Amie Cham; On Freedom, and freedom

Intro:

[In the very first article of this blog (The Fourth Estate), rating Gambian websites, I made recommendations as to what each website NEEDS and DESERVES. My recommendation for one of the wesites was to "just close down". Here, Amie Cham explains just why and how Gambians are better off WITHOUT certain "literature". I'm sure people like Sekou Toure are also encouraged that this IS "the dawn of a new era in Gambian Journalism. The journalists will watch the government, and the PEOPLE will keep the journalists in check!" I encourage all Gambians who feel the same way, or otherwise, to make yourself heard.]
Louis Friend

Here’s what Ms Cham has to say:

This week, on my weekly call to The Gambia to speak to friends and family there, I had the opportunity to talk to my grand-nephew Kemo, a brilliant young man currently attending high school. Kemo couldn't wait for his mother to hand him the phone, so he could tell me about the prize-winning poem he had written at school for a competition.

"It won first prize in my school, Aunty", he said.

"That's very good Kemo. I'm proud of you. Why don't you email it to me?"

"Ummm...", he replied, not sounding very enthusiastic. On further questioning, I found out the reason for his reticence. Apparently the competition had been not just a school one, but a regional one, and the teacher in charge had selected the best poem from his class (Kemo's), in order to put it online to compete with other best poems from the region. When Kemo's father had learnt about it, however, he had brought the whole thing to a halt. Why?

"He says the Internet is a bad place, Aunty", Kemo said, before his mother took the phone from him and explained to me that due to certain...issues surrounding the publication of certain... information on the Internet, which had led to certain people being arrested, Kemo's father had thought it best to not have their son publish his poem (which incidentally was about democracy) online. We soon moved away from the delicate topic - no one likes to discuss the issue of Government censorship on a telephone, not least of all on an International call - and after a while we completed the conversation and I hung up.

But the conversation had me thinking later, sitting alone in my apartment. It had me thinking about the issue of press freedom in the country, and the relationship between the Press and the Government. But more specifically, it had me thinking about Freedom Newspaper.

Freedom Newspaper is an online Gambian newspaper. Its website is one of the most visited in the country, and probably gets more hits every day than the Daily Observer, currently the newspaper in the country with the largest circulation (and an open supporter of the APRC Government). The ominous "issues" Kemo's mother referred to in the phone conversation we had were the arrests which had resulted when the National Intelligence Agency had rounded up and (illegally) detained a list of people purported to be subscribers to Freedom, which had caused quite a stir in the country. This was why Kemo's father - who is otherwise a very intelligent, thoughtful man, with whom I have had many insightful talks - forbade Kemo from having anything to do with the Internet. Completely illiterate about the new computer technology (like most of his generation), the Freedom arrests had one effect on him: making him believe that everything associated with the Internet is a bad thing or, at least, something that could get you into trouble, and therefore best avoided.

Which leads me to the point I want to make in this article: Freedom and its ilk are, paradoxically, instead of the beacons of democracy and hope they like to affect themselves as, in fact quite as bad as they paint the current Government to be, and are one of the great barriers to democracy (at least, that aspect of democracy which permits a free press) in the Gambia. Or, to make it into a catchy slogan: Freedom newspaper is bad. Not just bad - it's about the worst thing that has happened to the campaign for press freedom in our country.

What I feel whenever I visit the Freedom homepage is a great sense of disappointment - I am completely underwhelmed. So much has been said about press freedom in this country. Press censorship is still a big problem in The Gambia, with reporters (like everyone else in the country) self-censoring themselves before they write a single word, or report a single event - such is the fear the Government has instilled, with its widely publicized 'disappearances' and its attacks on newspapers. The result is a wishy-washy press, mostly afraid to be seen as too critical, underpaid and overworked and toeing the fine line between government sycophancy on one side, and being harassed endlessly and with no legal respite in sight on the other side.

Then along came the Internet, that wild free land of plenty which is beyond the clutches of all but the most totalitarian Governments. Our Government (though Freedom Newspaper would have you believe it is much worse than China's) does not really monitor what goes in and out of the country on the Internet's pipes, or try to control it on any significant scale. There is no great Gambian Internet firewall, and people are allowed to access pretty much any Internet site they wish to. Thus the popularity of Freedom was a very encouraging sign, at the onset: it showed that people wanted free press, they wanted reports written by reporters writing outside the great threatening shadow of the Gambia Government, and if they had a source to get these "free and fair", completely non-partisan reports they would go there en masse. It wasn't that Gambians were too stupid to want or deserve a good press, it was that they were shrewd enough to not go around saying it in public, but were only secretly waiting for one to surface. And then their prayers were answered, and suddenly everyone was talking about the great Internet newspaper, Freedom. And not just talking, but emailing each other articles, and printing them out to take home later to their non-Internet-browsing friends at the bantaba, for discussions over attaya.

Like pioneers visiting brave new lands across the Ocean, Freedom was given an opportunity few other newspapers have: to set the standards for democratic discourse in this country, to be the flag-bearers, the gold weight against which all future Internet publications would be measured. Freedom was the great press experiment: here we were, fighting for an unfettered press, a free one, and now here was a newspaper which could not get any freer, which had exactly the lack of control and freedom from Government pressure we had all been fighting for, and dreaming about every time we had to delete a paragraph from a report because we thought the President wouldn't like it. What would Freedom do with this freedom? We waited with bated breath, thrills of excitement running up and down our spines as we thought about the possibilities. And Freedom, instead of coming through, instead of showing the critics once and for all that Government needs to be watched, an illuminating spotlight thrown unto its every activity at every turn, and that the best way to achieve this is through a free press, Freedom instead became the greatest argument against press freedom in the Gambia, a "newspaper" which makes even the most stalwart defender of the press blanch and cover their face in embarrassment at its mention, hastily changing the topic or leaving the room.

If you have never visited the Freedom website, permit me explain how it works: imagine the cheapest, most lurid tabloid newspaper you can think of. Now take this, and visualize it being filled, not with headlines about superstars secretly having intercourse with barnyard pigs, but instead with the cheapest, most low-life stories about everyone who has ever had anything to do with the Government of the Gambia, stories which usually have absolutely nothing to do with their ability (or lack thereof) to perform their duties as civil servants, but instead delve deep into the unfortunate subject's personal lives, weaving one strand of half-fact with a hundred strands of coarse and unimaginative outright lies to produce a dirty, smelly tapestry of their lives, filled with hate. You'd think, with everything going on in the country, a newspaper would be hard-pressed to find enough column space. But whilst people like Louis Friend try their best to write intelligent, critical and honest-to-God reviews of the news headlines and what is going on, with an eye to the future of the country, websites like Freedom slash and burn, ravaging and creating havoc, pissing in the water-hole we are all going to have to drink from in the future. And at the same time creating not a little rancor towards the Press, and the Internet as a media reporting platform, on the part of both the Government, and the average Gambian. What Freedom lacks for in reporting accuracy and factual content they more than make up for in prolificacy - to read their website you'd think that every single army colonel at Kanilai is just dying to defect, and all of them keep reaching the conclusion that sending an email to the Freedom editor pouring their hearts out is the best way to do it.

In the world-as-Freedom-knows-it, there are only two sides: you are either with the government (and thus a thief, liar, and general ne'er-do-well, whose most sordid personal historical details are liable to be put online and paraded before everyone, as proof of your irredeemable corruption); or you are against the government, absolutely hating everyone who is on the other side, and willing to agree with anything Freedom says. No middle ground, no place for people who want to take an intelligent look at issues and see how we can work best with what we have in place, to move the Gambia further forward (at places like Freedom, the underlying assumption apparently is that there is something called perfect democracy, and it exists in the real world, and the Gambia will get it as soon as the President is replaced, preferably in a violent coup d'etat that will leave him and everyone who ever worked with him decapitated and/or dead. There is no analysis of issues, no discussion of problems and possible solutions to them apart from this). *

But perhaps there is a good side to all this, I imagine you thinking, Oh gentle reader. Perhaps the very fact that there exists some form of dissent online, even if it's only of the crackpot, conspiracy-theory kind, is a good thing: anything that will give some counterpoint to the boring, repetitious sycophancy and empty rhetoric that are the majority of local newspaper editorials. At least Freedom is daring to say these things, unlike those cowards sitting at home. This is certainly what the editor of Freedom would have you believe. The people who run Freedom firmly believe they are doing a great and heroic thing, standing up to The Man, publishing things that no other Gambian paper would dare publish. In actual fact, Freedom is doing far more harm than if it didn't exist at all. Let's look at this claim closer. Freedom newspaper has two kinds of audience:

- people who are already convinced Jammeh can do no harm, he wouldn't hurt a fly, etc. ** For these Freedom only further reinforces their belief that the opposition are a bunch of hate-mongering, vengeful crackpots who're in it for personal gain, or because they hold grudges against members of the Government. The small subset of this group who have actually been attacked on Freedom's website then set themselves up as poor victims, who deserve sympathy for these unfounded attacks on them even though they have never done anything but good for the country, etc., etc. The net effect is that Freedom actually helps these people further concrete their wishful fantasies, and gives them one more escape from actually facing the facts, whilst at the same time making even legitimate opposition look very, very bad. It's like discovering one bad egg amongst a crate of eggs you are about to buy - you are immediately put off the whole crate, and asking for another.

- people who have some doubt, who think perhaps there may be something wrong with a government in which the president is all-powerful and laws are routinely ignored, with no consequences whatsoever. Freedom makes these, paradoxically, afraid. Yes, scared to death, at the shootings and killings and ominuous dissapearings which are purported to be suffered by all those who dare oppose Jammeh, with no end in sight, and no hope of justice. Freedom paints the situation thus: all-powerful Jammeh and his henchmen on one side, acting with perfect impunity, the ordinary powerless Gambian (the hapless reader) on the other, unable to do anything about it, and in so doing does a much better job than the NIA (which, let's face it, has limited resources and is not really as omniscient as they would have you believe) ever could.

One cannot speak about Freedom without mentioning its editor, one Pa Nderry M'bai. A few months ago the Freedom website headlined an article claiming that he was on a list of "most wanted" people in The Gambia, that his life was in grave danger should he return to the country. Only last week there was a story on the front page about former Observer editor Sheriff Bojang, claiming he had "betrayed" members of the Opposition during his tenure, faxing stories to the state house and getting people arrested. Midway through the reporting, the purported whistle-blower, Pa Nderry M'bai, Freedom's editor, started to tell the reporter about his "ordeal at the Observer". After explaining that he had been fired, but Mr Bojang had kept him on and still paid him, he went on:

"[The Editors at Observer] claimed that Mbai was their star reporter. They could not afford to lose such an enterprising reporter. Thanks to M’Bai’s stories, Observer’s sales had improved dramatically at the material time. Parting with the Reporter was not in their best interest."

These kinds of stories crop up with alarming frequency on the site, and the impression you get of the editor is of an egotistical man, one who cares more about feeding his own self-aggrandizing masturbatory fantasies than about the future of the Gambia, a narcissist bearing an ancient and unfulfilled personal grudge against the current Government and the people who lead it. Reading the daily headlines on the site, Pa Nderry comes up over and over again sounding like the jealous and spiteful kid in the boarding school who everyone refuses to play with, and who goes around putting dirt into people's beds and willfully not flushing the toilet, these trivial and meaningless acts blown up in his mind out of proportion to become large deeds of resistance against his "enemies".

The Internet, in large part due to the lack of technical literacy in the country, has been given a weight of truth which it does not possess, a seal of veracity which makes a Gambian much more likely to believe something if it is online, on a website, behind the supposed immutability of a computer screen. This has led to Freedom being given an over-inflamed importance by those Gambians who read it, believing things printed in it which they would never believe if it had come from another source (such as the radio) religiously following each new headline with wide-eyed wonder at the daring of the writers. Gambians have learnt that the radio - and even the TV - can lie, but they have not yet been burnt by the Internet. Most of them still do not understand the underlying principle of the Worldwide Web: that any idiot can create a website, and put whatever they want on it, that there are no rules, online, stopping anyone from saying anything they want.

Here is what I propose - stop giving Freedom hits. Stop going to their website, and listening to their lies. If you are interested in democracy in the country, if you want the Gambia to become a better place for not only us but our children and grand-children, then what I am about to say next should make sense to you: spreading hate is not the way we want to do it. Freedom is so far off the mark I have shuddered every time I have had to call it a newspaper in this article - it is anything but. I am not sure even the tabloids would welcome it as one of their own.

Let us kill Freedom (and nurture freedom, giving it back its good name), and start all over again, creating a Gambian Press worthy of the name, one whose freedom is worth defending. Now is the time to promote dialogue, to firmly make the issue the Gambia. I have seen - and been greatly impressed with - Gambians writing and speaking both online and off-, and I do not believe Freedom is the best out there, the pinnacle of Gambian reportage. We need a press that is intelligent and lucid, but also ethical (Freedom is none of these things). We need to re-invent Gambian politics, and Gambian Government, and this is a good way to start: putting our foot firmly down, and saying no insults, no character assassinations, no lies or deceit or trickery. Let's make it about the issues, and stick to those, even when it becomes tempting in our effeminate desperation to call people names, and smear shit on the walls. As a people, we really are one of the friendliest bunch on the planet, our culture is one built on mutual respect for one another, and it is on this foundation that any eventual homegrown democracy that works will have to build on. This is bigger than Freedom, or Jammeh, or any single political party - this is about the whole political process. Let's make the Internet a respectable part of politics in the country again. And let's make politics respectable.

[Footnotes]

* This reflects a wider problem with Gambian political culture: its complete partisanship. You choose a party, and then stick with it, agreeing with whatever policies the party leader sets forward, and disagreeing with whatever competing parties propose, even if your party leader wants to use the country's money to build statues of elephants wearing underpants, because he thinks they are cute, and the opposition leader thinks perhaps the money should be spent on building a new hospital... It is almost unheard of to have someone from one party during a discussion come out in opposition to whatever their party leader said, or in support of whatever the opposition party is saying.

** Aside: these also fall into two camps, the smaller camp of people who actually do believe this, and those who don't, but have decided to in the best interests of everyone involved, especially themselves.

Amie Cham

NYAMATOO Says:

“To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly…”
VIRGINIA WOOLF