{UAH} THE TRIAL- By Frantz Kafka: and THE PERSECUTION OF DR STELLA NYANZI

 

THE TRIAL- By Frantz Kafka: and THE PERSECUTION OF DR STELLA NYANZI

 

George Okello, LL.B; LL.M; M.Phil

 

In the Trial, an ambitious, worldly young bank official named Joseph K. is arrested by two warders "one fine morning," although he has done nothing wrong. K. is indignant and outraged. The morning happens to be that of his thirtieth birthday. One year later, on the morning of his thirty-first birthday, two warders again come for K. They take him to a quarry outside of town and kill him in the name of the Law. K. lets them.

"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., because he had done nothing wrong, but one day he was arrested".

Kafka opens with these disconcerting words, setting the tone for the rest of the novel, as what follows is a deeply disturbing account of a man placed at the mercy of (until then unknown) law courts.

 Although K. maintains adamantly that he is innocent, at no point is there a hint given of the crime K. may have committed, adding to the reader's confusion as they are given as little information as K. and so cannot judge whether the appropriate ending would be conviction or acquittal.

Absolute acquittal is soon discovered to be an impossible dream, as is the possibility of a fair trial which is not influenced entirely by court politics and inter-relationships. Thus Kafka presents a bleak world where a once respectable bank clerk is suddenly prosecuted for apparently no reason at all, and does not even have the benefit of an effective lawyer to represent him

The Trial is the chronicle of that intervening year of K.'s case, his struggles and encounters with the invisible Law and the untouchable Court. The context is different, but the persecution of K mirrors in many respects the state imposed terror and persecution  that Dr Stella Nyanzi is being put through. It is an account, ultimately, of state-induced self-destruction,

 

It was written during 1914-1915, while Kafka was an official in the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom ofBohemia. On one level we can see inThe Trial a satirical pillorying of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy of Kafka's day. Yet to many readers it is eerily prescient of the psychological weaponry used by the much more insidious totalitarian regimes to come, of the legally-sanctioned death machines Kafka never lived to see. It is also an unfinished novel, and this is apparent in the final chapters.

 

It is at times as suffocating to read as the airless rooms of the Court that it describes. The German title, Der Prozess, connotes both a "trial" and a "process," and it is perhaps this maddening feeling of inevitability that leaves a lasting visceral impression: the machinery has been set in motion, and the process will grind toward conclusion despite our most desperate exhortations. In fact despite world-wide condemnation, Dr Nyanzi, it would appear is grinding towards an inevitable conclusion: death by involuntary suicide.

The Trial is deeply thought-provoking in its uncomfortable presentation of a world where people are observed by secret police, , and suddenly abducted and whisked away to safe houses, reflecting the social turmoil in Europe around the time Kafka wrote it in 1914. There are striking parallels to Kayibanda Museveni's Uganda where innocent citizenry are observed constantly by state agencies like ISO, CMI and police, hundreds of thousands are abducted or kidnapped and made to disappear without trace, torture is routine and people are punished by the fascist totalitarian state for actions which seem harmless, such as 'thought-crime'., or calling a bumbling head of state "a pair of buttocks"  

Frantz Kafka may have died many years ago and left his epic novel The Trial unfinished, but little did he know that a pot-bellied tin-pot dictator the name of kayibanda Museveni would finish it for him in deed, and that the protagonist would be Dr Stella Nyanzi, an acerbic academic researcher, rather than K., an unassuming bank clerk. .