Shimbo Pastory
This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on 21st February, 2023.
Someone told me one easy way to die in crowded places like Kariakoo, is to make another person shout “Thief!” a few times and point at you. I did not believe until I saw it happening. There are people with energies to kill and can in just a second, leave everything just to brutally deal with a suspect thief.
If there is one world-shattering thing that modern audiovisual communication technology will do is to give people a text preview, aside the description of the sender that describes the nature of the audiovisual content before people open it. There are things one would wish not to see because they stir negative feelings and doubts as regards to whether we are making any ethical progress at all. This came to my mind when I saw a video of a young man being burnt to death by mob justice.
While every society can boast of having a system of justice since time immemorial, some acts of informal allocation of justice do not reflect any values cherished by any upright society. The judgement employed in what is popularly known as mob justice does not always depend on the ancient laws or the modern ones. It is an unreflective uproar of negative emotions in which energy is directed at making the most possible destruction of life that can possibly happen at that very time.
The fact that there are incidences of mob justice communicates to us one of the following two things. First, it is either people do not know the law, or they do not know how to get help from the law, or second, the law enforcement agencies have disappointed people from time to time, and people have lost trust in the effectiveness of what they do.
It is easy to correct the first one as all is needed is raising awareness and sensitizing people to control their emotions so that possibility of regrettable harm is minimized. The latter, however, is difficult to tackle, in that it is difficult to build trust again and restore professional reputation.
Societal values and vices are all passed on from generation to generation through the same process. As such, it is not strange that children learn as many bad habits as they learn good habits that they are exposed to. A child that grew up in a place where people do not take justice into their hands will find it difficult to be violent, and will find mob justice to be cruel and unfair. But it is going to be a different judgment altogether for a child who grew up seeing violence all around him or her: at home, at school, in the streets, etc.
About a decade ago, a person I closely relate with was brutally killed because he knocked at someone’s door at night. He missed his way home because he was drunk. The house owner, sadly, raised an alarm that he was a thief, and despite being helpless, he repeatedly hit him with a hoe (blade) which impacted bleeding wounds, and ultimately death.
I also saw, when I was young, people being burnt to death with petrol or tires because of theft and child sexual abuse, some being stoned to death, some being taken around the village with the things they have stolen, while people torture them in every possible way, etc. It was something that attracted the attention of many. I trust many had opposite opinions but they could not air them out. I recall feeling that that was not right. One sweeping phrase was, “Nao wamezidi!” and everyone will walk away home with these sad memories of seeing people in excruciating pain.
I also heard of one serial criminal who was tied onto the railway so that the train could just kill him, and a few whose bodies were publicly and locally operated on (without anaesthesia) in order to remove hidden charms that make them invincible. There are also people in my village that enjoyed the reputation of being lead executers in these missions, some of whom had most of their lives in prison. Theft and sexual offenses were the most common for mob justice.
The situation in my village is not a strange one as there are many places that are like that. A few crucial questions will be what legacy is left with children who are exposed to this kind of environment? Are they going to be capable of being less brutal or extreme without making conscious effort?
Proper human formation will be one that puts people in control of their emotions and reserved in their judgment when not sure what to do. One thing every society cherishes is to instill in people a sense of value for life and dignity. Human problems can be solved without killing each other or being extremely brutal even amidst uncertainties. Criminals should be reported to right authorities, and the right authorities should deal with them justly in order to bring mob justice to an end.
