Scribes should let reggae stand up for them
By Levi Obonyo, March 14, 2025Is it boldness or carelessness? A mainstream media outlet was doing one of its best things: entertaining its audience, this time with reggae music. Reggae is revolutionary. He inserted commentaries that were so blatant and nearly actionable.
In Buffalo Soldier Bob Marley, the evangelist for reggae, sings of the “Buffalo soldier, in the heart of America, stolen from Africa…” In 1974, “Revolution” hit, the Wailers wrote that it takes a revolution to make a solution. “Never make a politician grant you a favour. They will always want to control you forever… We got lightning, thunder, brimstone, and fire… wipe them out of creation … Let righteousness cover the earth”
Marley called on his audience to “Get up, stand up… We are sick and tired of your bullshit game… You fool some people some of the time, yeah… We gonna stand up for our right.”
Reggae is a protest genre of music. Pick your artist and somewhere along their career, they will say no to one thing or another, swimming against the tide, calling society to order. They will have a message to a culture that oppresses their women, to a political class that cares little about the masses, a religion hoisted on a high pedestal. If you want to protest, then reggae is for you, and you don’t have to struggle adding on any more messages.
Sitting behind a microphone is laced with great responsibility. Even in the age when media audiences are spread thin across platforms, legacy media still enjoys some dominance given the size of the population that derives approval from the man or woman behind the microphone. That person, therefore, has a responsibility to care about what they put on air.
The media world has spread, blurring the distinction between the institution and the pretenders to it. See what happened at the White House about a month ago.
The leader of the free world, that freedom defined by access to media and the space given to media to operate, decided that it was up to the state institution to define the parameters of media operation. Perhaps one of the world’s oldest news agencies, the Associated Press, took an editorial position and refused to go with the state dictate that the body of water previously known as the Gulf of Mexico was now the Gulf of America.
In exercising that independence, AP paid a price by being denied access to the hallowed grounds of state operations: the White House. Instead, the opportunity was given to one of the emerging independent media operators, who, to the world, the most demanding concern the representative would raise with the President of Ukraine was why that president did not wear a suit.
That is what one gets when new upstarts come to the scene without a care to familiarise themselves with the rules and begin to set their own rules. So, back to our own case of the recent past, the announcer, probably not satisfied with the revolutionary lyrics of the reggae song they were playing, sought to make his message even more explicit by inserting a localised understanding of the song’s relevance into the pauses.
This approach is fraught with risks. This country has media laws and institutions that monitor content, and breaching some of these requirements could lead to serious consequences.
Freedom has responsibility, and once a journalist is called to order, it is not enough to start screaming that the freedom of the press is under siege.
The danger we face is sometimes exposure to excessive social media content, with influencers and operators whose responsibility is limited. Those who play in the periphery can afford infractions that would attract greater attention if committed by those in the mainstream.
But the responsibility for a credited journalist is much higher. The principles of ethics as outlined in the Media Act demand closer attention. Journalists must seek not to attract wrath to themselves but act more responsibly.
The journalists’ act to make political statements, much of which could be actionable, unnecessarily exposes the trade to greater scrutiny. You can stand up by just letting reggae stand up for you.
The writer is the dean, School of Communications, Daystar University.