Let us not pretend that state control of the media is something new to the region, or that South Africa has a history of defending press freedom and shouting down the villains, writes GEOFF HILL. If a government nationalised the press or introduced the death penalty for writers who criticised the ruling party, there’d be an outcry. Correct? Well not always. At least not in South Africa. Let me explain. In 1975, the MPLA government in Angola, which had wrested independence from Portugal a year earlier, took control of the press and made it a capital offence for journalists to “commit crimes against the revolution”, or endanger the good name of the state. The African National Congress (ANC) in exile was dependent on the charity of regional leaders, so would have found it hard to comment, though given their current stance on Zimbabwe, and solidarity with oppressive regimes like Cuba or Libya, it is doubtful they would have said much anyway.

More surprising was the silence from “progressive” newspapers like the Rand Daily Mail or human rights activists including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the late Helen Suzman. Ditto the anti-apartheid movement, and student activists at colleges around the world. I know because at the time I was writing about Angola and found it hard to get quotes from those who should have been condemning Luanda.

Same thing in 1981 when Robert Mugabe effectively nationalised the press. The following year, his North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade entered Bulawayo and began slaughtering the people of Matabeleland.

Most of the corpses still lie in mass graves, but don’t look for evidence in Zimbabwe’s daily newspapers because, with ZANU-PF in charge of the media, there was no mention of the four-year campaign in print or on radio and TV. What some now call a genocide never happened.

Various groups in South Africa, London, New York and elsewhere who were fighting a just cause to overthrow apartheid said little or nothing about the Matabele murders, or Gukurahundi, “the wind that blows away the chaff.”
Rather, universities including Edinburgh and Massachusetts, conferred honorary doctorates on Robert Mugabe for his “contribution to humanity” and the government of Margaret Thatcher knighted him. The degrees and the knighthood have since been withdrawn, but I suspect that is little consolation to the families of those who died.
In Tanzania, the late Julius Nyerere nationalised the press shortly after independence and a free media did not emerge until after his resignation in 1985. When Samora Machel came to power in Mozambique in 1975, his government banned all opposition, and, you guessed it, muzzled reporters more effectively than even the colonial Portuguese had managed.

Howls of protest from South African liberals and freedom fighters? Hansard ripe with attack from the political opposition in Cape Town? Wrong! There was barely a whimper.
Back in those days, it was chic to support people like Machel, Mugabe, or the MPLA in Angola, while Fidel Castro was described as an idealist. Even last month when Havana released some of its more than 150 political prisoners, and TV images showed these shattered souls emerging from jail and forced into exile, the political left was largely silent.

Ahh, so that’s what this is about! Bashing the trendoids in their Ché Guevara T-shirts. No dear reader, for there are plenty on the right who are just as guilty.
In America, for all the hate-speech against Castro and his island dictatorship, successive governments were silent on worse thugs like Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaïre (now DRC), the Duvalier dynasty in Haiti and President Suharto of Indonesia, even during his army’s brutal occupation of East Timor when up to a third of that country’s population was murdered.

And a majority of whites in South Africa said nothing when in 1977 the late Jimmy Kruger, then minister for justice, drafted laws to muzzle the press more harshly than anything now proposed by Jacob Zuma.
The voices today, and I am one of them, who rally against control of writers and broadcasters, are correct to challenge the ANC. There is plenty of legislation that can be used when people are defamed or lied about, and no government should have the right to hide its failures from the public.

But let us not pretend that state control is something new to the region, or that South Africa has a history of defending press freedom and shouting down the villains.
I mentioned Desmond Tutu and Helen Suzman, and it should be noted that, post 1994, both became champions in the fight for freedom across the continent and their courage has shown the way for others.

But we must not forget that under cover of censorship, African states were able to commit the most terrible human-rights abuse, and impose tyranny on their subjects without fear of public criticism, and many who should have known better said nothing.
Let us hope it is not too late to have their cry heard in this new struggle for freedom. –

August 17 2010, by Geoff Hill   

......................

Source:www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/index.php  (Accessed on 19.08.10)