#Cabo Delgado também é Moçambique campaign: exploring African communitarianism in the digital

Since 2017, terrorist attacks have shackled Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique, displacing thousands of people and causing waves of humanitarian crises. Despite the intensity and frequency of the attacks, the Frelimo-ruled government in Maputo mounted an ineffective counter-response and limited press coverage of the events, using fines and jailing journalists. Against this backdrop, young activists launched a campaign under the hashtag ‘Cabo Delgado também é Moçambique’ (Cabo Delgado also is Mozambique).
The campaign, which started on Facebook, quickly collected followers and spread to other digital social media. The activists aimed to provide relief measures to affected populations but mainly they intended to break the silence the ruling party had imposed. They swung between digital activism and analogue engagement to foster a sense of common identity in the name of national belonging among Mozambicans, to create digital ties of empathy, reciprocation and support. Digital and physical-analogue actors blended in the campaign, as digital avatars were the first exposed and engaged in creating the country-wide networked community.
I question the involvement of humans and non-humans, in this case, digital-humans, in engaging in patterns of relationality, solidarity and reciprocating. These ideals are central to African political philosophies of communitarianism and Ubuntu, yet their rendition in contemporary underpinnings marked by digital technologies is to date underexplored. The interpretative and qualitative analysis I offer suggests that digital campaigns such as the ‘Cabo Delgado também é Moçambique’ trigger forms of post-anthropocentric relationality. By this I mean a form of relating that includes in equal yet not symmetrical terms human and non-human actors. The insights from the case in Mozambique are pivotal in understanding the reframing of political paradigms and ideologies but also communities in the digital sphere, and their interplay in the digital-analogue blurred boundaries.