Origin and meaning of interdiction

In Kenya — ever since I became a newspaper reader — somebody is always threatening to “interdict” somebody else. The Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC), for example, does it again and again. The other day, it threatened to interdict all teachers who do not toe the line.
The question is: What does it mean? As far as I know, to interdict is to officially forbid, prohibit or slap a ban on a thing, a practice, a person or a whole society. But both in practice and as a word, interdiction is part and parcel of European Christology and has stalked it throughout the Church’s history.

For certain faux pas, the Roman Catholic Church still regularly interdicts persons — and even regions — from all sacraments, except what it calls “holy communion”. In short, then, interdiction was originally an ecclesiastical term identifiable with Rome’s practice of excommunication.

But the verb to interdict has long entered the realm of civil practice and law and, from the way in which the English-speaking world nowadays deploys the word, it has come to mean to officially prohibit or restrain a person or organisation from taking one action or another.

This significance is easy to see from the two elements that compose interdicere, the Latin original, namely, inter (which means “between” or “among”) and dicere (the Latin verb which means “to say”). Dicere is what has spawned such English nouns as diction, dictation, dictator and dictionary.

All of these terms presuppose “words”. After all, a word or set of words was the primary “weapon” which a creative heavenly dictator had to brandish to get things done on earth. This is the very same word which that deity — the dictator in adjecto – had to utter in order to dictate everything into being.

The Bible asserts that light, for instance, appeared only in response to the deity’s dictation: “Let there be light.” This word that the Nilotes knew by a term which remains logooi (Kalenjin) and loko (Dholuo) was what the Hellenic Greeks borrowed as logos from ancient Egypt’s Coptic Nilotes.

Both logooi and loko as well as logos signified “word interpretation” and, subsequently, the “transfiguration” of a word into a material thing. It was in the same way — by means of a word — that even Jewry’s Jehovah could create anything. Light, for instance, appeared only after the deity’s dictat: “Let there be “light”.

Originating among the Nilotic Copts of Egypt, this use of a word to transform an idea into a corporeal figure was what Europe — on borrowing Nilotic Christology through Qumran (in Rome’s colony of Judaea) — usurped as the corporeal word — namely, the “word made flesh” — and eventually personified into a cosmic figure of salvation.

It was in this way that Europe made the Christic word much more powerful than a million hydrogen bombs — personifying it into a cosmic figure who will rescue deserving mankind at the eschatological moment that it calls “the end of time”. An edict — from the Latin verb edicere — is an authoritative religious, political or military word.

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