Tanzanians like to chat and gossip

Here are some of the topics covered in today’s training.

We started the morning by visiting the American online magazine Salon, which is featuring quite lively reporting and commentary on news, politics, culture and human interest. I wouldn’t regularly follow that site while in Finland, but the story of how it came about is worth sharing. It grew out of a strike. When the print newspaper San Francisco Examiner was shut for a while in 1994, a few of its journalists taught themselves the HTML website designing code language and practiced making an online newspaper with the new technology. They found the experience so nice that at the end of the strike some of them gave up their jobs at the print newspaper and launched their own online paper, probably the biggest of its kind at that time and still active.

We also searched the Wikileaks website to find all the 663 diplomatic cable reports sent from the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam between January 2005 to February 2010 about often secret discussions held between Tanzanian officials or individuals and US diplomatic staff. The revelations that the anti-corruption chief of the Tanzanian government was afraid for his life can be found here.

Statistics on internet usage in different world regions and countries attracted a wild debate. In absolute numbers, there are nowadays most internet users in China, USA, Japan, India and Brazil, in this order. Only then follow some European countries, Germany, Russia, UK and France, and right after them comes Nigeria, the new leading African country in the chart, boasting 44 million internet users, at least according to the figures published by the website Internet World Stats.

In recent years, the biggest growth in the number of internet users has been registered in Sub-Saharan African countries, especially Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and lately also Rwanda. In all these countries, the number of internet users more than doubled during just a period of one year. In Tanzania, however, such growth is not yet to be seen. Neighbouring Kenya has almost six times more internet users (four million) than Tanzania (676,000), although the population in Kenya is smaller than in Tanzania. One obvious reason is the language. In Kenya, the middle class speaks English, while in Tanzania the common language is Kiswahili. And from the web you can find so much interesting and useful information in English, while the Kiswahili content is still limited.

We noticed another thing in the latest statistic, namely that almost two thirds of Tanzanian internet users are also using the Facebook, while in most other countries in the region a much smaller proportion of the internet users would have a Facebook account. Some participants said that this is obvious, because Tanzanians love to chat and gossip and watch pictures, and are not so much interested in serious issues. There is not a reading culture, many people rather shun away from books. The education system has been in shambles since the good old days of the 1970’s, said the more senior participants. It would be the task for the new generation to change this pattern – if it’s at all about to be changed.

So far, the local online media doesn’t appear very high in the statistics of the most visited websites in Tanzania. According to a statistic from last year, BBC and CNN were among the Top 20, and the most popular local media website was, maybe a bit surprisingly, Global Publishers, the media house selling sensational tabloid papers such as Uwazi, Amani and Ijumaa. They were in position 28, followed by the popular blog of photojournalist Issa Michuzi. Far behind came the online editions of the English-language newspapers The Citizen (70th) and Daily News (80th). The online editions of the Kiswahili newspapers were not yet among the Top 100 most visited websites in Tanzania.

For comparison, the discussion site Jamii Forums was the tenth most popular website on the list.