One of the great difficulties with satire is that often those who actually get it are those who are already on board with the message. This has been the case for Zambezi News, Zimbabwe’s leading satirical show.
Co-founder Samm Farai Monro, aka Comrade Fatso, says: “An old member of parliament may not understand our show or some of the content will go over their head, but this isn’t our target audience; our aim is reaching young Zimbabweans.”
Zambezi News parodies the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, “the state-controlled propaganda mouthpiece”, for its uncritical approach to Robert Mugabe’s government. Unsurprisingly, you won’t find the show on Zimbabwean television, and the cast is frequently harassed by state officials.
The show shot its first season in 2011 and self-promoted through independent radio and activists groups. “When we first started the show, we printed thousands of DVDs and distributed them ourselves across the country,” he says. “But now with the advent of social media and people’s access to the internet through mobile phones, we can distribute through Facebook and WhatsApp to get the message out there.”
The snubs by the state clearly haven’t hurt Zambezi News. The show has been viewed by six million Zimbabweans, and the cast have performed in Sweden, South Africa, Swaziland, the USA and with Index on Censorship in London.
Still, given the treatment of critics and dissidents in Zimbabwe, there is no doubt that Monro and his comedy troupe are risking their freedom and even their lives to make some of the hardest hitting satire in Africa. In 2010, artist Owen Maseko exhibited paintings critical of Mugabe, depicting government-led massacres in the country in the 1980s. As it’s against the law to insult the president’s authority, Maseko was arrested, interrogated and faced a possible 20-year prison sentence.
Other critics, such as activist Itai Dzamara, who had told the country’s 92-year-old dictator that he was too old to run the country and was causing Zimbabwe’s economic woes, have been disappeared. Dzamara was abducted in March 2015 never heard from again.
“Satire affords ordinary people an opportunity to connect with a message or conversation in lighter terms outside of the regular intellectual jargon that you find these politicians spouting on a daily basis,” he says. “It allows that engagement to keep flowing without people disconnecting or just feeling depressed or hopeless.”
Satire also has a knack of being able to bend its targets out of shape. “There is a group of government supporters who are really disgruntled by what we do,” says Makawa. “With satire, there has to be a degree to which people agree with you, while at the same time leaving a lot of ruffled feathers in its wake.”
Makawa and Monro have certainly ruffled many feathers, in whatever medium they are working in. Both have backgrounds in spoken word, hip hop and as activists. They run Magamba, “a cultural activist network”, which uses arts and culture in the struggle for social justice in Zimbabwe, and Shoko Festival, Zimbabwe’s “biggest festival of urban culture”.
“Shocko is about creating a space for free expression, debate and giving people a platform to talk about social and political issues, often using the vehicle of hip hop,” says Monro.
Long before his involvement with Zambezi News, Monro’s band Chabvondoka saw their debut album House of Hunger — which mixes hip hop with traditional African music such as Chimurenga to discuss political and social issues — banned from state-controlled radio and TV.
“We released the album two weeks before the presidential elections at the time, and it’s heavily critical of the government,” says Monro. “The symbolism behind the album was a book by Dambudzo Marechera, the great Zimbabwean writer, which talked about how Rhodesia was a house of hunger, but we’ve still got that situation in places.”
An estimated 1.5 million people – 16% of the population – were projected to be food insecure in 2015, a 164% on the previous year. And while the white colonial rulers of the past may be gone, the oppressors have “now been painted black and we still have the same structure of repression in places,” Monro adds.
The repression has also taken the form of an intensified campaign of artistic censorship by the government since the early 2000s, especially against defiant art.
“Hip hop, by its nature, has always been a defiant genre, something that speaks against the status quo and gives an alternative voice to a group of people who don’t have any other means of channelling their feelings,” says Makawa.
Although busy making with comedy — the pair have just toured a new show and have recently begun recording more Zambezi News— Makawa and Monro still have time for the music.
“I’ve grown to understand that we live like those superheroes who have to do admin work by day and their activism by night,” says Makawa. “I still write rhymes and think about concepts for music, so it really doesn’t ever die, it’s there gathering dust until that time when you need it.”
Monro has just completed his second album, which he has been working on for three years, due to be released later this year. He has kept his skills sharp by making hip hop “a big part of Zambezi News”.
“On the show we have these characters called the Even Mo Lil Swaggery Boys, who are like our alter-egos, a gangster rap crew, and on every season of Zambezi News we record a few hip hop tracks that take the piss out of different issues from elections to power shortages,” he says. “It’s just another way of using hip hop and satire to communicate the important political messaging and get dressed in very silly, over-bling outfits at the same time.”
Since its birth in the Bronx in the 1970s, hip hop has made its mark. Today, graffiti artists, MCs, breakdancers and DJs across the world are still using the medium to empower themselves, from women in Columbia and political movements in Burkina Faso, to aiding the fight for free speech in Zimbabwe and challenging religious stereotypes in the UK.
Index on Censorship has teamed up with In Place of War to create two unique full-day events that provide an opportunity to listen to, learn from and collaborate with 14 world-changing hip hop artists from eight different countries.
The Power of Hip Hop: Exchange / 8 July
A multi-disciplinary full-day academic conference that considers hip-hop’s role in revolutionary social, political and economic movements across the world.
The Power of Hip Hop: Exchange will explore the role, challenges and potential of hip-hop culture in facilitating positive social change in global contexts, and its role as a site of resistance and identity.
The day features academic panels, keynote papers, artist performances and practitioner presentations. This event harnesses In Place of War’s vast international network of grassroots artists and University of Manchester origins, to explore issues including hip hop and gender, race, religion, commerce, and conflict.
When: 8 July 2016, 10.00 – 18.30 (registration 9.30) Where: Richmix, London (map) Tickets: £45/£36 concessions – lunch, refreshments and delegate packs included (buy online) Promo Code: “hiphop15” (£15 ticket). Can be redeemed online at checkout, over the phone or at the box office.
The Power of Hip Hop: Live / 9 July
A day of TED-style talks and live performance. Join 14 of hip hop’s most revolutionary artists from across the world for a mix of music, dance, rap, DJing, VJing, exhibitions and satire.
From local grassroots initiatives to multi-national citizen movements, you’ll hear stories of how hip hop is changing the world first-hand. You’ll encounter the artists performing live. And you’ll have chances to meet the speakers throughout the day, before a DJ set and drinks to end it.
Featuring Index on Censorship’s inaugural Music in Exile fellow Smockey (Burkina Faso), Rodney P (UK), Zambezi News (Zimbabwe), Wade Waters (USA), Poetic Pilgrimage (UK), SYMBIZ (Germany), Shhorai (Colombia), Afrikan Boy (UK/Nigeria) and more.
When: 9 July 2016, 12.00 – 19.30 (doors 11.30) Where: Richmix, London (map) Tickets: £20/£15 concessions (buy online) Promo Code: “hiphop10” (£10 ticket). Can be redeemed online at checkout, over the phone or at the box office.
It was my intention for a long time to publish a statement about the censorship of my video Ayhan and me (2016), part of the group exhibition Post-Peace that was censored by Akbank Sanat. When the exhibition was censored, I wanted to prioritise the group statement of the collaborators and artists of the exhibition. The group statement is out, and it’s now my turn. I would like this statement to be seen as a contribution to the statements made by Katia Krupennikova, the curator of the show; the jury of the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition 2015; Anonymous Stateless Immigrants Movement; and the artist and contributors of the exhibition Post-Peace. With this statement, I aim to share my own experience.
I am the only artist from Turkey that was supposed to take part in the group exhibition Post-Peace. My initial proposal was specifically about Turkey. This proposal went through a censorship process starting months before the originally planned opening date. I’d like to share my experience with the hope that it will shed a little bit of light on the censorship that of the exhibition itself and the problem of censorship in the art field more generally.
The group exhibition Post-Peace was initially planned to take place in Amsterdam. I was invited by the curator at this early stage. Later on, with this exhibition concept, Katia Krupennikova applied for and won the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition 2015. The exhibition moved from Amsterdam to Istanbul. In one of the talks Katia had with Akbank Sanat managers in November 2015, she mentioned to them my proposal. They told Katia that the political situation in Turkey is tense and that they can not commission the proposed work. Katia asked for an official statement from the director of Akbank Sanat, Derya Bigalı. She didn’t receive a reply. I met Katia when she came back to Amsterdam. We wrote together to Zeynep Arınç from Akbank Sanat, with whom Katia has been in contact throughout the process. We asked for a formal rejection letter from the director, explaining the reasons for their decision. Zeynep Arınç replied to our email informally telling Katia that Akbank Sanat can not commission this work.
My initial work proposal, censored by Akbank Sanat, was about Ayhan Çarkın. Ayhan Çarkın was part of JITEM, an unofficial paramilitary wing of the Turkish Security Forces active in mass executions of the Kurdish population in the 1990s. As a part of the deep state and JITEM, Ayhan Çarkın confessed in 2011 that he led operations that killed over 1000 Kurdish people during the 1990s. These confessions were made on television, and videos from those confessions are accessible on Youtube. The work I was planning to make was about Ayhan Çarkın’s personal transformation, how historical reality is constructed, and how to think about the term ‘evil’. This work, which was only a written proposal at that point, was censored by Akbank Sanat, even though it was part of the curator’s exhibition concept from the very beginning, and was chosen by an international jury as part of the exhibition for Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition 2015.
This was the first time something like this had happened to me. Instead of leaving the exhibition, Katia and I came up with a proposal for a new work. The new work was going to talk about the censorship of my previous proposal, as well as the politics of images of war in Turkey. Akbank Sanat requested to see the script of this new work. Katia didn’t respond to this request, and I told her that I’m not in favour of showing the script, due to Akbank Sanat’s attitude up till that point. Consequently, we asked the founder of the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition, curator Başak Şenova, for her opinion on this issue. At first she supported us, but after she consulted with Akbank Sanat she told us that the refusal by Akbank Sanat is understandable. To be honest these reactions made me feel alone. Turkey is really going through a tough period, and I started questioning why, as an artist, I was putting the whole institution at risk.
In December before I started producing my second proposal I realised that I did not feel comfortable with accepting the situation as it was. I decided to make the censorship public, by writing a letter and sending it to the press. I met with Katia and we started writing an email explaining the situation to the jury. In mid-January, before we finalised the letter, Katia told me that she talked to Akbank Sanat and they agreed to the new proposal and no longer demanded to see the script in advance. I started making the video. I got in contact with Siyah Bant, a group that deals with censorship in the field of art in Turkey. I got a lot of support from them, which helped against the feeling of isolation such censorship cases cause. Also, we started thinking about ways to deal with this specific case. The final video took shape as a result of this process. I believe watching the video complements this statement.
The video was finalised on 23 February, and Katia Krupennikova presented all the works to Akbank Sanat for a technical check on the same day. The exhibition was supposed to open on 1 March, and it was cancelled/censored on 25 February. There was no exhibition announcement on Akbank Sanat’s website or social media accounts, or there was any exhibition poster at Akbank Sanat’s space at any point. This makes me think that Akbank Sanat has been considering this decision for a long time, but didn’t communicate it to the curator or any other contributor of the show.
I don’t know and will never get definite confirmation whether the cancellation of Post-Peace was related to the content of my work or not. However, this does not change what happened. Together with Siyah Bant, we prepared a press release explaining the censorship prior to the cancellation of the exhibition. Even if the exhibition had not been cancelled, I was planning to publicise my experience of Akbank Sanat’s censorship.
In the 90s, Akbank Sanat hosted a painting exhibition by Kenan Evren. Kenan Evren is the leader of the 1980 coup d’etat in Turkey. Akbank Sanat has had several censorship cases in its history. Akbank Sanat gave Kenan Evren the possibility to exhibit his work as an “artist”, without questioning his leading role in the 1980 coup, from which the country still suffers. Akbank Sanat has never taken responsibility for this exhibition nor the role they took in it and what it means for Turkey. I do not believe that Akbank Sanat has or aims to acquire the ethical and conceptual capacity to host any exhibitions. The Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition that they have sponsored for the past four years is an important award in the international art world, which gives them a prestige they do not deserve.
At this point I have a number of questions to ask:
– Why does Akbank Sanat have the right to bypass the jury of Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition 2015 and the originally accepted plan of the exhibition? As mentioned in Başak Şenova’s statement following the cancellation: “Afterwards, Akbank Sanat unquestioningly implements all aspects of the exhibition”
– How does Akbank Sanat position itself in relation to the jury of the competition, the founding curator, the curator, and the artists of the exhibition?
– Why didn’t Akbank Sanat discuss the possibility of cancelling the exhibition together with the curator, the artists and the jury prior to the cancellation? Why does Akbank Sanat take decisions from the top, thereby marginalising the contributors and blocking their participation in decision-making mechanisms concerning the very exhibition they have been commissioned to make?
Institutions like Akbank Sanat will not admit that they censored the content of any exhibition, and will not take responsibility for the situation. These institutions interfere with cultural content due to their connections to corporations and banks, allied with oppressive government policies. This paves the way for normalising censorship and abusing the political situation of the country as an excuse, as in the text explaining the cancellation by the director of Akbank Sanat (“Turkey is still reeling from their emotional aftershocks and remains in a period of mourning.”).
I believe we need to expose these government-allied mentalities and structures over and over again. Institutions like Akbank Sanat can continue their activities because every time they censor the cultural arena they get away with it; their acts are not revealed, they are not held accountable, and they continue to receive support. Letting this happen deserts the fields of culture and art, and distances them from the struggles going on in the country. At the same time, this acceptance and silence obstructs those people and institutions that bravely resist, and further restricts already shrinking zones of freedom. We, as cultural and art workers, can counter this by refusing to accept the silencing of artistic expression.
Any cultural and art worker who is ignorant of the ongoing oppression in Turkey, who does not call censorship by its name, who does not see or fails to recognise the ongoing massacres in Kurdish lands becomes part of this oppressive structure. I have channels to speak out, I do not want to intimidate people who don’t have access to such channels, or who have to stay silent in order to avoid risking their lives. It is exactly for this reason, that we have to speak out en masse. I also think that ‘speaking out’ can happen in a variety of ways, just as acts of resistance do.
Although I have a hard time believing it myself, almost everyone I met in Cizre (a Kurdish town inside Turkey bordering Syria) in 2015, has either been killed or else left Cizre in order to stay alive. I owe this statement to the people I met in Cizre. Many other Kurdish towns and cities have suffered from or are currently undergoing similar attacks by Turkish State security forces. Every struggle in this region is connected, even though some might want to separate them. The one sharp difference is that some people get censored and others get killed in this country. Exactly because of this, we, the ones who get censored, need to keep ourselves connected to other resistances and realise of our privilege.
With this letter I wish to show solidarity with those working in the fields of culture and art who have already experienced or might experience similar censorships. My statement aims to express that we do not have to bear those abuses alone, with the hope that more of us will be able to speak up, and the hope that we can act collectively.
Still from an Auschwitz exhibition, 22 July 2014 in Oswiecim, Poland
When discussing academic freedom more than a century ago, German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber wrote: “The first task of a competent teacher is to teach his students to acknowledge inconvenient facts.” In Poland today, history appears to be an inconvenience for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is introducing legislation to punish the use of the term “Polish death camps”.
The Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced earlier this month that the use of the phrase in reference to wartime Nazi concentration camps in Poland could now be punishable with up to five years in prison. If enacted, Poland would find itself in the unique position of being a country where both denying and discussing the Holocaust could land you in trouble with the law. Holocaust denial has been outlawed in Poland — under punishment of three years “deprivation of liberty” — since 1998.
Any suggestion of Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes against Jews brings with it, in the party’s own words, a “humiliation of the Polish nation”.
Of course, Poland was an occupied country which suffered terribly under Nazi Germany, so any talk of acquiescence understandably hits a nerve. As all good history students know, however, the discipline has its ambiguities and competing theories, from the acclaimed to the crackpot, and singular, simplistic narratives are rare. But few democratic countries in the world punish those who argue unpopular historical positions. Which is why legislating against uneasy truths is the same as legislating against academic freedom.
Two recent examples show the Polish government of doing just this. Firstly, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda made public his serious consideration to stripping the Polish-American Princeton professor of history at Princeton University Jan Gross of an Order of Merit — which he received in 1996 both for activities as a dissident in communist Poland in the 1960s and for his scholarship — over his academic work on Polish anti-Semitism. Gross outlined in his 2001 book Neighbors that the massacre of some 1,600 Jews from the Polish village of Jedwabne in July 1941 was committed by Poles, not Nazis. More recently, the historian has claimed that Poles killed more Jews than they did Germans during the war, which prompted the current action against him.
Some who disagree with his arguments have labelled Gross an “enemy” of Poland and a “traitor to the motherland”. The historian has hit back, saying in an interview with the Associated Press: “They want to take [the Order of Merit] away from me for saying what a right-wing, nationalist, xenophobic segment of the population refuses to recognise as facts of history.”
Academics too — Polish and otherwise — have come to his defence. Agata Bielik-Robson, professor of Jewish Studies at Nottingham University, points out that a “democracy has to have a voice of inner criticism”. She is worried that PiS is seeking to do away with such criticism in order “to produce a uniform historical perspective”.
Polish journalist and former activist in the anti-communist Polish trade union Solidarity Konstanty Gebert explained to Index on Censorship that PiS has made “convenient scapegoats” of people like Gross. “PiS is moving fast to reestablish a ‘positive narrative of Polish history’ by breaking with an alleged ‘pedagogy of shame’,” he said.
The party first tried — unsuccessfully — to outlaw the term “Polish death camps” in 2013 when it was in opposition. Should the law now pass, and you need help adhering to the proposed rules, the Auschwitz Museum has released an app to correct any “memory errors” you may experience. It detects thought crimes such as the words “Polish concentration camp” in 16 different languages on your computer, keeping you on the right track with prompts asking if you instead meant to write “German concentration camp”.
Poland may have lurched to the right with the election of PiS last October, but the party’s authoritarianism — from crackdowns on the media to moves to take control of the supreme court — seems positively Soviet in some respects. Attempts to control history, too hark back to the Polish People’s Republic of 1945-1989, when, in the words of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier in the winter 1985 issue of Slavic Review, “cultural patterns” and “habits of mind” made it impossible to make historical interpretations “alien to that national sense of identity and a methodology at odds with the canons and objective scholarship”.
Gebert sees similarities between current and communist-era propaganda “in the basic formulation that there is nothing to be ashamed of in Polish history, and in Polish-Jewish relations in particular, and in the belief that there is one correct national viewpoint”.
However, now that freedom of speech exists, the government can and are being criticised for their actions. “This puts the government propaganda machine on the defensive,” Gebert said.
Just last week, President Duda spoke against the “defamation” of the Polish people “through the hypocrisy of history and the creation of facts that never took place”. He has made his motives clear: “Today, our great responsibility to create a framework […] with the dual aim of fostering a greater sense of patriotic pride at home while enhancing the country’s image abroad.”
It should be intolerable for the freedoms of any academic subject to be impinged for ideological ends. If academic freedom is to mean anything, it should include the right to tell uneasy truths, get things wrong and have you work challenged by the highest academic standards.
There’s only one place to turn for PiS to find an example of best practice on how to challenge Gross’ research, and that is to the very body the party will grant authority to on deciding on what is and isn’t a breach of the law regarding “Polish death camps”. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) produced several reports between 2000-03 challenging claims in Gross’ book on the Jedwabne massacre. It used research and reason — as opposed to censorship — to make the case that the historian didn’t get all the facts right. It found, for example, that German’s played a bigger part in the slaughter than Gross had claimed, and that the numbers killed were more likely to be around the 340 mark, rather than 1,600.
IPN should tread carefully, though. Any inconvenient truths with the potential to humiliate the Polish people could one day soon see it branded a “traitor”.
Ryan McChrystal is the assistant editor, online at Index on Censorship
