You cannot suppress people's inherent desire to be informed

WHILE imprisoned on Robben Island many years ago, Govan Mbeki, an ANC intellectual of his era and who has no contemporary in today's ruling party, wrote passionately about the role of the press during the liberation struggle.

In his collection of essays, Prison Writings: Learning from Robben Island, Mbeki, made profound observations about the difficulties faced by the press during the apartheid era.

"Under Hendrik Verwoerd, then minister of native affairs, the implementation of the pass laws was intensified. A special police section - the Ghost Squad - was set up," Mbeki wrote in an essay paying tribute to Ruth First, an anti-apartheid journalist.

The function of the Ghost Squad was to keep a tight check on passes and to arrest pass law offenders. (failure to carry the notorious dom-pas was an offence).

"Almost from nowhere, the Ghost Squad sprang on Africans on busy streets, at odd places and times. People would disappear without trace, some would be used as slave labourers on white-owned farms.

"The Guardian line of newspapers (for which Ruth First worked) caught the Ghost Squad in action and splashed the photographs. Thus exposed, the Ghost Squad was stripped of its ghost mask."

TheGuardian newspapers were then banned and their journalists imprisoned.

Mbeki was concerned that under the pretext of ridding the country of "foreign Communist ideologies", the National Party government was "attacking freedom of speech and assembly as well as the freedom of the press".

While this happened, "the bourgeois press and politicians looked on without raising a finger".

However, the "TheGuardian line of newspapers warned white opposition parties and their press that true to the Nazi tactics of taking out opponents one at a time, the Nationalist government's vicious attack on the Communist Party, the Congresses, progressive trade unions and The Guardian newspapers would, in due course of time, be unleashed against all opponents of its policies."

But history has shown that repressive legislation aimed at strangling the media is not an exclusive preserve of colonial and racist apartheid governments.

After Kenya gained its independence Daniel arap Moi had a different idea of what liberation meant. He instituted political practices that sought to crush debates that could lead to political change.

In her book, It's Our Turn to Eat, journalist Michela Wrong observes that during Moi's tenure as head of state, Kenya's small group of intellectuals felt besieged.

Nairobi's bookshops would not officially stock works deemed to offend the president. Such books could be bought discreetly under the counter, hidden among a spray of magazines, if you knew the right code word.

Wrong quotes a Kenyan journalist who lived in the Moi era as having said: "You never knew for sure what had been officially gazetted as banned books. So you stashed the entire library under your bed. If you owned a book that might have been banned, you photocopied it and it circulated in A4 form, person to person, because then it was easy to hide among your ordinary papers.

"You felt watched all the time. When you went out you would look for the shiny shoes. They were the dead giveaway, they very shiny shoes of the National Intelligence Agency guy who was following you. I remember ducking under the table in restaurants to check out the shoes around me."

Kenya's public broadcaster was meant to glorify the government rather than tell the full Kenyan story - mainly about the abuse of power, corruption. Instead, virtually every news broadcast began with the kneejerk: "His Excellency Daniel arap Moi...."

But Kenyans, hungry for information, had their way to know the goings on.

They established Machakos Express: a week's worth of political gossip from the capital relayed in person by Nairobi workers on weekend visits to the countryside.

So, if you thought you could suppress people's inherent desire to be informed and to spread information, think again! People's desire for information and to use it for political change has since graduated from the gossip era to the fruitful use of modern technologies.

In her book, The Revolutionwill not be digitised: Dispatches from an information war, British journalist Heather Brooke writes about the political significance of the spread of information in Tunisia, leading to the revolution.

It all started with a hawker who resisted a demand for a bribe and thereafter burnt himself to death.

That video of a burning man was shared online.

It ended up on Facebook, where it was harvested by news channel Al-Jazeera and was then broadcast across the Arab World. Consequently, protests spread across Tunisia and, united in their common goal to overthrow a corrupt regime, the people began protesting loudly and publicly against the leadership of Ben Ali and his family.

"Because of the uncontrolled nature of networked communication, alternative 'truths' could be told - that truth that reflects better the reality for the majority of the people in Tunisia," observed Brooke.

Walter Wriston, an executive at investment bank CitiGroup, was recently quoted in the Foreign Affairs Journal as having remarked: "Information technology has demolished time and space. Instead of validating Orwell's visions of Big Brother watching the citizen, it enables the citizen to watch Big Brother. And so the virus of freedom, for which there is no antidote, is spread by electronic networks to the four corners of the Earth."

This is the virus which the ANC government, in utter defiance of the call for press freedom made by Mbeki many years ago, and which later found expression in the Constitution, seeks to fight.

Hard luck!