What does it feel like to be free?

I’m willing to grant that the question may be irrelevant. After all, does one need to feel free to be truly free? Isn’t it more important to be free than to feel free?

Yet.

Having grown up in the Moi era, I know all too well that political repression is as much psychic as it is material. And an emphasis on material growth and prosperity—look at the burgeoning middle-class, the increasingly wealthy Kenyans, the amazing growth in productivity—too easily effaces the significance of psychic life. As I have claimed over the past 3 years, psychic life is not entirely private. It is social.

I want to lose the nagging sense that democracy in Kenya is fragile and threatened. I especially want to lose the sense that leaders, trained and reared under a repressive regime, will go to any lengths to secure their authority.

Over the past few years, we have seen incidents of political repression: threats from the-then minister of Internal Security, the destruction of media outlets, indifference to citizens when their ideas do not align with politicians.

And now, the police commissioner has told us the president is above political critique. Make no mistake, though Hussein Ali speaks of “demeaning” statements about the president, he targets critique, no matter how it may be articulated. In an election year, the president has become sacred, protected, to be revered, not engaged.

Now, certainly the Smiling Texan’s reign may have made us more than a little skeptical about freedom of speech—which seems to have been reinterpreted as the freedom to ignore freedom of speech. I can’t get rid of the sense that, in America, freedom of speech amounts less to political critique and more to opportunities to appear on TV. And Kibaki’s seeming indifference—witness the referendum debacle—suggests he really does not listen.

So, arguably, freedom of speech might amount to little more than freedom to make noise. Even so, I want it. It’s a right. I am absolutely frustrated by the many columnists and bloggers who, over the past two years especially, have insisted we must “respect” the office of the president, that we should not critique or satirize, and that if we do so, it must be done with all respect. Indeed, I take these calls for “respect” as authorizing, in part, this latest edict.

In “On Patriotism,” I tried to unsettle the notion that an unquestioning relationship to citizenship was desirable. I was especially concerned that the repeated calls to “love” Kenya, without critique, might allow various forms of political abuse—it’s much easier to love Kenya when safely ensconced in the middle class or abroad.

Here, I want to register my support for dissent. Indeed, to insist, as the Left has been in America since the Texan took over, that dissent is democratic. As several politicians have pointed out, we cannot let ourselves slide back into the swamp of repression.