Jubilee out to copy Kamuzu Banda’s censorship and fear policy in Kenya

Tiyambe Zeleza has a fine essay on censorship. I would like to cite a section that goes: “Banda’s Malawi ‘was a country of pervasive fear where words were constantly monitored, manipulated and mutilated; a country stalked by silence and suspicion; a nation where only the monotonous story of the Ngwazi’s achievements could be told and retold; a state of dull uniformity that criminalised difference, ambiguity and creativity.”

Banda’s, he continues, was “an omnipresent regime with a divine right to nationalise time and thought, history and popular will…. It censored memories, stories and words that contested and mocked its singular authority. Even one’s careless dreams could be dangerous.”

This essay, which I recommend is published in Zeleza’s book Manufacturing African Studies and Crises. The essay will shatter your faith in humanity but, hopefully, awaken you to our own bitter fruits arising from March 2013.

I see too many of us complaining about Jubilee when only a few months ago, we joined the chorus supporting the evacuation of our Somali citizens from Kenya. I see others bashing the Jubilee regime when our aspiration in 2013 was to belong to it.

AMAZING EFFECTIVENESS

Three eerie things will strike you about censorship in Banda’s Malawi. First was its assumed universal reach. Second, though ridiculously hollow, it had amazing effectiveness. Three, it aspired for the impossible; to control thought, silence imagination and punish dreams.

The power of Banda was only possible because the people became participants in the blatant abuse of their own rights, in the silencing of their thoughts and in the censoring their own dreams.

Thus, Banda’s power surveyed and silenced written and oral narratives, intellectual texts and ordinary speech in a way that was almost omnipresent.

Not only was his power effective across the reach and breadth of Malawi, he was able to scare and punish Malawians outside the country. Many learned to live in awe and fear of that power.

Though Banda’s censorship aspired to censor many things including thought and dreams, it was ridiculously empty since silencing thoughts and dreams was impossible.

The only reason he was able to do this was implanting a sense of defeat in the people so that people censored themselves rather than waiting to be censored by the regime. This worked for years until the hollowness of his edifice came crushing like a house of cards.

Banda’s Malawi is being replicated in Kenya and Kenyans need to see what the government is doing with the security discourse. Jubilee is trying to get Kenyans to internalise fear and to reproduce it against themselves. Remember, the reach of censorship is often the consequence of internalised fear.

INSTIL FEAR AND SILENCE

Without internalising fear, self-censorship cannot and will not work. The urge to express oneself, to communicate and realise your full potential as a human being depends on how much you are willing to deal with that fear.

At the heart of the current struggle is the desire by some within the Jubilee government to instil fear and to silence. For it to be effective, they want the silencing to appear to have an omnipresent character.

This is why someone who otherwise is obscure and harmless to the state is prosecuted for insulting a public officer. The prosecution is done in a manner that is confounding by any standard.

Or take the case of the CS Internal Security who goes on air to suggest that someone who commits an offence in one part of the country should be prosecuted in a different and far off place.

Of course, the attack this week on children in Lang’ata is the clincher; for except in the US Civil Rights Struggle and in apartheid South Africa, there are not many places where security forces teargas children with the reckless abandon we witnessed in Lang’ata.

Nothing illustrates the desire to visibilise the omnipresence of oppressive power than this.

Godwin Murunga is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. [email protected]