Pius Nyamora was the first Kenyan journalist to publish cartoons of President Daniel arap Moi. The fearless publisher and editor-in-chief of Society weekly splashed the works of Paul Kelemba aka Maddo on the covers of his publication.
While Kanu stalwarts like party chairman and Education minister Peter Oloo Aringo, who died the other week, outdid each other chanting “Baba Moi juu! Kanu juu zaidi”, Maddo deconstructed the mythologised “Prince of Peace”, sketching out the President in unflattering shapes and sizes.
The cartoons could not appear in the regular newspapers Maddo drew for, but only in Society, which Nyamora and his wife Loise founded in 1988 at the height of Moi’s dark era of tyranny.
Nyamora, resident in the US for the past 30 years, writes that the singular courage of the alternative press, like Society, played a decisive role in mobilising Kenyans to dismantle the Moi dictatorship, unlike the timid and pliable mainstream media of the time.
Having worked at the Nation as a political reporter for 11 years, Nyamora knew how bad things were. “The indirect pressure applied on the media by the government was a frequent talking point in the Nation’s newsroom. Self-censorship was an unwritten rule, the dark art of self-preservation and balancing readers’ entitlement against political sensitivities at which every editor had to be adept,” he writes.
“My objective in starting Society — to provide a forum for government critics whose views could not be heard through the mainstream media — amounted to poking the government in the eye.”
Nyamora was not alone in this journalism of courage. “Society joined two magazines that were trying to give a voice to those who had no access to mainstream media: Finance, run by economist Njehu Gatabaki, and lawyer Gitobu Imanyara’s Nairobi Law Monthly.”
Today, thanks to advances in information and communication technologies, social media has taken up – and greatly expanded – the crusading tradition of the alternative press of the Moi years.
In recent weeks, silhouettes lampooning politicians and other public figures have grabbed attention in social media. The sketches have sparked both praise and criticism. Admirers say they illustrate the state of poor governance in Kenya, while critics dismiss them as insulting.
Senior Counsel Ahmednassir Abdullahi scrolling down his phone wondered, tongue in cheek, that: “Why is the Hon Attorney General Madam Dorcas Oduor SC not going to court to stop the publication and dissemination of these blasphemous and treasonous cartoons? Freedom of speech and expression doesn’t entail a ‘right to abuse/scandalise’.”
Of course, that is precisely what freedom of speech entails. The Grand Mullah simply wanted to rub it in. Opinion is free. No one can police people’s thoughts or lawfully stop people from expressing their views. And views don’t have to be nice to be heard.
But sometimes even journalists don’t understand this freedom. A sub-editor with The Standard wrote that, “There is too much hate in the air being directed at the person of the President and former Prime Minister through cleverly crafted memes which, if allowed to continue, could grow into a monster that will be hard to contain.”
So, the ‘hateful’ cartoons should be stopped, si ndio? “Those posting and reposting the memes find comfort in the freedom of speech and expression, no doubt guaranteed by our constitution. This freedom, however, does not grant one the freedom to insult, malign or ridicule others.”
Ona huyu. Ironically, Maddo, who sketched the groundbreaking Moi cartoons for Society, still publishes his punchy caricatures in the same Standard newspaper whose sub-editor reads our constitution narrowly and calls for censorship.
The saving grace is this repugnant view of freedom of speech is the exception rather than the rule in Kenyan journalism and society. Too much blood and tears have been shed over the decades in struggles for democracy in Kenya for a journalist to hanker after the dark days of Nyayo.
Let’s listen to the revolutionary Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire writing in his magnum opus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
“Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.”
The cartoonist sketches out/names the world around him as he sees it. He refuses to be silent. He is a transformative force speaking truth to power. Salute to all cartoonists!
See you next week!
