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Culture divide - or media manipulation?

Thursday, November 19, 2009

SOMETIMES A SOCIETY I know and love will suddenly act crazy, as if I didn’t really know it at all.

Like in 1995 when the US appeared totally transfixed – via cable TV mainly, during that pre-blogosphere time of relative innocence - by the O J Simpson murder trial. Or last year when South Africa, the so-called rainbow nation that had overturned centuries of race-based oppression, was suddenly convulsed in an upheaval of xenophobia, with immigrants violently attacked in the streets and in their homes – with many in the media fanning the flames.
 
And now comes Zambia. It's a country where colonial rule was displaced and a free society created anew in the 1960s, informed by the enlightened philosophy of “Christian Humanism” – but it has been going somewhat insane this week over what has been called “pornography” by the president Rupiah Banda (above right).
 
But it’s not about pornography.
 
Here’s the real story.
 
Against the background of a public employees' strike seizing up many of the country’s essential health services, a horrible event took place in the capital Lusaka. A young woman was forced to give birth without medical help in the parking lot of a strike-bound hospital. Pictures were taken – and distressing pictures they were. A baby is seen emerging from the mother in the breech position; and the infant dies of suffocation.
 
Through the woman’s family the pictures reached Chansa Kabwela (above left) News Editor of the nation’s leading newspaper The Post. With (I believe) a commendable desire to put public policy before journalistic sensation, Kabwela didn’t immediately publish the pictures. Instead she sent them to senior government officials, demonstrating to them what human costs were resulting from the government’s poor handling of a critical labor dispute.
 
Outrage swept the corridors of power, but not about the horrible event. Rather, the outrage voiced was that pictures of such a private and personal female nature should be shown to others – especially to men. The President himself labeled them “pornographic” in a press conference, and ordered legal action be taken. Kabwela came to trail on charges not unlike those in America against sending obscene material via US Mail.
 
   
 
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IT MAY HAVE BEEN A MORALISTIC smokescreen, but the government’s case was pressed with some discomfiting force.
 
At one point the arresting officer – a policewoman, notably - gave evidence and expressed herself in personally indignant tones: "We are all Zambian here. We all know this is not allowed in our culture." She herself, she said, had felt assaulted by the pictures, made to feel naked herself.
 
Playing on these undoubted sensitivities, the government nearly got away with it. The only international reporter in the courtroom – Jo Fidgen, an experienced BBC radio reporter and host who now freelances from Zambia for the Beeb’s World Service – was prompted to re-examine her own social and sexual attitudes. “Maybe there are cultural forces at play here beyond my understanding”, she said.
 
The nation has certainly been transfixed by the trial arguments, through exhaustive press, radio and TV coverage, and inside the courtroom legalistic grandstanding and noisy audience participation had to be determinedly reined in by the presiding magistrate.
 
But in the end the editor was - thank God - acquitted, just two days ago, in what is rightly being seen as a triumph for free speech, including the public’s right to know how well or otherwise its government is handling a national crisis.
 
And for sure, all the Zambian women I know  -  journalists, civil servants and many other professionals  -  would have no truck with such a governmental effort to exploit some unavoidable concerns for female modesty, in order to prevent the open confrontation of a real and terrible threat to women’s health.

 

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