Parable of the sword and the pen and the rising tide against free thought in society

NAIROBI: I never doubted the inherent risks in providing comic relief to a society constipated with bitterness and hardships, but I never suspected those provoked could consider murder as a response to satire.

Satire, after all, is a quest to laugh at oneself, thereby providing fresh insights into a problem or subject.

French scribes at Charlie Hebdo, a journal which most of us heard for the first time this week, paid the ultimate price for their work. An editorial meeting was interrupted by the crack of gunfire as hooded hoodlums called our scribes' names, one by one, and shot them dead.

Reason? Charlie Hedbo had published cartoons that the criminals found offensive. The cartoonist in question had caricatured the French society for 45 years, and he was still at his desk doing his sketches when he met his death. He lampooned politicians and different faiths without fear.

But he also created many illustrations, including a long-running children's TV series that nurtured generations of French children.

Predictably, the world has responded with outrage, and rightly so. But the events of this week have led to a little introspection on my part, and to my horror, I realised low-scale Charlie Hebdos have been committed to journalism worldwide on a regular basis.

There are the three Al Jazeera scribes wasting away in an Egyptian jail for over a year now, apparently for aiding Muslim Brotherhood through their reporting. Journalism has become a crime.

Closer home, there was the raid on this newsroom nearly a decade ago, when similarly hooded goons, armed to the teeth, descended on the group and harassed scribes on duty, switched off the TV transmission and set the day's paper to fire.

As far as I know, no explanation has been provided by the Government for their action.

Perhaps the Government need not provide any explanation. As Martin Shikuku, the departed politician remarked in 1975, there should be no need to substantiate the obvious.

And although the raid on The Standard was orchestrated by the Narc administration under former Prezzo, now Mzee Emilio of Mweiga, where I understand he is yet to reach, presumably because he is been walking home, it is under the Jubilee administration that the worst assault on media freedom have been launched.

I am not talking about legal instruments being legislated by ill-mannered politicians who fight it out because, as Tracy Chapman sings, words don't come easily; I am talking about diverse threats like denial of advertisement to independent media, arrest of bloggers and deregistration of non-governmental organisations.

But that's not my problem; I am more worried about the by-products of this climate of fear, which include self-censorship.

The latter is a very poisoned chalice for one wouldn't need any censor; they would do the work for them. And since one wouldn't know what's safe to say, as happens when one is not inhibited, there is no testing of the limits to discover what's permissible.

The goons of Paris sought to silence Charlie Hebdo scribes with their guns; instead, they have resurrected the power of the pen with the reproduction of some of the cartoons that they considered offensive by other French media.

And once again, the collective humanity has demonstrated evil can never triumph over good, or even the sword cut deeper blows than the strokes of the pen. The indelible marks left by Charlie Hebdo scribes confirm it.

And that's the lesson all those intolerant to criticism should learn and internalise.