Read the Blog of Citizen Journalism Workshop June,2008

 Today Women'sNet is working with partner organisations in South Africa to bring together an initial group of activists and organisations to build their capacity to develop media products. The capacity building takes the form of a hands-on technical skills training on using the technology tools to produce media products as well as raising awareness about the concepts and use of citizen media as part of development practice. This blog is a space for this capacity building and sharing idea, opinions and news.

How I became an activist

My defintion: An actvist is someone who is an active participant in the bringing about of change to any social issues. This can be a teacher, an entertainer or even a policy maker etc.

In light of the above definition I dare to consider myself an a Rastafari activist in that I have become someone who actively seeks to better change the reality of the Rastafari nation in Azania. This was not my intention from the onset but something that rather happened to me along my life path.

My experiences in the workshop sharpened my knowledge about women and their struggles. As a male, most especially one from a very partriachal faith, we very seldom notice sisters taking part in gender activism. These women are powerful and i would love to introduce more Rasta sisters into the program to instill more confidence and self esteem.

I started in 2002 after attending a training that was organised by SINANI, which was on trauma management. We were taught about how to deal with people who have been traumitise through violence. It was an eye opener for me, because of the issues we were dealing with, which forced me to look at my own life experiences. However my interest was around HIV/AIDS as most of my family passed on through HIV/AIDS related illnesses, being HIV positive myself I wanted to be different from them, by not letting the views of
“uneducated society” bury me while alive.

I'm very passionate about development. I have a need to contribute to the development of my country.
I think we live in a very interesting time in the history of our country South Africa, we have a chance to shape
and contribute into building the future of this country. no excuses no nothing. its like 50 years from now I'll be able to say I did ABC
in the development and nurturing of our democracy.

so I wouldn't call myself an activist or maybe I am.

In 1998 my parents enrolled me in and after school project named TEKPREP(Technical Preparation) which focused in developing young people on different skills,introducing them to variety of work fields. One of the fields was community work where we offered different services to a number of institutes from shelters to oprhanages and this became my introduction to social work. It was later that I got to understand the term activist and what it meant.

I founded a publication that prached interesting “jibberish” about Rastafari. The aim; to redeem many ignorant and stereotypical people from lack of information and resource material regarding Rastafari. We also spiced it with some nice creative writing, events, entertainment, and recent Afrikan updates.

This past week, Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies and the South African Broadcasting Corporation hosted a conference called Highway Africa. The theme this year was, “Citizen Journalism, Journalism for Citizens”.