1527 Days: 4 Years, Two Months and a Week.

In my last real blogpost published on May 3^rd of 2018, I said the following:

“Tanzania has passed laws and regulations this year requiring bloggers to register and pay a punitive fee in order to keep offering their content. The flimsy excuse is taxation. The real reason is standard restriction of free speech. The Tanzanian blogosphere is too minute to generate anything worth taxing, but it has punched above its weight lately.

So it is with a clean heart that I announce the icing of the Mikocheni Report. Reader, you already knew it was coming.

I say icing because in truth I have no idea what these regulations actually mean and I need time to see. Also...ten years. I am going to take a break. Maybe new opportunities will come along. Maybe there will be an evolution. There is a lot of maybe right now. Maybe the blog is just...on ice?

What I really want to say is thank you. For reading. It is hard for me to explain how essential writing is in my life. Like...how do you explain bone marrow? Since I was a child the world has been rendered in terms of the word. Word is life.”

I stopped blogging out of protest, having amassed enough of a readership by then to be able to leverage this move as a signal that all was not well with my country. It worked better than I had hoped considering TMR is just one woman’s little corner of the internets. Thank you for that.

So here we are again.

A few months ago, President Samia Suluhu Hassan mentioned in one of her speeches that Hon. Nape Nnauye, the Minister for Information, should look into the laws and regulations on online content to make it easier for more Tanzanians to participate in the online conversation. This should apparently preceed a move to overhaul the current Information Act. Because Mama Samia said it in public, I was assured that this meant an easing of the restrictions that led to my pausing the blogging in the first place. But I did not blog immediately.

A lot happened between 2018 and 2022. I turned 40 somewhere in there, praise be. I have now “eaten some salt” as we might say in Kiswahili. The salt of sweat, the salt of tears? The expression never specifies. In that time I lost several “innocences” as well as trust in Tanzania’s leadership class. So no, I did not blog immediately. These days my position is to be cautious, patient, strategic where possible- all of which is a lot easier in one’s fourth decade on Terra than in one’s second or third.

Instead of firing up TMR, I waited. I asked. And asked again. Then triangulated to be sure. Then waited some more to see what might happen to other bloggers. The scene in Tanzania is a wasteland: everyone is on Medium or a shared platform or social media, or technically located “elsewhere” in the ether of the World Wide Web. No point in taking risks- I had made my point and several platforms very generously offered me a couch to crash on during my self-exile from blogging.

It has been imperative to know for sure whether blogging again on this platform would be okay. Not just safe, but okay and understood. Tanzania is not what it was prior to 2015. It will never be like that again. Our culture of Presidentialism might convince you to put the blame on the shoulders of one deceased man but it is not so. This is a paradigm shift in which we all participated in, one way or another. We all made choices. We live with them.

I am still learning how to navigate these new environs. I move slower in my mind and in my feelings: scar tissue.

Sometimes my sleep breaks in the night and I think of a poem that writes about “floating belly-up from the depths” yet try as I might I cannot recollect it nor who wrote it. Sometimes I don’t know I was dreaming and I laugh easily, only to wake up to another day in 2022. For the longest I simply didn’t get out of bed. Better that way, frankly. And yet, my stubborn soul has cleaved to the promise I made myself when I was a child: live. Live it all, live it to the fullest of your being, live greedy for experiences, live. And in that living, write.

So here we are again.

I built this shelter with my own two hands because material things come and go, as do people. But words? Words. Words are a record and my records give me the comfort of a sense of place: somewhere to go that is mine. A Blog of her own. I had to leave it for a while but I am back now. I am home. The Mikocheni Report is online.  

Hello. Shall we… dance? Cheek to Cheek?

#ThisWritingLife