Ensconced in the comfort that is the West, to many people a revolution is something belonging to the annals of history. I suspect the turmoil in North Africa would not have jolted too many people out of their comfort zone had it not been for the power of social media. Suddenly, revolutions are everywhere and there is no excuse to ignore them. Over the past few months we have seen people fight for basic freedom, we have seen bloodshed and we have hopefully gained some understanding of what life under a regime is like.

These revolutions are marred by many tragedies and they’re not just related to many deaths. In Tunisia, a desperate act by one man set off a chain reaction with no predictable end in sight. And yet, outside of Africa the name of Mohammed Bouzazi remains largely meaningless because Bouzazi is not a pop celebrity or someone with ascribed celebrity status. Few in the West can even begin to comprehend self-immolation or what would drive a person to such a brutal death. Much has been said about the brutality of these revolutions, but far less attention has been paid to the brutality that preceded the moment when Africa made a bid for freedom.

The revolution is not confined to the north of Africa. The people of Sudan have been facing extreme brutality for a very long time. Southern Sudan has made its own bid for freedom (and not without bloodshed) but the people in the north are still part of a horrific regime. Further down, Mugabe’s regime has been carrying out full scale atrocities for decades and yet the West shows no sign of wanting to intervene. In the past few days, Mugabe’s henchmen rounded up Zimbabweans and beat them up. Their crime? Watching news on Al Jazeera.

Via Al Jazeera we have caught a glimpse of life for ordinary people under a bloody regime. The reports trickling out of Libya should terrify everybody: people arrested and tortured and held for years, soldiers bursting into homes and randomly shooting people, beatings, a culture of terror and all under the aegis of an ageing despot who happily opened fire on his own people. And this has been the situation in Libya for a very long time. Following the rules for being an efficient despot, Ghaddafi ensured that people are too terrified to even think about their situation, let alone speak about it. A brutally efficient regime ensures that it controls how you think, act, dress and basically exist. Human agency is dangerous and it has to be destroyed by a systematic campaign of terror, torture and fear.

Yet, dictators in North Africa never quite succeeded. It is testament to the indomitable human spirit that while people were forced to suppress their very sense of being for a long time, they finally overcame the horrors of the regime and took to the streets. The trouble with suppressing a voice for too long is that it will eventually come back louder and stronger than ever. In Libya, where the threat of death is part of the every day experience, people continue to shout for their freedom. If the threat of violence has been embedded into your sense of being for a very long time, there comes a point when you no longer fear it because either way you risk death. Despots are too caught up in their own self-absorption to realise that.

Being Maltese, I look at North Africa and feel pain and anger. These people are not just our neighbours, with them we share more than just a hazy notion of identity. Unlike many western commentators, I am not surprised to see masses of well spoken and well educated people taking up arms. The continent of Africa is not (with apologies to David Lowenthal) a “foreign country”.