Features Beware bigotry: Free speech and the Zapiro cartoons Mahmood
Mamdani 2010-06-03,
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*cc D B* <http://www.flickr.com/photos/dblackadder/166701361/>Zapiro’s
controversial cartoon featuring the Prophet Mohamed, published in South
Africa’s Mail & Guardian, prompts Mahmood Mamdani to ‘reflect on times and
places when humour turned deadly’. Speaking at the University of
Johannesburg, Mamdani explores the relationship between ‘two great liberal
objectives, freedom of speech and civil peace’. Zapiro’s cartoon, Mamdani
argues, has misread the real challenges we face today: The intellectual
challenge of distinguishing between ‘two strands in the history of free
speech – blasphemy and bigotry’, and the political challenge of building ‘a
local and global coalition against all forms of bigotry’. We need to learn
‘how not to respond to a changing world with fear and anxiety, masked with
arrogance, but rather to try a little humility so as to understand,’ Mamdani
writes.
It warms my heart to see these flowing gowns. I congratulate you on work
accomplished! For over a millennium, these gowns have been a symbol of high
learning from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Should anyone ask you where
they came from, tell them that the early universities of Europe – Oxford,
Cambridge, le Sorbonne – borrowed them from the Islamic madressa of the
Middle East. If they should seem incredulous, tell them that the gown did
not come by itself: Because medieval European scholars borrowed from the
madressa much of the curriculum, from Greek philosophy to Iranian astronomy
to Arab medicine and Indian mathematics, they had little difficulty in
accepting this flowing gown, modelled after the dress of the desert nomad,
as the symbol of high learning. Should they still express surprise, ask them
to take a second look at the gowns of the ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq and
elsewhere and they will see the resemblance. Education has no boundaries.
Neither does it have an end. As the Waswahili in East Africa, which is where
I come from, say: Elimu haina muisho.

Today, I want to talk to you about the core value of the liberal university,
critical thought, not just any thought, but thought which dares to stand up
to the dictates of power and to the embrace of wealth, even to the seduction
of popular prejudice.

Yesterday, when I was in Cape Town, a friend gave me the week’s edition of
Mail and Guardian. I went straight for my favourite section, the cartoon by
Zapiro. To my surprise, Zapiro featured a cartoon of Prophet Mohamed,
agonising: ‘OTHER Prophets have followers with a sense of humour! …’ I want
to take this opportunity to reflect on times and places when humour turned
deadly. Such a reflection should allow us to think through the relationship
between two great liberal objectives, freedom of speech and civil peace.
Since Zapiro seems to present his series of cartoons as a second edition of
the Danish cartoons, I shall begin with a reflection on the original.

When the Danish cartoon debate broke out I was in Nigeria. If you stroll the
streets of Kano, a Muslim-majority city in northern Nigeria, you will have
no problem finding material caricaturing Christianity sold by street
vendors. And if you go to the east of Nigeria, to Enugu for example, you
will find a similar supply of materials caricaturing Islam. None of this is
blasphemy; most of it is bigotry. It is well known that the Danish paper
that published the offending cartoons was earlier offered cartoons of Jesus
Christ. But the paper declined to print these on grounds that it would
offend its Christian readers. Had the Danish paper published cartoons of
Jesus Christ, that would have been blasphemy; the cartoons it did publish
were evidence of bigotry, not blasphemy. Both blasphemy and bigotry belong
to the larger tradition of free speech, but after a century of ethnic
cleansing and genocide, we surely need to distinguish between the two
strands of the same tradition. The language of contemporary politics makes
that distinction by referring to bigotry as hate speech.

Just a few weeks after the Danish cartoons were published, the German writer
Gunter Grass was interviewed in a Portuguese weekly news magazine, Visão. In
that interview, Gunter Grass said the Danish cartoons reminded him of anti
Semitic cartoons in a German magazine, Der Sturmer. The story was carried in
a New York Times piece, which added that the publisher of Der Sturmer was
tried at Nuremberg and executed. I am interested less in how close was the
similarity between the Danish and the German cartoons, than in why a
magazine publisher would be executed for publishing cartoons. One of the
subjects I work on is the Rwanda genocide. Many of you would know that the
International Tribunal in Arusha has pinned criminal responsibility for the
genocide not just on those who executed it but also on those who imagined
it, including intellectuals, artists and journalists as in RTMC
(Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines). The Rwandan trials are the
latest to bring out the dark side of free speech, its underbelly: How power
can instrumentalise free speech to frame a minority and present it for
target practice.

To understand why courts committed to defending freedom of speech can hold
cartoonists responsible for crimes against humanity, we need to distinguish
between bigotry and blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a
tradition from within. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition
from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power,
bigotry is the reverse: An attempt by power to instrumentalise truth. A
defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for
blasphemy.

The history of blasphemy as a liberating force is particularly European, not
even American. To understand the political role of blasphemy in Europe we
need to appreciate the organisation of the Church as an institutional power.
Institutionalised religion in medieval Europe was organised as a form of
hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling.
Institutional Roman Catholicism mimicked the institutional organisation of
the Roman empire, just as the institutional organisation of Protestant
churches in Europe borrowed a leaf from the organisation of power in the
nation states of Europe.

The European example was not emulated in the United States of America.
Though blasphemy marked the moment of birth of the New World, the New World
was not particularly receptive to blasphemy. The big change was political:
Puritans and other Protestant denominations were organised more as
congregations and sects, more like voluntary associations, than as
hierarchical churches. There was also a change in religious practice: The
puritans shifted the locus of individual morality from external constraint
to internal discipline, displacing both the Pope and the Scriptures with
inner conscience. Pioneered by the Quakers, the Christ of scriptures became
the ‘Christ within’. Unlike in Europe, religion in the rapidly developing
settler democracy in the United States was very much a part of the language
of the American Revolution and of the public sphere. The European experience
has to be seen more as the exception than the rule.

And yet, the European experience is not without a lesson for the rest of us.
It is precisely because of a history of opposition between organised
religion and political society, and the consequent history of religious
civil wars, that compromises have been worked out in Europe, both to protect
the practice of free speech and to circumscribe it through laws that
criminalise blasphemy. When internalised as civility, rather than when
imposed by public power, these compromises have been key to keeping social
peace in European societies. Let me give two examples to illustrate the
point.

My first example dates from 1967 when Britain’s leading publishing house,
Penguin, published an English edition of a book of cartoons by France's most
acclaimed cartoonist, Siné. The Penguin edition was introduced by Malcolm
Muggeridge. Siné’s Massacre contained a number of anticlerical and
blasphemous cartoons, some of them with a sexual theme. Many booksellers,
who found the content offensive, conveyed their feelings to Allan Lane, who
had by that time almost retired from Penguin. Though he was not a practicing
Christian, Allen Lane took seriously the offence that this book seemed to
cause to a number of his practicing Christian friends. Here is Richard
Webster’s account of what followed:

‘One night, soon after the book had been published, he [Allen Lane] went
into Penguin’s Harmondsworth warehouse with four accomplices, filled a
trailer with all the remaining copies of the book, drove away and burnt
them. The next day the Penguin trade department reported the book “out of
print”.’

Now Britain has laws against blasphemy, but neither Allan Lane nor Penguin
was taken to court. Britain’s laws on blasphemy were not called into action.
I want to point your attention to one issue in particular. Allan Lane was
not a practicing Christian but he had internalised legal restraint as
civility, as conduct necessary to upholding peaceful coexistence in a
society with a history of religious conflict. To put it differently, the
existence of political society requires the forging of a political pact, a
compromise.

My second example is from the United States. It concerns a radio show called
Amos ‘n’ Andy that began on WMAQ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMAQ_(AM)> in
Chicago on 19 March 1928, and eventually became the longest running radio
program in broadcast history. Conceived by two white actors who mimicked the
so-called Negro dialect to portray two black characters, Amos Jones and Andy
Brown, Amos ‘n’ Andy was a white show for black people. Amos ‘n’ Andy was
also the first major all-black show in mainstream US entertainment. The
longest running show in the history of radio broadcast in the US, Amos ‘n’
Andy gradually moved from radio to TV. Graduating to prime time network
television in 1951, it became a syndicated show after 1953.

Every year, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) protested against the racist character of the portrayal that was the
show. Giving seven reasons ‘why the Amos ‘n’ Andy show should be taken off
the air,’ the NAACP said the show reinforced the prejudice that ‘Negroes are
inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest,’ that every character in the all-Black
show ‘is either a clown or a crook.’ ‘Negro doctors are shown as quacks and
thieves,’ Negro lawyers ‘as slippery cowards, ignorant of their profession
and without ethics,’ and Negro women ‘as cackling, screaming shrews … just
short of vulgarity.’ In sum, ‘all Negroes are shown as dodging work of any
kind.’

But CBS disagreed. You can still read the CBS point of view on the official
Amos ‘n’ Andy website which still hopes that black people will learn to
laugh at themselves: ‘Perhaps we will collectively learn to lighten up, not
get so bent out of shape, and learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.’ I
was reminded of it when I read the Zapiro cartoon in Mail & Guardian
yesterday.

The TV show ran for nearly 15 years, from 1951 to 1965. Every year the NAACP
protested, but every year the show continued. Then, without explanation, CBS
withdrew the show, in 1965. What happened? In 1965 the Watts riots happened,
and sparked the onset of a long, hot summer. The Watts riots were triggered
by a petty incident, an encounter between a racist cop and a black motorist.
That everyday incident triggered a riot that left 34 persons dead. Many
asked: What is wrong with these people? How can the response be so
disproportionate to the injury? After the riots the Johnson administration
appointed a commission, called the Kerner Commission, to answer this and
other questions. The Kerner Commission
Report<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_Commission>made a
distinction between what it called the trigger and the fuel: The
trigger was an incident of petty racism, but the fuel was provided by
centuries of racism. The lesson was clear: The country needed to address the
consequences of a history of racism, not just its latest manifestation. Bob
Gibson, the St Louis Cardinals pitcher, wrote about the Watts riots in his
book ‘From Ghetto to Glory’. He compared the riots to a ‘brushback pitch’ –
a pitch thrown over the batter’s head to keep him from crowding the plate, a
way of sending a message that the pitcher needs more space. CBS withdrew
Amos ‘n’ Andy after the long hot summer of 1965. The compelling argument
that the NAACP and other civil rights groups could not make, was made by the
inarticulate rioters of Watts.

Why is this bit of history significant for us? CBS did not withdraw Amos ‘n’
Andy because the law had changed, for no such change happened. The reason
for the change was political, not legal. For sure, there was a change of
consciousness, but that change was triggered by political developments. CBS
had learnt civility; more likely, it was taught civility. CBS had learnt
that there was a difference between black people laughing at themselves, and
white people laughing at black people! It was like the difference between
blasphemy and bigotry. That learning was part of a larger shift in American
society, one that began with the Civil War and continued with the civil
rights movement that followed the Second World War. This larger shift was
the inclusion of African-Americans in a re-structured civil and political
society. The saga of Amos ‘n’ Andy turned out to be a milestone, not just in
the history of free speech, but in a larger history, that of black people’s
struggle to defend their human rights and their rights of citizenship in the
US.

Can we deal with hate speech by legal restriction? I am not very optimistic.
The law can be a corrective on individual discrimination, but it has seldom
been an effective restraint on hate movements that target vulnerable
minorities. If the episode of the Danish cartoons demonstrated one thing, it
was that Islamophobia is a growing presence in Europe. One is struck by the
ideological diversity of this phenomenon. Just as there was a left wing
anti-Semitism in Europe before fascism, contemporary Islamophobia too is
articulated in not only the familiar language of the right, but also the
less familiar language of the left. The latter language is secular. The
Danish cartoons and their enthusiastic re-publication throughout Europe, in
both right and left-wing papers, was our first public glimpse of left and
right Islamophobia marching in step formation. Its political effect has been
to explode the middle ground. Is Zapiro asking us to evacuate the middle
ground as testimony that we too possess a sense of humour?

If so, Zapiro has misread the real challenge that we face today. That
challenge is both intellectual and political. The intellectual challenge
lies in distinguishing between two strands in the history of free speech –
blasphemy and bigotry. The political challenge lies in building a local and
global coalition against all forms of bigotry. The growth of bigotry in
Europe seems to me an unthinking response to two developments: Locally, the
dramatic growth of Muslim minorities in Europe and their struggle for human
and citizenship rights; globally, we are going through an equally dramatic
turning point in world history.

The history of the past five centuries has been one of western domination.
Beginning 1491, Western colonialism understood and presented itself to the
world at large as a civilising and a rescue mission, a mission to rescue
minorities and to civilise majorities. The colonising discourse historically
focused on barbarities among the colonised – sati, child marriage and
polygamy in India, female genital mutilation and slavery in Africa – and
presented colonialism as a rescue mission for women, children, and
minorities, at the same time claiming to be a larger project to civilise
majorities. Meanwhile, Western minorities lived in the colonies with
privilege and impunity. Put together, it has been five centuries of a
growing inability to live with difference in the world, while at the same
time politicising difference. The irony is that a growing number of
mainstream European politicians, perhaps nostalgic about empire, are
experimenting with importing these same time-tested rhetorical techniques
into domestic politics: The idea is to compile a list of barbaric cultural
practices among immigrant minorities as a way to isolate, stigmatise, and
frame them.

But the world is changing. New powers are on the horizon: Most obviously,
China and India. Neither has a Muslim majority, but both have significant
Muslim minorities. The Danish case teaches us by negative example. To the
hitherto dominant Western minority, it presents a lesson in how not to
respond to a changing world with fear and anxiety, masked with arrogance,
but rather to try a little humility so as to understand the ways in which
the world is indeed changing.

There is also a lesson here for Muslim peoples. The Middle East and Islam
are part of the middle ground in this contest. Rather than be tempted to
think that the struggle against Islamophobia is the main struggle – for it
is not – let us put it in this larger context. Only that larger context can
help us identify allies and highlight the importance of building alliances.
Perhaps then we – and hopefully Zapiro – will be strong enough to confront
organised hate campaigns, whether as calls to action or as cartoons, with a
sense of humour.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article comprises the text of talk given by Mahmood Mamdani on
receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Johannesburg on 25 May
2010.
* Mahmood Mamdani is director of the Makerere Institute of Social
Research<http://misr.mak.ac.ug/>,
Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
* Please send comments to [log in to unmask] or comment online at Pambazuka
News <http://www.pambazuka.org/>.

*

*
*
*

*Hmm, Mamdani is on to something here.  I like this analysis and the way it
exposes the hypocrisy of the so-called custodians of free speech, especially
how the Left liberals connive with Right in the name of "secular tyranny" to
demonise "others".  *
**
*Mamdani himself on occasion is somewhat controversial especially in the way
he analyses the alleged genocide being committed by the Sudanese government
against the people of Darfur. *

**
*Mboge*

**


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