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The Brown Shirts have arrived, they’re sealing off our ‘hood'

Saturday November 15 2014

When a meeting organised by the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation (MNF) was wrecked last week, I got thinking about a bygone era of political violence.

In the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler was trying to wrest power from the Weimar Republic and install his fascist regime, he resorted to a force that had been created by one of his lieutenants, Ernst Rohm, who had in turn taken it over from its founder, Captain Pfeiffer von Salomon.

The organisation was called the Sturmabteilung (SA), or the Strom Troopers, better known as the Brown Shirts, from the colour of their attire. One of the intriguing pieces of historical fact is that these uniforms were produced by none other than our beloved. Hugo Boss, of Baden-Wuerttenberg, who used slave labour in his factories.

The task of this force, made up of thugs with a military background, was to provide security at Hitler’s rallies and to wreck any meetings that Hitler and his Nazi party did not approve of.

In a situation in which debate was stifled and contrary ideas were heckled, any space that still existed for people to express themselves freely was forcibly shut.

One had to support Hitler, just shut up, or face the Brown Shirts. These hooligans occupied streets, beat up Hitler’s opponents and sowed terror all over German towns and cities. We need hardly add that the rest is history.

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The relevance of the history of the Brown Shirts is to be found in the increasing signals pointing to new levels of intolerance that is taking hold in our midst.

Debate, once an integral part of our school experience, died a long time ago, except in the few incredibly expensive private schools that only the rich can afford.

Coupled with that, the long period of time spent under single-party rule, in which there was only one centre of political thought, stunted many of our brains and reduced large numbers of people to zombiehood. We have managed to place blinkers around our heads, and these cannot allow us to see anything else but that which is dangled before our noses.

The late Seithy Chachage, a sociology professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, may have died too young, alas, but he did not leave before warning us against efforts that are being made at the “collective imbecilisation” of our people. Just as in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, we are required to think in a particular way that is determined by Big Brother.

What is even scarier is that the meeting the thugs were sent to disrupt was organised by an institution bearing a name that our rulers are fond of saying they honour.

In reality, the very name of Julius Nyerere strikes terror in their hearts because their lavish lifestyles, their thieving and embezzlement of public monies, their plunder of the country’s natural resources… These are all attributes that will never sit comfortably in the company of the name of Julius Nyerere.

Sadly, the thuggery we witnessed the other day is but a harbinger of what we are likely to experience as we move towards the general election next year. I hear the glib talk about ours being a “peaceful” country, but we know that political violence has been introduced here, and more is likely to show its ugly face as more people jpin the scramble for the loot.

Scores of people were killed in Zanzibar in 2001, and no one has been held responsible for those deaths. A couple of journalists have died in circumstances that are less than clear.

Clerics of various denominations have been shot or attacked with acid, and no culprits have been brought to book. A number of abductions have taken place and no explanation given…

Those who are responsible for this state of affairs cannot pretend they do not fully understand what all this portends. Nor can they escape culpability and responsibility in the fullness of time.

And those who want to stop others from making their opinions known on matters of public interest are the ones to be held responsible when all hell eventually breaks loose.

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]

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