Try, if you will, to observe the difference in these two body languages: The first one is that of someone killing a snake, and the second is one of a policeman hitting a journalist.

In the first image, you will see someone hunched backwards even as he strikes the serpent, and the suggestion is that every time he hunches forward and delivers a blow, he has to rapidly modify his posture and recoil from the object of his violence before that “victim” strikes back. If the scene is captured on video it will be more or less like… stoop forward, strike, arch backwards, then repeat action, till the job is done.

In the second image what you will see is the uniformed (though some are plainclothes) men hunched over their target, and pounding and pounding without pause.

The two images speak to the difference in the balance of violence between the hitter and the hit. In the first case, though the attacker occupies higher ground – an advantage in any military situation – the snake on the ground possesses the means and tools to retaliate; it can bite him, it can spray him with its saliva, and both actions could have deadly consequences for the assailant. Here we have a more or less equal balance of violence.

In the second case we observe the monopoly of violence enjoyed by the men with the batons, pepper spray, guns and attack dogs. Only they can unleash any kind of violence. Their counterparts — the journalists — are armed only with notebooks, pencils, tape-recorders and cameras, hardly weapons to scare a baby.

When we were treated to another episode of police brutality against media practitioners in Geita last week, I watched the video with a sense of horror. I asked myself why the police would want to attack people who were only doing their job, recording the day’s events. But then a thought came to my mind.

The occasion was a leader of the opposition — who seems to be greatly feared for reasons I cannot fathom — going to a meeting that the police did not want to take place.

The politician was stopped and taken to a police station but was not beaten. So why beat people who were not doing any unwanted political meeting and spare the one who was actually going to hold one? The answer seems to me to be simple. It’s called transference.

The venom the police were seen directing toward the journalists was an expression of the anger their bosses in government harbour against this politician who has refused to be cowed. Beating him up in public would be unthinkable, especially with these irksome busybodies with their cameras and recorders. So the anger against the politician is transferred to the journalists.

The logic is plain: the politician can hit back, just like the snake – he collected six million votes in the last election, and that is a force — but the journalists can only write and broadcast their inconsequential tales of woe that few people will lose sleep over.

So in this case, as in so many others, the journalists become the punching bags for a political system that is running out of steam and ideas. It does not understand – cannot comprehend – that it has come to this because it has denied itself the necessary ventilation and fertilisation that can only come from engaging with the people.

Made up mainly of a bunch of people who seem to believe in government by fiat, it’s a system that is increasingly given to the whims and caprices of whoever happens to want to be seen to be doing anything, at anytime, anywhere, from the president down to the village.

Everyone in their right mind should know that this will not work, not now, not in a hundred years. You can hit journalists all you want, because beating a weaker person does not even need courage.

It is the sport of cowards; the valiant kill snakes, all the while knowing they can be attacked in return.

Now, a piece of advice to the journalists and all other citizens who find themselves at the receiving end of police brutality: Sue them, and sue them for huge sums of money. Not all our judges and magistrates are lackeys of the government; some of them will deliver justice. Sue them.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]