/ 18 June 2004

It’s 2004 and Big Comrade is growling

The ridiculous concept of ”quiet diplomacy” has been our government’s response to the political catastrophe that is Zimbabwe. It’s been obvious that the ANC is not only quite content to let the Mugabe oligarchy continue with its brutality and its devastation, it often openly endorses it. It isn’t at all surprising, therefore, that in one of its latest moves, the ANC shows it is set upon becoming another Zanu-PF.

Draft legislation has been published recently by the Justice Ministry: the Prohibition of Hate Speech draft Bill. Kimani Ndungu, head of the Free- dom of Expression Institute’s anti-censorship lobby, has said that provisions of the draft Bill are synonymous with the Zimbabwean Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

The only thing that’s surprising about this draft Bill is that it’s taken so long to appear. That it’s been in the offing is as clear as daylight. Ever since it took over government, the ANC has complained about media comment critical of the party and its officers. This self-pitying farrago is common usage from the bottom to the top of the ANC administration.

Freedom of speech and expression are guaranteed under the South African Constitution. It is to the country’s eternal credit that prime liberties are currently so enjoyed and explored. Those chapters of the South African media not under direct control of the ANC administration — the SABC is the prominent example of one that is — have never been so sovereign, so free to criticise, to analyse and discuss. Our press, in particular, hosts a wide compass of opinion. Our stages present work no longer throttled by censors. Our radio and television broadcasters are alive with individuality.

Clearly, all this disturbing autonomy of perspective, this distressing liberty of the mind, this ominous independence of thought has been too much for the ANC to stomach. It is time to crack down. Time to silence dissenters of the prescribed will. It’s 2004. Big Comrade is growling.

You only have to look through the broad definitions of ”hate speech”, as evinced in the draft Bill, to understand — and be dismayed at — what is intended. The Kafkaesque draft Bill states that criminal liability will follow for: ”Any person who in public advocates hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion against any other person or group of persons that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate an intention to be hurtful, harmful or to incite harm, intimidate or threaten, promote or propagate racial, ethnic, gender and religious superiority, incite imminent violence, cause or perpetuate systemic disadvantage, undermine human dignity or adversely affect the equal enjoyment of any person’s or group of persons’ rights and freedoms in a serious manner.” The draft Bill leaves to interpretation what it describes as ”fair and accurate reporting in the public interest”. Talk about a catch-all.

Under such legislation both the Mail & Guardian editor and I would be liable to be charged as criminals for publishing the opening comments in this column. It could be argued that the comments demonstrate an intention to be hurtful; that they advocate hatred of a group of persons, could reasonably be construed to demonstrate an intention to be hurtful, harmful or to incite harm. Since the ANC is made up largely of African people, the comments could be seen to propagate racial or ethnic superiority.

Under eerily similar legislative provisions, the arrest, detention and torture of dissenting journalists takes place in Zimbabwe with regularity.

What is most frightening about this proposed legislation is not only its subversive intention — the gagging of political and other comment — but the question of how it is going to be implemented. Will there be the setting up of a Hate Speech Police? Or will it be left to some appointed government flunky such as the Zimbabwean Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, at whose grotesque whims an entire media industry has been all but destroyed?

And how objective and fair would such an appointee be? For instance, would he or she condemn as hate speech remarks made to his or her staff by the South African ambassador in Indonesia, Norman Mashabane? He said that the thought of having sex with a white woman ”disgusted him”? Somehow I doubt it. What if the colours were reversed in that statement? Three years in the clink?

With this draft Bill we are set on our way back to National Party fascist-style censorship because, no matter how cunningly they try to disguise it under emotionally loaded terminology like ”hate speech”, that’s what the draft Bill proposes. The ANC makes much of the ideal of free speech, its officers clamorously define it as a cornerstone of democracy. Yet it is the ANC that now seeks to specify free speech, to impose some ill-conceived set of ”undesirables” in exactly the way the old Publications Act blatantly enforced the tenets of narrow Calvinist doctrine on the population.

Then, the censorship was justified as protection of the nation’s moral health. Now it is being flaunted as being the defence against such leery notions as ”undermining human dignity” and ”systemic disadvantage”.

It is censorship, nothing more, nothing less.

Next week, the second half of this column