Warning against renewed fascism after World War II, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz extolled art as the memory of human conditions. You can kill a poet but another is born; their words are written down, the deed and the date.
Milosz is a powerful literary painter of human conditions, which is why I have returned to his poetry to deal with the turmoil in the United States. Police officers viciously attacked journalists covering the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd.
The incident last month — duly recorded on video and in literature, seen around the world, and etched into our collective memory — is considered the touchstone for a renewed campaign to reform policing and improve race relations in the US and beyond.
There are signs change is coming in the way the world looks at minority groups, particularly black people. Memorials of formerly revered white men are being toppled in the US and Europe and the white world is scratching some pop cultural events and images that demean black people. Laws banning cultural insensitivity are in the works and many whites are joining the blacks in matches for racial equality.
These attempts at improving race relations could not have come so quickly but for citizen journalism, which has exposed the cruel, daylight murder of Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin, an event that galvanised the world against police brutality.
Citizen journalists are amateurs who often capture everyday events that turn into news stories. In many countries, they are as vulnerable to brutal attacks as other journalists. Both are the first chroniclers of history. Their work informs our collective memory and spurs corrective action. This is apparent on racism, which reminds me of early 20th century American publisher Joseph Pulitzer’s words. “Our republic and the Press,” he said, “shall rise and fall together.”
Police brutality is familiar to me from my experience as a reporter in Kenya decades ago but I had never witnessed it in America. A reporter lost an eye after she was hit by rubber bullets in Minneapolis. I have followed these incidents around the world for years and the situation is not getting any better. Eight journalists have been killed this year, says the Committee to Protect Journalists. We may match last year’s 25 dead in 13 countries.
The memory of my attack resurfaced as I watched police officers arrest and physically strike journalists in Minneapolis, Washington DC and New York. Not since the 1960s has the Press been embroiled in so much violence on American streets. PEN and the CPJ are kept so busy defending the First Amendment in the US that they barely get time to worry about threats to press freedom elsewhere.
I should know. As a young reporter in Kenya in the early 1990s, CPJ came to my defence when police firebombed our offices at Society magazine on Moi Avenue, Nairobi, and arrested three editors. It issued statements on my support when I was beaten up by government-sponsored thugs because of my reporting for the Daily Nation.
Nation CEO Peter Chadwick duly instructed company attorney Jackie Janmohamed to sue the State but the case went nowhere. The magistrate kept postponing the case and I had to leave the country. If the same were to happen today to any Kenyan journalist, I do not expect CPJ to intervene because that would be hypocritical.
What is happening in the US is a reminder of the fragility of democracy, and therein lies a stark warning for Kenyans to safeguard against encroachment of totalitarianism. “We can’t stop paying attention and, most important, calling attention to the importance of press freedom,” says Francine Prose, a former president of PEN.
As writers, we remember even the slightest of incidents, just as Milosz said. That should keep us from resting on our laurels. We should be appalled by the attacks on journalists and the Trump administration’s decision to teargas peaceful protestors, an egregious breech of constitutional rights.
Mr Orwel is a Kenyan journalist, essayist and lecturer based in New York.
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