Must Thinking Come At A Price?

Images depicting the charred back of a Namibian lawmaker in Wednesday’s issue of The Namibian could not have escaped our readers’ eyes and must have jolted many despite the fact that the pictures date back nearly 15 years.
Coinciding with Geoffrey Mwilima’s chance to finally and substantively have his day in court over allegations that he was part of an insurrection in August 1999 to have Caprivi secede were media headlines about tensions in Swapo that ended with a slap on the wrist for the leadership of the ruling party’s youth league, specifically its head Elijah Ngurare.
What do the two have in common, one might ask? Freedom of thought and expression as well as due process.
Before Mwilima’s arrest in 1999 he was reported to have advocated a public debate about the secession of Caprivi from Namibia.
The police and the military promptly descended on him and his family with brute force and some of the worst forms of torture were inflicted, leaving him unable to speak and with broken jaws, ribs and internal bleeding.
Mwilima apparently paid a painful price for his thoughts before he had a chance to even put his case to the test in court, never mind public opinion. This week, Mwilima denied that he was ever part of a violent plot to have the region become an independent state.
Although the Swapo youth league leaders did not suffer the same fate as Mwilima, and the expulsions called for did not materialise, information emanating from the ruling party suggests that we have to borrow from the words of Milan Kundera, who wrote that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Widely reported information states that the youth leaders largely got into trouble because their thinking was different from that of “the establishment”, a phrase that one of the youth league leaders used, much to the annoyance of President Hifikepunye Pohamba.
That the youth dared to criticise “senior” leaders and their cavorting with wheeler-dealer businesspeople, using State House as a “club house”, was considered beyond the pale.
As Nelson Mandela lies critically ill on life support, it may be a good time to remind our leaders that innovation and greatness sprout from upsetting the apple cart. The greatest African icon of our time was himself considered something of a rebel by “senior” African National Congress leaders. Him and other young turks, such as Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo, called for violent resistance as the only way to get the message of freedom and democracy to the apartheid regime.
Some in the ANC considered their views heretical, divisive and saw only ill-disciplined youth in them. But how times change. Examples abound of people expressing new thinking and incurring the wrath of the powerful in society.
In these times of the written word and high-tech storage of knowledge, we ought to tread with care not to muzzle free speech under the guise of seeing young people as “disrespecting adults”. That is not to say insults and uncouth behaviour must be given a pass. Society should have, and has, measures in place to systematically handle that which is completely unacceptable.
But adopting kangaroo court tactics to curb “unwarranted” ideas transports us back to the type of society that Swapo, as a liberation movement, fought against.
Surely, the youth league’s proposal that General Martin Shalli (Retired) should head a continental military unit that African Union leaders dream about cannot be considered treasonous. If anything, it should be countered by debate about why it is embarrassing for the party, and country, to put up someone who still faces serious corruption charges.
Lest we forget, freedom of speech is an essential ingredient of human development despite our leaders who, now that they are in power, want to curtail free-thinking when what is said does not suit them.

Comments

   I enjoyed reading this. Indeed, nobody needs permission to think. - Elijah Ngurare