Global outrage at the murder of exiled Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey earlier this month is mounting. It throws a bright light on the precarious existence of intellectuals, artists and dissidents in the Arab world.
The repression there finds parallels with the worst of the European fascists, with stalinism behind the Iron Curtain, with Pol Pot's Cambodia, with the Myanmar military - in the notorious Insein prison and more recently against the Rohingya minority - and of course with apartheid's notorious Security Branch.
The explanation that Khashoggi died in a fist fight in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul sounds very much like slipping on a bar of soap in John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. The more implausible the attempts at denial, the deeper repressive regimes dig themselves into a hole.
Hostility against journalists in democratic SA is on an uncomfortable incline. That is not a recent feature. When Thabo Mbeki was at the helm, he and his posse of belligerent lieutenants frequently took the battle to journalists.
In the disastrous Jacob Zuma decade, the media was frequently a target from podiums and even hauled before the courts. During that awful period, it often seemed we might slip back into a system of state repression. SACP leader Blade Nzimande, in a grossly stalinist move, proposed an "insult law" to protect the president from critique and there were attempts to impose various kinds of state regulation over the media.
There were also informal forms of pressure against journalists including surveillance, theft of computers and, towards the end of the Zuma period, an avalanche of fake news and scurrilous personal attacks on journalists and publications.
It has recently emerged that certain journalists allowed themselves to be fed narratives that have turned out to be unfounded. That will be an enduring blot of the stellar record of South African journalism.
The hostility from some quarters today comes from those politicians and their beneficiaries fingered in the VBS, Limpopo and Tshwane financial scandals, among others. All told, however, our country's constitutional guarantees in the Bill of Rights and the robust defence of press freedom by both the current administration and civil society point to the fundamentals of free expression being firmly in place.
This should not be interpreted as the media having a licence to do as it pleases. Quite the contrary. The more sensible understanding is that as citizens we must relish the value of a free press. The corresponding obligation from the media, of course, is that in a democracy, rights come with responsibilities.
In unpacking the ramifications of the Khashoggi murder, one is reminded that under the apartheid regime, 41 years ago this month, The World newspaper was banned and anti-apartheid journalists like Percy Qoboza and Aggrey Klaaste faced the full might of repression including arbitrary detention.
My personal compulsion to add my voice to the horror of the Khashoggi murder is inspired by the disappointment I felt standing in Cairo's Tahrir Square as the teeth were being pulled out of the Arab Spring. That feeling might have had a parallel with Soviet tanks rolling into Prague as the Czechs decades earlier rallied in a brief spring of their own.
As one of the most dominant political players in the region, the Saudis actively betrayed the Arab Spring. It confirmed the belief that the very centre of global Islam is being run by a decrepit tribal clique concerned with its own survival and wealth accumulation.
The Saudis are guardians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Many Muslim leaders in SA and around the world kowtow to the House of Saud, fearing that any criticism might compromise them in various ways. That must stop.
The brutal murder of Khashoggi must be condemned as the most un-Islamic deed. The Saudis must be held accountable in all the councils of the world and indeed in all the mosques of the world.
In his last column in The Washington Post, Khashoggi wrote prophetically, "Arabs … are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect … their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche … a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative."
Those cutting words demonstrate the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword. It is, however, the brutality of the sword that cut down Khashoggi.
• Buccus is senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute, research fellow in the school of social sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and academic director of a university study-abroad programme on political transformation..