Swaziland Newsletter.

Good wishes to the news aggregators who take our posts and disseminate them to all corners of the globe. We wish we could keep track of all the outlets, but there are too many.

A birthday ‘thank you’ to the people who write articles exclusively for Swazi Media Commentary and to those who allow us to reproduce material from their websites.

A special mention to those who supply us with information; many have to remain anonymous to protect themselves from victimisation in Swaziland.

Also, to those brave souls in Swaziland who print out our posts and hand them around to people who have no access to the Internet. They risk harassment and jail.

Greetings to journalists in the ‘mainstream’ media across the world who use us as a source of information for their reports on Swaziland’s prodemocracy movement.

A not quite so friendly ‘Hello’ to the bosses in the Swaziland media who are so scared of what we publish at Swazi Media Commentary they harass their own workers to try to stop them reading us. But a special wave to the media workers who carry on reading nonetheless.

Lastly (but not least): hello to the students at schools and universities in Swaziland and elsewhere who use Swazi Media Commentary as a source in their research reports and essays.

So, Happy Birthday to us. And to you too . . .

(With profuse apologies to anyone we’ve missed out).

In February 2011 Peter Kenworthy wrote an article on Swazi Media Commentary called ‘Telling the truth about Swaziland’. Click here to read it. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70617