Freedom of speech under colonial malaria

France rose up as over 3 million demonstrators furious at intents to murder ‘’freedom of speech’’ by devotees of a violent form of religion openly said to have roots in Saudi Arabia. One grandson of Africa, one Coulibaly – with ethnic links in Mali, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso – was slaughtered by   the […]

France rose up as over 3 million demonstrators furious at intents to murder ‘’freedom of speech’’ by devotees of a violent form of religion openly said to have roots in Saudi Arabia. One grandson of Africa, one Coulibaly – with ethnic links in Mali, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso – was slaughtered by   the French police for allegedly killing four Jewish hostages inside a meat shop; his linkage with deaths of cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo suggesting anger with Israel’s long record of wars against Arabs.
‘’Freedom of speech’’ draped the French protest slogan ‘’Je suis Charlie’’ on a figure of Prophet Mohammed; drawing vigorous  protest from Pope Francis whose Catholic church was fought by ancestors of France to combat its burning of books and beheading thinkers and scientists accused of speeches which undermined doctrine and priestly political power. Presidents of Europe marched in Paris while ignoring their legacy of killing free speech with colonial power; and monstrous apartheid in Algeria and South Africa.
The British, French and Portuguese secret police used assassinations with impunity. The murdered a charismatic Patrice Lumumba. The British hanged Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the Mau-Mau revolution in Kenya; while Portugal’s secret police (PIDE), assassinated Amilcar Cabral because he scored the rare diplomatic victory by addressing the United Nations General Assembly  as head of a liberation war.  Robert Mugabe spent eleven years in prison in the hands of those who now preach to him about dictatorship.
 The anti-colonial press was denied nutritious intellectual food. In Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe’s newspaper, West African Pilot was blocked from circulation in northern Nigeria. A local government clerk in Zaria was dismissed from his work for owning a copy of the newspaper. The ‘’Law of Sedition’’ was used to punish those who exposed truths critical of colonial rule. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana later borrowed the law to imprison political opponents. Apollo Obote stopped newspaper reports of speeches in parliament to block tongues of critics. Jomo Kenyatta was accused of borrowing British colonial use of motor vehicle accidents to fatally terminate parliamentary critics.
 Leaders of liberation movements intensely practised internal freedom of speech. As armed debaters against colonial terror they operated clandestinely but practised person-to-person persuasion of colonised peoples whose support and willingness to join their armed struggle they needed as fish require oxygen from water. Within their ranks, they also cherished freedom to propose and criticise until a decision had been agreed upon. Under the principle of ‘’democratic centralism’’ there was no freedom to turn around and dissent from a collectively reached decision. There was a hidden danger here of seeing an enemy or a ‘’running dog of imperialism’’ in every critic; including after freedom was won.
President Nyerere translated Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar into Swahili to broaden freedom to read speeches in one’s own language; invented competitive elections within a universally popular ruling single party system to save freedom of debate. Senegal’s film director Ousmane Sembene celebrated the sensual swagger of the Wolof woman’s walk as against imitations of ‘’rat-walks’’ by European women. Franz Fanon called intellectual sweat and industrial inventiveness by Africans just like Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian have done. Uganda’s writer-anthropologist, Okot p’Bitek, mocked Africans who visited Britain and were overwhelmed by the brilliance of English people because ‘’even children were speaking English!’’.
One war against post-colonial African and Asiatic freedom of thought is the intensive use of film, television and print advertisements to give high status to pale white skins. Managers of images are making billions of dollars from sales of skin defoliating chemical creams. The freedom to express blackness or brown or yellow – African, Indian, Indonesian or Burmese – skins as beauty is vigorously blocked through mind-changing. African diplomats are yet to categorize this ‘image violence’ as a crime against humanity; and assaults on freedom of ‘image speech’. A  BBC critic condemned ‘’Wahabi’’ Islam for defining others as inferior targets for violent termination. Peter Enahoro should tell Euro-American racists to use mirrors made in Saudi Arabia.
Chukumerije invented Afriscope magazine; Peter Enahoro published Africa Now magazine and Ralph Uwechue published Africa and Africa Woman magazines. These Nigerian intellectuals met the injunction that you cannot use other people’s mouth to make your speech to the world.  Rapid financial success killed these inventions.  Enahoro knows that Mandela beat a silence 27years tall.