ZAMBIA — It would be easy to laugh in nervous superiority about the Zambian trial of Chansa Kabwela and her allegedly “pornographic” photos of a woman giving birth if it weren’t for the fact plenty of Americans confuse nudity with sex and sex with obscenity. News editor Kabwela is facing an obscenity trial for sending two photos of a woman attempting to give birth without the assistance of medical professionals to the Zambian vice-president, its health minister and various human rights organizations.
The goal of the mailing was to call attention to the suffering caused within the nation’s healthcare system and to beg for an end to an ongoing nurses’ strike.
Instead, Kabwela, who works for The Post, the country’s largest and most popular independent newspaper, is on trial for distributing obscene images — because President Rupiah Banda considers the photos to be pornographic.
As is so often the case, the key legal argument relates to the definition of obscenity, with the defense insisting that witnesses should be required to describe what things they find obscene or arousing – and to determine whether the sight of a pregnant woman in the process of a tragic childbirth disaster qualifies.
According to the BBC, the prosecution’s first witness, the vice-president’s senior private secretary, found explaining arousal highly embarrassing.
Why any of the individuals in the photo loop would consider photos of a woman struggling through a breech birth arousing is an excellent question, but that is precisely what the images captured and Banda’s claim would require.
As the BBC describes it, the photos shows an infant’s legs and arms emerging from its suffering mother’s vaginal passage, but its head remained trapped and undelivered.
Utterly ignored by the politicos claiming to be offended by sexualized imagery is the fact that the woman in the photos had been turned away from Lusaka’s main hospital – as well as two other clinics – due to the nurses’ strike.
By the time doctors were able to tend to the woman, her child had suffocated and died.
Pornography is illegal in Zambia and so President Banda demanded a police investigation not into the medical disasters being perpetrated by the strike, but into Kabwela’s possession and distribution of the photos, which came to her from the mother’s relatives.
Kabwela was arrested soon after the investigation began and charged with distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals. Although she insists that this is a political matter and Banda’s hatred for The Post is no secret, if convicted, Kabwela faces the possibility of five years in jail.
