Tremors in Africa

The story of the young man who set himself on fire in Tunisia because he was humiliated and harrased by police officers will continue to have great consequences on Africa. It was said that the young man, Muhammad Bouazizi, a vendor, embarked on self-immolation after police confiscated his wares. It's believed that if the man had had some money to bribe the police officers, he wouldn't have been subjected to the kind of treatment he received from the police; but, unfortunately, he was struggling to make ends meet.

After the young man was widely reported to have set himself on fire, people were angered by the way government handled the issue which led to the man's death. People in Tunisia trooped out in their thousands to protest the way government was handling the country's affairs. Ben Ali, the man who has been ruling the country for more than two decades, was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia for asylum- It's interesting how Western nations such as the United States and France, who had had cozy relations with him, refused him asylum. At the beginning, the US was not enthusiastic on supporting the protesters, but after some time they backed the protests.

Immediately after Ben Ali was ousted out of power, people in Egypt felt they could also assemble themselves and protest against Hosni Mubarak's iron-fist government. With the help of social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, people mobilized themselves to protest against Hosni Mubarak's government. At first, he thought he could get Western countries to support him because of the good relationship they had been having with him for the way he supposedly blocked 'fundamentalist Muslim groups' from coming to power and his blockage of Gaza for Israel's safety. The tide went against him; and, with the way things were fast changing, Western nations saw that they had to support the people's yearning for democracy otherwise their self-acclaimed confessions of being guardians of democracy would be seen as a farce and hypocritical. At last, people succeeded in making Hosni Mubarak to step aside.

Step by step, people are massively coming together in North African countries and Middle East, which are mostly populated by Arabs and Muslims, to protest the way dictators and monarchs exploit religius sentiment to continue their rulership. Besides, other African countries, mostly those with sit-tight dictators who have been ruling for long years, are also bringing themselves together to bring about leadership change in their various countries. However, dictators in sub-Saharan Africa are known to muzzle-up opposition and media outlets who try to expose their breach of human rights records. It's left to be seen whether people in these countries could assemble themselves by using new technology like Facebook and Twitter, just as it was done in Egypt and Tunisia, to oust out their long-standing dictators.

Meanwhile, people in Western countries have also begun to realize that Arabs and Muslims are not the way they were wrongly made to perceive by their strongly biased and prejudiced media. New polls conducted by various organizations have shown a remarkable shift in the way Westerners view Arabs and Muslims.