Maravi

(ZIMPAPERS) Tunisia, Egypt: Fatwa on US Middle-East strategy?

NATHANIEL MANHERU-Tunisia, Egypt: Fatwa on US Middle-East strategy?
Saturday, 05 February 2011 03:05 Blogs

In his Anti-Memoirs, Andre Malraux wrote that if our caves and their flint implements remind us that man invented the tool, “it is in Egypt that we are reminded that he invented the tomb”.

I don’t know what Malraux meant by that. I just hope he meant the prodigious and majestic pyramids attesting to both Egyptian architectural excellence and the hard slave labour their grandeur belie. If that is what he meant, I might just agree, even then reluctantly. If he meant to mischaracterise Egypt as the place of death or the deathly, maybe I might need more persuasion.

Egypt, apart from being the birthplace of world civilisation, invented irrigation technology, invented paper — that far reaching technology and platform that made human experience recordable and preserve-able. Egypt chose to call it papyrus, not paper, but frankly who cares about a name? I hope my readers remember that the giant Sphinx only lost its precious nose when some short Frenchman called Napoleon realised the nose that squatted on that giant face had an African flatness about it. Leaving it there would then have given an African identity and name to the crib and citadel of human civilisation, something no European was ready to accept, something no European is ready to concede to this day. There is a way in which black Africa navel-connects with ancient Egypt. Read Cheikh Anta Diop for more if you so wish more on this subversive narrative.

The day Tunisia angered Zimbabwe

I recall one prominent Zimbabwean politician who broke away in protest from a guided tour in Tunis a few years ago. This minister politician had gone for the second leg of the World Summit on Information, WSIS as it was called. In between sessions, he chose to tour Carthage, home of Hannibal the great conqueror who crosses the implacable Alps to subdue and subjugate Europe. In spite of the well known fact that Carthage was an African city, its denizens decidedly African, the Tunisian guide maintained after what the minister hoped was a confirmatory enquiry that Hannibal was an Arab. That upset the honourable minister who then decided short of punching the Arab guide, the only other sane thing to do was to protest with his feet. He walked away, quite angry, quite embittered by this great pillage from the black man’s great past.

Boil in the land of the Pharaohs, Hannibal

Today, these two sites of great African grandeur and heroism are on the boil. Western media networks are having a field day, half-hourly spewing images of deadly confrontation in Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs, themselves part of our collective ancestry as Africans, or at the very least, as of Africa. And these networks deliver these images with a conspicuous grin of macabre cynicism. They do much more. Where Egypt is not illustrating enough Marlovian atavism, their reporters are goading them into it, all for “great television”.

Egypt shall go down in history as the first civil conflict or unrest to reach our homes in real time, to reach us live. In that sense it shares the same dubious fame with its Arab cousin Iraq, which also made history as the setting for the first televised war. Of course both situations raise fundamental ethical dilemmas for broadcast journalism, dilemmas schools of journalism and human rights agitators run away from by invoking the myth of “freedom of expression”.

You do not need to be an employee of any government to start wondering whether or not it makes sense for societies to allow “live” transmission of civil unrest, thereby inadvertently encouraging it, directing it, compounding it and, quite frankly further causing it once it has begun. Yes, cameras do cause human actions, do incite destructive human behaviour. Yes, networks delivering such images do make big money from enhanced ratings as a result. They thus do make money from the gory scenes, from spilt blood. When blood and tears do make good broadcast business, reporters very easily slip into the zone of agitation, very easily cause — not cover — events. Therein lies the ethical dilemma which no amount of chanting of First Amendment will ever change.

So much noise, so little light

Malraux called Egypt that country where man invented the tomb. Today I say Egypt is that country where the media invented contents for that tomb. And that had nothing to do with the genius of the Pharaohs. Quite the very opposite, it has a lot to do with the West and its worst media habits. In Tunisia and now in Egypt, we have had noise, too much noise masquerading as journalism. I do not know if after watching so much on Egypt from western networks and their Arab decoy — principally Al Jazeera and Al Arabyia — I stand any wiser, any better informed about those two situations.

I see the media magi shouting every day, every hour, behind them agitated Egyptian crowds and behind these plumes of fire, wisps of smoke from a burning city, burning country, but I come no nearer to understanding what is at stake. I can only suspect it must be enormous. Otherwise how does a country self-immolate so tremendously for so little or nothing?

But my suspicion of the bona fide status of these so-called global broadcast networks is fortified. A reporter who asks an irate crowd when it will march on President Mubarak’s palace cannot pass for reporting. Etymologically, “reporting” comes from “re-” which means “again”, and “-port” which means “carry”. “Reporting” then means to “carry again”. You do not carry, let alone again, what you are fomenting, instigating or actively wishing “live”, do you? But in their infinite wisdom, the Egyptians allowed that to go on for a long time. It is their prerogative.

Labels: EGYPT, PROPAGANDA

posted by MrK @ 4:15 AM