Kenya vs NYT is not about press freedom. But it could be.

The New York Times decision to publish graphic images of victims of Tuesday’s terror attack at Dusit D2 Hotel in Nairobi and the backlash it has engendered online have sparked furious debates about everything from the perceived racism of the foreign press, to media ethics and the limits of press freedom.

Many shades of opinion have been expressed with some seeing the photographs and the NYT’s refusal to take them down as a continuation of violence against the victims and their families, and as evidence of racist double-standards in the reporting on terrorist atrocities. Others have opposed the torrent of personal abuse and calls for deportation visited on incoming NYT bureau chief, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura following her initial tone-deaf and seemingly dismissive responses to complaints on social media. Now threats by the state in the guise of the Media Council of Kenya to revoke or suspend her and her colleagues’ media accreditation if the Times did not remove the images and issue an unconditional apology have also opened up a regulatory can of worms.

Photographs of deceased victims of terror attacks strike a particularly sensitive chord in Kenya and it is not just the foreign media that has found itself on the receiving end of a social media backlash. Following the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall, in which 68 people lost their lives, the Sunday Nation was excoriated and forced to apologize after it published on its front page a gory photo of bloodied and screaming woman. Three years ago, the government arrested and threatened to prosecute bloggers for circulating pictures of dead Kenyan soldiers following the overrunning of their base in Somalia.

While extremely sensitive, it is not one that lessens Kenyans’ general commitment to press freedom. Fifteen months after Westgate, many were outraged when the government rammed through Parliament amendments to security laws that included a prohibition on the publication or broadcast of images of terror victims without the consent of both the police and the victim. The law was later struck down by the courts which ruled it infringed on the constitutional guarantees of press freedom and freedom of expression.

Media editors also have to contend with evolving community standards and attitudes as well as social media’s empowering of audiences to forcefully express themselves. Two decades ago, in what seems a completely different era, graphic images of victims of the 1998 bombing of the of the US Embassy in Nairobi in which 224 people died, caused little uproar. And while pictures of victims of state violence do not always attract the same umbrage, the traumatizing and, in many ways, uniting effect of terror incidents gives their expression particular force.

It is within this context that we must understand the reaction to the publication of the photographs. The New York Times claims it was motivated by the need “to give our readers around the world a clear picture of the horror of an attack like this”. However, many are not buying it, pointing out that, despite the paper’s assertions to the contrary, similar standards are rarely applied to white and US victims. In a telling interview explaining the Dusit D2 decision, Meaghan Looram, the NYT’s director of photography admitted that she could not recall seeing pictures of victims of school shootings in the US and the need to abandon historical notions that “may have applied different standards to material from locations broadly thought to be remote or “over there,” rather than close to home.”

But it is these same racist notions that have seen the paper refuse to bring down the offending photograph despite over 14,000 people signing a petition for it to do so. That this demand is being made by ordinary Kenyans is what should matter. It is not about censorship by the state. Rather, Kenyans are demanding that the folks at the New York Times choose humanity over their editorial policy. It should be a no-brainer.

The stand-off with the MCK is thus unnecessary. But it does have rather toxic implications for press freedom in Kenya. Not only does it make it easier for the state to isolate and target the foreign press corps, something it has previously done, but giving the government a taste of the power to decide what content media can carry could whet its appetite for more. As was demonstrated with the 2014 security laws amendments and again with a shutdown of local private broadcasters for a week last year, this is no idle threat.

So, for the sake of humanity and press freedom, the Times must take down the photo. And an apology would be nice too.

This Cartoonist's Take On Charlie Hebdo and Freedom of Expression

A week, after the despicable attack on its office that killed 12 people, the Parisian satirical Charlie Hebdo, has declared its defiant new edition will feature a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on the cover. Though the cartoon itself is innocuous, simply featuring the Prophet holding up a sign proclaiming “Je Suis Charlie” with the words “All is Forgiven” above it, doubtless the cover will lend more fire to the raging debate over the limits of satire and the freedom of expression.

Many have seen the attack which killed some of France’s most prominent cartoonists, as primarily an attack on the principle of free expression. And it has drawn universal condemnation. However, there has been considerable angst regarding whether this should be translated or understood as an endorsement of the content that the magazine purveyed.

I am not a reader of the magazine, though English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist, Stephen Fry has described their cartoons as bordering on racist and repulsive. However, Frenchman and self-described “radical left militant” Olivier Tonneau avers that Charlie Hebdo’s satire falls “well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic.”

Ours is a profession that thrives on humour at someone else’s expense. Cartoons can be funny but can also hurt. At their best, cartoons can help to confront and expose the hypocrisies within society and to chop down the arrogance of power. At their worst, they can vilify and stereotype entire communities and reduce complex realities into simplistic vistas.

My first, almost reflexive, reaction was to rush to the defence of Charlie Hebdo. To declare to all and sundry the obvious. That there can be no justification for the attack. That cartoonists should be free to satirize and ridicule whomever and whatever they please without having to fear for their lives. That religious hypocrisy should not be immune to caricature, especially when it is loosed from private sphere and presented as a public obligation. That no one wants to read anodyne satire.

No idea, no matter how cherished and sacred, should be deemed as sacrosanct. And, as Salman Rushdie, the British Indian novelist and essayist who was forced into hiding after his book, The Satanic Verses offended religious zealots, said, “Nobody has the right to not be offended.”

However, it is also undeniable that decent, well-meaning people from across the religious spectrum, Catholics as well as Muslims, have been offended by Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And though satirising a religion is not the same thing as belittling its adherents (any more than ridiculing a political party’s policies is saying its members are idiots), it is not always a distinction that everyone accepts.

Ugandan academic, author and political commentator, Prof Mahmood Mamdani, has spoken about “the dark side of free speech, its underbelly: how power can instrumentalize free speech to frame a minority and present it for target practice.” In discussing the controversy that erupted after the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed, Mamdani distinguished between between religion being critiqued from within and coming under attack from without.

Though Prof Mamdani is wrong when he implies that only believers can legitimately critique religious tradition and that all external lampooning of it is bigotry, some attacks are undeniably motivated by less than honourable intentions. And it when confronting this that we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As he says, compromises circumscribing free speech are sometimes necessary to keep the peace but these work best when internalized as civility, rather than when imposed by public power. It is more a question of how, not if religions can be criticized.

Cartoons do not exist in a vacuum. Our works will be seen and understood within the context of the historical as well as prevailing issues and attitudes and we always run the risk of promoting and reinforcing the very prejudices and oppressions we may be seeking to ridicule. This is because while the pictures and text are designed to elicit humor when placed in specific contexts, the meaning they carry is as much a function of the readers’ circumstance as it is the cartoonist’s intent. And it is in the social space that that meaning is negotiated and determined.

Kenya’s top cartoonist, GADO, fell afoul of this when one of his cartoons from two years ago, which made fun of Kenyan politicians’ propensity to turn funerals into political rallies, was widely circulated in the wake of the death of Fidel Castro Odinga, the son of former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga. Many were outraged by the cartoon which portrayed the elder Odinga giving a speech while poised atop a coffin. In being transferred from one context to another, the cartoon acquired a hugely offensive connotation that had never been intended.    

People are thus liable to read their experiences and contexts into our works. Members of the Muslim community may see the cartoons of the Prophet as a continuation of the racism, stigma and discrimination they have suffered. Others who place them within “the French tradition of satire” would cast them in a totally different light. Thus, when Charlie Hebdo fired a satirist for alleged anti-Semitic jokes, it was probably reflecting a general European horror at their historical treatment of Jews. The double standard illustrates how the competition of contexts and the privileging of one over another affects the way a cartoon is understood and whether it ends up offending or amusing.

This, then, places an extra burden on those of us who undertake the risky work of satire. As we skate at the very edge of what society considers tolerable, we must not be oblivious of the choices we are making, the contexts we are privileging and those we are perhaps ignoring. We must realize that we are accountable for those choices and that that, in the end, is the reason we do not really say everything we have the right to say.

One thing we can all agree on is that it is not those who threaten and carry out violence who should be the ones to set limits on what can and cannot be said in polite company. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, that is for its (now global) audience and French society, including its religious communities and perhaps the French courts where the magazine is regularly sued, to deliberate. It is a conversation about the relative place of different communities within the fabric of society and about the relative weight given to their stories. 

The Morning After

If you play with fire you get burned. That was the reaction of many Kenyans to the Jubilee-controlled Parliament's passage of  a draconian law which restricts their advertising and imposes massive penalties for infractions by journalists and media houses. Many think the Kenyan media had it coming.

For some time now the Kenyan press has been in bed with the Jubilee coalition. Before the March election, they were complicit in the delegitimizing of civil society. Their silence over the flaws in the election and the idiotic Supreme Court judgement was a betrayal of the faith most had put in them. And ever since, from the Garissa "anti-terror operation" to the coverage of the Westgate attack, it has been one stumble after another, with journalists exhibiting an extreme reluctance to take on, question and criticize the government.

So the media is now being made to lie in the bed it made for the rest of us. They "slept on the job when vigilance was most needed" wrote one commentator. It is our schadenfreude moment, our turn to have some fun at the expense of our unthinking, celebrity-obsessed, state-worshiping newsmen. But as we do so, we should not lose sight of the fact that this is not just an attack against them. It is part of a sustained campaign by government to clamp down on dissent and roll back the democratic gains of the last twenty years.

The lies and threats that have become the government's preferred way of communicating with citizens are a throwback to the Fuata Nyayo era. Back to 1984, when, as Okech Kendo recently reminded us, President Daniel Arap Moi could declare that we should sing like parrots. "During Mzee Kenyatta’s period, I persistently sang the Kenyatta tune until people said: 'This fellow has nothing to say, except to sing for Kenyatta.' I said I did not have ideas of my own. Who was I to have my own ideas? I was in Kenyatta’s shoes and, therefore, I had to sing whatever Kenyatta wanted. If I had sang another song, do you think Kenyatta would have left me alone? Therefore, you ought to sing the song I sing. If I put a full stop, you should put a full stop. This is how the country will move forward. The day you become a big person, you will have the liberty to sing your own song and everybody will sing it.”

This is the darkness into which Kenya is being dragged. This is not just about an incompetent and sycophantic media getting its comeuppance. We need to look at this in the context of the subversion of the institutions of state to tackle the ruling couple's "personal challenges" at the International Criminal Court; the continuing efforts to crush political and governance minded civil society groups pushing for accountability for the crimes committed during the post-election violence of 2007/8; the rehabilitation of Moi as lovable statesman; and the push to vastly increase the state's surveillance of the people via the introduction of Nyumba Kumi.

We thus must pay particular attention to the proposed amendments to the Public Benefit Organisations Act which seek to curtail NGO's access to foreign funding. While this will cripple civil society organisations across the board, there is little doubt that the legislation targets those working to enhance transparency and accountability in  government. It is they whom Jubilee has consistently sought to demonize -again with the media's complicity- as Western stooges, they who were the backbone of the push for democratic freedoms in the 90s and they who ironically stood up for media freedoms when it was the turn of the Kibaki administration tried to introduce oppressive legislation.

We must be wary when the government says the cure to its bungling at Westgate is getting us to spy on one another. Nyumba Kumi, a concept which dates back to ancient China, has never been about security. It has always been a means to police dissent by turning all  citizens into state intelligence agents.

Now this is not to say that we do not need to reform the media. We do. But, unlike what is being attempted
by the state, we need to make the media more inquisitive and more suspicious of the government. We need to look into the increasing tendency towards media concentration and cross-media ownership; the fact that powerful politicians, including the President, own many of the largest media organisations and outlets. What effect does this have on the editorial policies and the public's access to information? According to Freedom House, many local journalists admitted that their election coverage required self-censorship to accommodate the interests of their respective media houses.We must also consider the effect  of big budget advertisers, including the government. Remember when just before the 2007 election, the state was accused of trying to trickle the Standard by denying it advertising?

The media can itself begin this process. It's howls of outrage sound more than a little hollow when there is little doubt that to date, it has pretty much been used to, in the words of Noam Chomsky, manufacture consent. It has been employed to scare us into silence, to discourage critical inquiry and to slander government critics. It has been a tool for legitimizing oppression, not a check on executive excess. Our journalists and editors now have an opportunity for introspection on their conduct over the last year, and to take a fresh look at those they were embedded with.

It is an opportunity to rediscover and recreate the old alliances with civil society and religious leadership that were so effective in confronting and rolling back the authoritarianism of the past. And that may just be the salve for their burns.