Simon Kasyate
15 May 2008
opinion
I read with disgust the rather ill informed opinion by one of Uganda's citizens living in a foreign capital, wondering whether Sir Samuel Baker was right to call Africans savages. "Was Sir Baker right to call us savages?" (Daily Monitor, May 1).
Morris D. C. Komakech was writing about the brutal treatment my media colleagues and friends Andrew Mwenda, Odoobo Bichachi, Njoroge and Joseph Kiggundu were subjected to while being arrested by the security personnel on April 26 in Kampala.
Like Komakech, I strongly condemn the manner in which these journalists were treated. I don't know either to be a non-law abiding citizen who would have resisted arrest when presented with an arrest warrant. For photojournalist Kiggundu to be beaten in the manner he was while covering a 'crime scene' is simply deplorable.
But for Komakech to equate these actions by rogue state agents to savagery of the African people is something I cannot stand, especially when the yardstick of the none-savage is Sir Samuel Baker and his ilk in race.
I wish to draw the attention of Mr Komakech to history's greatest evils to mankind, evils whose perpetrators would be flattered to be called savages; slave trade and apartheid.
Narrating in any detail the brutality and savagery treatment Africans were subjected to during the two deadly eras of slave trade and apartheid in South Africa, to you Komakech I want to assume that it would be like reciting the canon law to the Pope!
As a resident social critic in Toronto, Canada, has it ever crossed your mind that that vast country you now call home was once occupied by a different race of people?
Ask around where that race went and how it went. It was the ilk of Sir Samuel Baker who savagely annihilated them to an almost insignificant statistic that they are today. It is the same story down to your south in the United States of America.
It is with maximum restraint from letting in on more grotesque detail that I beg to challenge you to read about the holocaust and tell me if any European had, has and should ever have the locus standi to call an African a savage, simply from the way we have and are treating each other.
I have not been to Iraq but if what I watch as heavily censored and skewed video clips off CNN are anything to go by, I challenge you to take some time and watch how suspected terrorists and or their accomplices are arrested.
On the flip side, the world leaves under the constant fear of terror from people who argue that it is their divine duty to terrorise; now those are the savages. If the gist of your argument is state excesses in curtailing press freedom as I am tempted to believe, it should have been restricted to the issue at hand, but not draw in historical distortions coined by colonialists for selfish reasons.
True, the modus operandi of the Ugandan government in dealing with perceived threats (read free press and vibrant opposition) leaves a lot to be desired. But it cannot against any measure be equated to savagery.
Especially that we know worse happens in those places you want to portray as civilised. While I don't condone Uganda government's iron hand in muzzling the press, I would be quick to call Russia a savage state before ours in this regard.
Komakech, borrow on best practices from Toronto in regard to the relationship between the state and the press and write about how these could be applied here, rather than going off on a name-calling tangent.
The writer is a journalist.
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