What Is Happening?!

At some point, presumably powered by Elon Musk in the dead of night, Twitter (who actually calls it X?) changed the tone of its tweet prompt.

It’s a subtle change. An exclamation point added after the question mark that ends Twitter’s eternal query of “What’s happening?” and makes it seem, at least to me, somewhat panicked, shaken, disbelieving or incredulous.

“What is happening?!” yells Twitter to everyone logging in from their desktop and, given the current, flaming state of the world, I find the platform’s new tone thoroughly apt because what the hell is going on?

“What is happening?!” Twitter shouts and Palestinian journalists in Gaza, reaching out on precious eSims despite Israeli bombardment, power cuts, internet outages and over 30 of them already murdered, tell us that genocide is happening. More than 11 000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes and 4 000 of them were children.

“What is happening?!” Twitter exclaims and not enough news trickles out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The inadequate picture that emerges informs us that the smartphones we use to log into our favourite apps are the end product of an exploitative and unconscionable cobalt mining industry that has displaced millions, killed just as many since 1996 and which continues to sicken and injure the Congolese people.

What is happening, is that there is war in Sudan. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, opposing factions of the country’s military government, are in deadly conflict and over 9 000 people have already been killed, four million people have been internally displaced and 1,3 million people have fled the country to seek asylum as we hear little of the Sudanese women who are being raped or sold as Sudan starves.

Lately, like many people, “What is happening?!”, or something like it, is a phrase I’ve taken to screaming in my head. The internal cry accompanies my incessant and powerless doomscrolling as the world’s headlines and their associated images grow more dystopian.

It’s what I wonder when I see so many of the countries of this world standing up to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestinians in their homeland, but the bombing and the blind eye of some of the planet’s most powerful nations persist in a disquieting show of indifference, murderous political allegiance or worse.

“What is happening?!”

It’s a question I may very well ask here at home in Namibia. There isn’t war and there isn’t the indiscriminate bombing of civilians or technology-fuelling metal deposits supposedly worth countless human lives.

But there are the things we seem to have accepted as a Namibian norm such as the rising number of suicides, a critical youth unemployment rate and the sexual and gender-based violence that continues unabated.

As the wider world plunges into a permissive darkness that should terrify every last one of us, local headlines continue to shout of our own crises.

‘UN warns of youth unemployment ‘threat’ ’, ‘A suicide a day in Namibia’, ‘Havana woman stabbed to death’, ‘She was slaughtered like a goat’, ‘Man accused of child rape remains in custody’. The latter is accused of raping four minor girls under the age of 14 at Oshakati and each of these stories made headlines just last month.

“What is happening?!” Twitter asks again and I don’t know where to begin, how to help or what it means to be human with the right to life in a world in which those rights are conditional and these conditions can change overnight.

“What is happening?!” Twitter prods and I whisper a movie title.

“Everything, everywhere, all at once.”

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com