License to Write: Encounters with Censorship

It was a debate about censorship that made me turn to writing. I was sixteen, in the last year of my primary education, and I had just been introduced to Dickens and Stevenson by one of my teachers. I came from a rural community in colonial Kenya; books were a rare sight in our lives. For me and my friends who were used to oral stories around the fireside in the evenings, it was quite a discovery that people could actually tell stories through writing. And such interesting stories too, that one did not have to wait for the evening to hear; one could read them, as I most certainly did, at any time of day and night and even under the desk in class during a boring lesson. For me these writers were a special category of beings. I wanted to join their company. Outside the classroom, I shared my secret desire with one of the students, with whom I also shared books that came my way. And why not? was his response. It was then that the debate began.

I believed that one needed a license to write, that if one wrote without some kind of formal permission, one would be arrested and most certainly be thrown into prison. If teachers needed training and a certificate in order to teach, why not writers? But my friend had a different view and said that one did not need a license to write, that there was no way one could be imprisoned for writing books. This exchange took place in 1954 and later, the following year, he and I went to different schools. He went to a teacher training college and I went to secondary school. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of our unresolved debate. But my friend never forgot the exchange and in his first year, his first act was to write a story, which he called a book, in order to prove to me that one did not need a license to write.

That was in colonial Kenya, then seething under a state of emergency declared by the British colonial state in 1952, in its fight against the Mau Mau guerrilla struggle for independence. As part of its anti-nationalist fight, the British colonial state had banned songs, dances, books, and newspapers that were deemed to be on the side of the independence movement. Although this did not become apparent in our debate, my own concerns may have been derived from that environment of censorship. My friend never went beyond the first chapter, but he had made his point. He had not asked for anyone's permission to write his unfinished book. Although he never finished the book, he did complete his training program and became a licensed teacher. Most important, he was not arrested and imprisoned for his unfinished, unpublished book.

I was to recall that debate when the police of an independent Kenya came for me at midnight on December 31, 1977. Their first act was to raid my home library. They collected any books with titles that bore the words socialism or politics. But what seemed to make them happy was their seizure of my typescripts of the play Ngaahika Ndeenda [I Will Marry When I Want], whose license to perform at Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Center, Limuru, had been withdrawn by the state six weeks earlier. The debate kept recurring in my mind when I was stripped of my name and any rights to books and writing material at Kamiti Maximum Security prison. All incoming and outgoing letters had to go though a prison censor.

Under those circumstances, I could not help but reflect on censorship and the free circulation of ideas, recalling the debate my friend and I had engaged in twenty-five years before. We did not give it the name censorship, but our exchange had been about the basic issue that underlies the question of censorship: the right to freely express and receive ideas.

Censorship is an act of regulating the shape, form, and content of ideas by a religious or secular authority with...