{UAH} Fair is foul and foul is fair, press laws hover in the fog and filthy air - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/press-laws-hover-in-the-fog-and-filthy-air-/-/434750/2066600/-/hf8flrz/-/index.html

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Fair is foul and foul is fair, press laws hover in the fog and filthy air - Comment

The Bahaya people of northwestern Tanganyika have a saying that, translated literally, means witches congregate around burial mounds. The basis for this adage is the belief among many pre-capitalist societies that those who practise the dark arts of the occult tend to favour cemeteries as their workshops.

Tombs house dead bodies, and dead bodies and the places they inhabit tend to exert a particular influence on those who want to dabble in the arcane mysteries of life and death. It is supposed that, from time to time, the witches of neighbouring villages will gather around the graveyard of one of the villages and do their rituals.

Different traditions exist for these rituals. Some explain the choice of assembly points as a quest for inspiration because the departed sages are physically close by and communication with them is quite direct — mere necromancy.

Others allege that the witches actually see tombs, especially recent ones, as sources of meat protein and go there to have a carnivorous/cannibalistic feast — anthropophagy.

What seems to be common to all schools of witchery is the dance, oh the dance, the dance of old bones, conical hats and broomsticks — in Western lore — and the dance of reed skirts, gyrating hips and tumultuous breasts — in ours.

Needless to say, these rites are done in absolute secrecy, in total darkness, in unmitigated obscurity. The deep, dark night provides the cover that the evil they engage in needs to thrive. The penalty for practising witchcraft, the witches know, is certain death, and that alone puts a premium on opacity.

If witches ran the village government, they would no doubt have legislated a whole raft of laws forbidding any snooping on their activities. They would make it a capital offence for anyone who is not a witch to stray into areas reserved for the witch festivals, and anyone found near a cemetery after midnight would be considered suspect.

The village busybodies in the habit of running their mouths on matters that do not concern them would have their tongues pulled out, and anyone who claimed they had seen the witches flying in their baskets would have their eyes gouged out, to make them see sense.

But another, more subtle translation of the Kihaya saying is that our governments will always converge at the point where machinations are put in place to curtail their people's freedoms, plunder their resources and maintain themselves in power no matter what.

This is more than amply exemplified by the recent epidemic in East African countries, which are busy passing draconian laws to further muzzle a media that is already toothless and pliant. Wanting to institute laws to enhance censorship in our conditions is almost like trying to make it criminal for the mute to sing.

Our media is still underage, underfunded, understaffed, undertrained, underequipped, underpaid, underserved, underrated and undervalued. Media in our countries needs support from all concerned because, even in its inadequacies, it plays a critical role that no one else can play, a role that in many ways has a salutary effect on the conduct of the affairs of a nation. To the extent that it is muzzled, society itself is muzzled.

Suddenly our governments in the region are acting in tandem in this negative endeavour while they have been showing singular lack of cohesion in more positive undertakings.

Could it be that the only place they can meet — even without inviting each other — is the burial mound, there to bury their countries' media and, perchance, eat its meat?

For every cure there must be an ill requiring it. Just what is the ill that the rulers of East Africa are seeking to cure? The realm of witchery would want to impose opacity to hide its necromancy and anthropophagy.

Witches do not build roads or rails; they do only harm. So they have no coalitions of the willing, nor of the unwilling; they act in tandem, unanimously. They need no prodding, no cajoling, no coaxing.

Fair is foul and foul is fair, press laws hover in the fog and filthy air - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/press-laws-hover-in-the-fog-and-filthy-air-/-/434750/2066600/-/hf8flrz/-/index.html