For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the Oslo Freedom Forum.
In April of 2016, Evan Mawarire, a 39-year-old pastor from Harare, Zimbabwe, posted an impromptu video on Facebook titled “This Flag.” The video is a meditation on the symbolism of his country’s national banner in protest of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, the former independence fighter who had ruled his country with ever-increasing levels of authoritarianism since 1977. “This flag — every day that it flies,” Mawarire pleaded, “is begging for you to get involved.”
Mawarire’s video and more than 20 others that he posted in the ensuing weeks helped touch off a movement, centered around the hashtag #thisflag. The videos made him a national figure and led to his arrest on multiple occasions by Zimbabwean authorities in the months leading up to Mugabe’s dramatic removal from power in November of 2017.