An African Spring?

Today was the final day of the planned protests. It's been a more eventful week than was anticipated. The protests took place roughly as planned. However, on Wednesday evening, some students were throwing rocks at police officers and then they attacked the officers. The officers fled, but reinforcements poured in, there was a bit of gunfire, and police arrested and beat a number of protesters. It wasn't a great event, but that was the exception to what has largely been a peaceful week.

Today was something else though. There were about 1000 protesters waiting in the middle of Mbabane's busiest intersection. The police were allowing them to go one direction, but they had all but walled off the other streets. Officers were lined up 3 deep along the side of the road, many carrying nightsticks. About ten yards behind them were a number of officers, some with guns, most with riot shields, helmets, and clubs. Behind them were auxiliary vehicles, one water cannon vehicle, and tactical officers with grenade launchers for teargas (I hope). I understand why everyone was out there, but I have to admire the responsibility of the police and the conviction of the officers. It was 95+ degrees out there and the sun is hot here.

The protests were larger than Monday, but most of the people just walked past or watched. Still, unrest here is a pretty unique situation. Unlike Syria or Libya, the risk of large scale conflict between the population and the authorities is pretty low. It's only one tribe and it's a very small country, so not only do many people know each other, a significant amount of them consider each other to be family. So the police are pretty unlikely to crack down on people they might know, or even distant cousins. Because of that, the critical mass of these protests might be much smaller than those in other countries.

So it could be an interesting year here as the politics of this place get sorted out. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to keep most of my posts focused on the work I'm doing. Next week you'll hear about the Training Needs Assessment I'm putting together for our farmers so that we can see what training will be beneficial and what won't be. At least I hope that's what I'm supposed to be doing. So far I've been lead by Google in many of these business-related topics (with help from Tinashe of course)

Have a good weekend. God bless the whole world.
-Ben