The Voiceless Campaign

Background

Calls for change have swept North Africa. Further south, in Zimbabwe, the continent’s most brutal dictatorship arrested people for simply speaking about what was happening in Libya.

For speaking-out against this regime, The Zimbabwean newspaper has had its vehicles burned and its vendors beaten.

As efforts to silence the newspaper continued, the Zimbabwean needed to let people know it had not lost its voice.

Idea

Late in 2010, The Zimbabwean carried reports that Mugabe’s notorious Central Intelligence Organisation had raided a small exhibition of photography in Harare. A number of photojournalists were arrested, and their hard-drives were confiscated. It became clear that anything the regime wanted to suppress, was exactly what the Zimbabwean needed to show.

Every photojournalist who had worked in Zimbabwe in the past year was asked to contribute the images they had captured but which censorship had prevented anyone from seeing.

Simply getting the pictures into the public realm was be a demonstration of what The Zimbabwean does every day. But in positioning the iconic map of Zimbabwe to appear as an empty speech bubble, the images were given a call to action.

Billboards and print directed viewers to a website where they could read, hear and locate the incidents shown in the photographs. They could also disseminate them via social media and add their voices to the blog.

‘VoiceBoxes’  were created, telephones in safe houses for people to use to dictate their stories to desks in South Africa, where operators transcribed their comments.

No media owners in Zimbabwe would run the campaign, so decals were sent into Zimbabwe. When people saw the print advertisements they knew exactly how to position their decals on pictures to make their own ‘Voiceless’ executions. An oppressed country had become its own symbol of freedom.

Results

The Voiceless website has received over 25,000 views.

So far, The Zimbabwean’s subscriber base has been increasing by 10% a week,

Over half of these subscriptions have been bought for people inside Zimbabwe.

Most importantly, through over 200 earned media impressions for the Voiceless Campaign, Zimbabwe itself is back in the news.

Our Thoughts

46 people are known to have been arrested and tortured in Zimbabwe for the crime of gathering to watch TV footage of the unrest in Libya, Egypt and Syria. In a free country, a free press would have reported on what was happening in North Africa and the implications for its own readership. But the editors and journalists of The Zimbabwean have been persecuted for many years by Mugabe’s government. While our government(s) interfere with Libya because of its vast oil reserves, they offer only pious platitudes to the suffering people of Zimbabwe. It remains for only a handful of brave individuals and a newspaper operating outside the country to keep the flicker of resistance alive.

Advertising isn’t always about selling people goods or ideas. It can be about providing hope.