The Blacklist and the Hollywood ‘holocaust’

By Peter Kimani

Something remarkably striking happened this week in America. A publication made a grovelling apology to its readers for a grave error committed generations ago.

The son of The Hollywood Reporter founder atoned for his father’s sins by admitting the publication’s role in promoting the Blacklist – Government-sanctioned propaganda that essentially a death sentence for hundreds of left-leaning American artists, writers and intellectuals by branding them communists – unheard.

“Calling someone a communist today is almost laughable,” WR Wilkerson III wrote this week.

“But in 1950, it was a professional death sentence. Instantaneously, people lost their jobs, and future employment was, in too many cases, denied.”

Peerless actor

These sentiments are powerfully conveyed in a documentary released two years ago, Scandalise My Name, from the title of Paul Robeson’s song, himself a victim of the Blacklist.

The documentary hosted by peerless actor Morgan Freeman presents an assemblage of interviews from actors and activists who survived the Blacklist and lived to tell the story.

To provide a context, the Blacklist, was a compilation of about 200 names issued by US intelligence as a strategy to tarnish and discredit leading figures associated with the left to undercut, if not wipe out, their influence over the public in agitating for equal rights and better working conditions for all.

Senate probe

The scheme was fronted by the Republican senator for Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, whose mandate under the Senate probe was to investigate and expose “un-American” activities that threatened to overthrow the Government with outside “communist” support.

Sounds familiar? Yes that script was staged in our own country at the height of the 1980s, and it similarly targeted writers and intellectuals with “communist” connections, and whose “subversive” actions, it was said, threatened the violent overthrow of a legitimate Government.

Leading African-American writers like James Baldwin and

Richard Wright found it difficult to operate once they were Blacklisted, and opted to escape state repression by going into exile.

Kenyan writers on the left suffered a similar fate. The list of writers and intellectuals who fled Kenya in the 1980s is too long to enumerate, more so when names like Mwakenya were invoked to demonstrate their nefarious connections and deadly intents.

There are more parallels between the Blacklist and our Mwakenya: Writers and activists on the left made a determined and articulate expression of their envisioned future, where all would live freely and without fear.

Why, we had only acquired our political independence in 1963 through an armed struggle, hence the legitimate expectation that the new nation would not oppress her own children. African- Americans, on the other hand, were emerging from a bruising World War II where they had defeated fascism. Blacks had fought alongside whites. They expected to enjoy full citizens’ rights, and not be treated like “nigger.”

Liberation struggles

One of the titans felled by the Blacklist was Paul Robeson, a lawyer, singer, athlete, actor, and activist who also ran the Council on Africa, which had transnational ambitions of linking Africans’ liberation struggles with those of African- Americans.

As Ossie Davis reminds us in Scandalise My Name, Robeson’s charisma and influence were in same league as Martin Luther King’s. But in his last years, Robeson lost just about everything after Blacklist. Unable to practice law, or entertain his audience after his passport was revoked, he retreated to the background before his death that most believed was from poisoning.

This week, on the 65th anniversary of the Blacklist, The Hollywood Reporter has owed up to its failures. How long shall we wait?

Ode to KK, the old pal that could give Kilifi a new lease

I have been keeping my ear to the ground and this week I picked vibrations about old pal Kazungu Katana, fondly known as KK’s impending departure from his Gigiri base to stake a claim in politics.

I hear KK is headed somewhere in Kilifi. I’m not sure if that’s where machete-wielding goons have been roaming. For those who may not have met him, KK was the face of the US embassy Press office for close to two decades, if not more, accessible at all times, and generous to a fault.

He wouldn’t let me queue for a visa, insisting his office was supposed to facilitate smooth operations for scribes, not mount barriers.

I have never met a more honest public servant, and I’m confident those who worked with KK at the national broadcaster, KBC, where he was known to another generation as “Mwana wa Leah,” would offer similar verdicts.

That’s the sort of leadership the Kilifi senate would need. But without political money to buy votes or patronage – neither of which I doubt KK would sanction – or hiring goons to prevent opponents from campaigning, he would only have an outside chance.

Yet, there is a glimmer of hope that things have changed. We have tasted the bitter pill of leadership failure over the years.

I think KK represents the future of what Kenya could become. I’m saying so because I know so.

Since KK did not pay for this message – which means he did not approve it – his opponents are invited to offer tokens that could motivate me to recant my testament.

May the sun shine to fire those solar panels, illuminate the way

I hear Kenyans are getting jittery about the many teething problems that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission is undergoing in its effort to register voters.

They need to know these things are complicated and patience is encouraged.

Some folks in Bomet were alarmed about Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits’ apparent malfunction because passwords had not been changed within the stipulated dateline after their manufacture.

One thing about passwords is that you have to have the old one before one can type out the new code. Then there was the issue of the sun not shining long enough to power the solar panels.

This sounds like well co-ordinated activities by politicians out to derail voter registration, particularly in areas where they enjoy least support. Or why has it been shining in other parts of the country where no voter registration has commenced? This is sophisticated way rigging. And they have the temerity to conspire even with nature.

Did you see what American politicians did? They tempered with nature and the ocean boiled over, unleashing a hurricane that destroyed lives and property, but gave our Cousin Barry all the mahewa he needed to feel and look presidential. And see where his challenger Mitt Romney is?

These politicians!