Banning ‘50 Shades Of Grey’ only contributes to its success

The Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) banned the American feature film 50 Shades of Grey. The movie is based on an erotic novel that inspired by the BDSM lifestyle. Curiously, the book escaped the ban probably because reading is not exactly a national past time.

The minders at KFCB are not alarmist. 50 Shades of Grey has entire blogs and websites condemning its portrayal of women. Most claim it glorifies male dominated sexual violence and promotes the idea that being tied up, choked, spanked, and whipped is the new normal in sexual lifestyles.

Only last year the Classification Board banned another American movie, The Wolf Of Wall Street because it served sexually explicit content and profanities. I am a law abiding citizen, but when government attempts to dictate what I can read or watch, I turn reactionary.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind. The Film board will probably cite public good and protecting the young from negative influences as the logical argument for the ban. Which is valid ignoring the irony of free-to-air TV feeding the masses with explicit content in the name of foreign music videos, need I mention; the twerk apocalypse.

The internet and decent 3G speeds offers an endless stream of porn that would make 50 Shades of Grey appear rather tame. No surprises there. This is a country that banned raw milk hawkers selling cheaper natural milk and promoted processed milk supposedly in the interest of public hygiene.

I grew up with government bans, reserved largely for literature that stimulated thinking beyond the sanctioned national approved status quo of Peace, Love and Unity. In the 70s straight to the 90s, there were a list of banned books that could land you in serious trouble.

Seditious material

In those days, police would raid your home library looking for seditious and subversive reading material that could earn a free lodging at the Kamiti Maximum prison. Handling anything written by Karl Marx, especially Das Kapital was akin to subscribing to Communist ideals, an act of treason in the Nyayo era.

Most of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s books were too hot to handle. I Will Marry When I Want sent a lot people to detention without trial, banned in 1977. Petals of Blood got Ngugi arrested and Decolonizing The Mind only added to his woes. The play Animal Farm George Orwell’s classic, was banned in 1991 for its harsh criticism on the greed of the leaders.

The phenomenon of MPigs is still alive and well two decades later. David Mailu’s After 4:30 was banned for its sexual content.

In the last decade, S.A. Mohammed, author of Kiu and Kitumbua Kimeingia Mchanga, both written in Kiswahili, was deemed sexually explicit and pornographic by a church backed Parents Caucus.

Chinua Achebe’s Man of the People also got blacklisted for its ability to ‘excite the students’ imagination and stir their sexual desires’.

As a result, banned works of art have always stimulated my curiosity. Millions saw the apple fall from the tree but (Isaac) Newton asked why.

Thanks to the Film board’s latest banned movie, a whole section of Kenyans are now trying to get their hands on “50 Shades of Grey”. Piracy is one of the few areas of business where bans are godsend.

A banned movie is a windfall and any DVD movie hawker with half a brain, probably has several copies of the banned movie at the bottom of his box doing rounds as we speak.

The long winded point I am trying to make is that, nothing draws us to work of art faster than a ban. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it enlightened the dog.