The Muzzled Muse: Literature and censorship in South Africa

180 Pages·1997·0.811 MB·English

by  Margreet de Lange

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Professor Douwe Fokkema for his encouragement and for his thorough
reading of my work. I also wish to thank Erik van den Bergh from Kairos for the
uninterrupted flow of information he sends me every week on the latest developments in
South Africa. I am grateful to Professor Ampie Coetzee for writing a preface. And finally
I would like to thank my in-house critic, proofreader, native speaker and friend Ralph
Hallo, without whom this work could not have been accomplished.
Utrecht, January 1997
“Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not love you,
with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you. The censor is an
intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction,
forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving
and censorious fashion.” Coetzee 1996: 38
“Where the writer is allowed only the freedom to pronounce the letters from A to M, his
word immediately acquires a peculiar weight if he risks not only his comfort but his
personal security in choosing to say N, or V, or Z. Because of the risk involved, his word
acquires a new resonance: it ceases, in fact, to be ‘merely’ a word and enters the world as
an act in its own right.” Brink 1983: 164-165
Sir Augustine Weighall, prosecutor of Babble Tower in A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower:
“‘Do not think, ever, ladies and gentlemen, “Well, it is only a book.” Men and women are
greatly moved by books, their lives may be enriched, changed, or ruined by books.
Dictators seize and burn books, because books are dangerous. (...) [T]hey are right, the
dictators. Good books are dangerous to bad men, and by the same token, bad books are
dangerous to good men.’” Byatt 1996: 529
Table of Contents
Preface xi
by Ampie Coetzee
Introduction 1
1. South Africa and Censorship 7
2. The Application of the Publications Act 13
2.1 Ideology of the censor 14
2.2 Application of the Publications Act 17
2.3 Conclusion 28
3. Censorship and Afrikaans Literature 31
3.1 Afrikaans language 31
3.2 Afrikaans literature 32
3.3 Afrikaner reactions to censorship 33
4. Afrikaans Authors and Censorship: Dislocation as Strategy 45
4.1 André Brink: Kennis van die Aand and ‘n Oomblik in die Wind 45
4.2 Karel Schoeman: By Fakkellig 53
4.3 Louis Krüger: Die Skerpskutter 57
4.4 John Miles: Donderdag of Woensdag 60
5. Censorship and White English Literature 65
5.1 White English-speaking South Africa 65
5.1.1 The ideology of liberalism 67
5.2 White English literature in South Africa 70
5.2.1 History 70
5.2.2 Language 72
5.2.3 Censorship 72
x Table of Contents
6. English Authors and Censorship: Moving to Different Levels of 79
Abstraction
6.1 Nadine Gordimer: Burger’s Daughter and A Sport of Nature 80
6.2 Christopher Hope: A Separate Development 90
6.3 The novels of J.M. Coetzee 101
7. Censorship and Black Literature in English 113
7.1 Black South Africa 113
7.1.1 History 113
7.1.2 The ideologies of African nationalism 115
7.2 Black English literature 117
7.2.1 Language 117
7.2.2 Aesthetics and politics: the place of literature in the 120
liberation struggle and issues of critical evaluation
7.2.3 Censorship 126
8. Black Authors and Censorship: No Place to Hide 137
8.1 Miriam Tlali: Muriel at Metropolitan and Mtutuzeli 139
Matshoba: Call Me Not a Man
8.2 Staffrider Magazine 146
9. Censorship in a Democratic South Africa 155
Conclusion 169
References 171
Index 179
Preface
From the middle of the 17th century until almost the end of the 20th century,
the people of South Africa, their actions, their thoughts and their creations,
have been controlled by one or another form of colonisation; whether it be
colonisation by external powers, or colonisation from within by those who
had engineered political structures for the maintenance of rule by a minority.
Censorship is not only the control of publications, films, theatre and
forms of art: it is the offspring of political control. But since the beginning of
democracy in South Africa in the 1990s censorship should no longer be an
instrument for the maintenance of any ideology. The object of this book is,
among other studies that have recently been undertaken, to look at the effects
of censorship on different groups of writers during the dictatorship of apart-
heid, and finally to map the route towards the repeal of the control of the state
over publications. This book, however, has a particular focus: to determine
the effect that censorship had on creative writers, on their literary productions
— and the methods they devised to overcome the limitations. It begins with
the passage of the first censorship law in 1963 and carries through to the state
of emergency which was declared in 1985 — when the ultimate of all forms
of censorship was attained: total political control which trampled upon free-
doms there still had been. The last chapter attempts to determine the position
at the moment, 1997, when new legislation regarding censorship is being
discussed in Parliament and ultimately by the Senate.
An ironic situation has developed in South Africa regarding the new
legislation on censorship: it seems that the laws of the past cannot merely be
incinerated. Those pernicious methods of control still have a determining
influence on the thinking of the present. No new law in this regard can be
totally different from the old unless, of course, all forms of censorship are
totally abolished. But in a country where censorship has been a powerful
xii Preface
discourse since colonialism, new statements within that discourse remain part
of it even if the intention may be to ‘democratise’ control. This is in itself a
contradiction because democratisation should be the opposite to enforced
control. A completely new mode of thinking would have to develop, but in a
situation where some of the legislators for a new dispensation are the same
persons who administered the old system — as this book shows — and where
the mode of thinking is still that there should be institutionalised guardians
over the morals of others, the ghost of censorship cannot be laid to rest.
Nevertheless — as explicated in the last chapter of this book — there has
been a will to change, to tame this offspring and accomplice of dictatorial
authority. In the sense that censorship has now become classification, is now
being called classification. One can, of course, consider whether classifica-
tion differs from control. Is classification not a formalisation of control, the
making of boundaries, the determination of limits, and ultimately the
bureaucratisation of creativity? For instance, regarding the fact that bona fide
literary and artistic production is exempted from censorship. What is litera-
ture? That which has become canonised? And who are the canonisers? And
what of the persistent subversion which is often, almost always, a characteris-
tic of literature? It seems obvious that art, literature, theatre and film are by
nature consistently inclined to extend the boundaries of what is considered as
‘moral’, ‘decent’, ‘proper’ and ‘acceptable’, and that methods of classifica-
tion for forms of control will never be able to confine the borders of creativity.
They are indefineable, and in a postmodern age absolute norms for classifica-
tion cannot exist.
This book is a commemoration of censorship, especially to the legislators
who will again in future have to revise their laws on this matter. In this sense
this study is another necessary statement in this discourse. But now the
message becomes quite clear: legislators should begin to realise that the
producers of culture in the future should never become part of a discourse that
concerns itself with forms of state control over their creations. Even if these
productions may be painful to the new South Africa and to the construction of
a new nation. Other laws necessary for the maintenance of society will be
sufficient to prevent creativity being abused in the name of art and literature.
Ampie Coetzee
University of the Western Cape
January 1997
Introduction
There is no doubt that censorship affects writers in their thinking and in their
writing. The question is how these effects can be made visible and under-
stood. The answer to that question is the focus of this work.
Censorship occurs in various forms and circumstances and with differing
degrees of severity. Censorship can focus on the media or literature, on
political reporting or on publications generally. Discussions rage from time to
time about the desirability of limiting the freedom of expression in order to
curb pornography or hate speech. There is no country in the world where the
freedom of expression is complete. There are always certain limits formulated
in the constitution or the penal code. This is not to say that all over the world
writers suffer under censorship. Only when the limits are so severe that the
freedom of expression is effectively abolished, do we speak of a censorship
system that affects all writers.
This book looks at one particular kind of writing, literature, in one
particular country, South Africa, at one particular time when apartheid was in
full development. In a country like South Africa, or any country with repres-
sive censorship laws, to ignore the role of censorship in the creation of a
literary work is to overlook a critical element in that work.
One of the first readers of a literary text produced under censorship
restrictions is the censor. The censor is in several respects a special kind of
reader. He is a reader with the power to suppress a text and make it unavail-
able for other readers. He is also a reader who often does not honor the
aesthetic conventions for the interpretation of literature. He reads a literary
text as a statement about the world, as a message with only a referential
function, ignoring its poetic function. There is, therefore, a discrepancy
between the censorious reader and the literary reader.
Both these readers are important for the author. The censorious reader
can suppress the text and the literary readers are the readers the author intends
to reach. This fact creates a tension that can shape the literary product. The
2 Introduction
author has several options with which to deal with the discrepancy. The
extremes are silence and martyrdom (ignore the censor). These have the same
result: no communication with the intended readership. He can also give in to
the demands of the censor. Or he can resort to masking ways of telling. In
Russian literature, the latter option has been called Aesopian language: “a
special literary system, one whose structure allows interaction between au-
thor and reader at the same time that it conceals inadmissible content from the
censor.” (Loseff 1984: x).
What I hope to demonstrate in this book is that the options an author has
to cope with censorship depend on his cultural and political position in society
and the readers for whom he writes.
Other reception-oriented issues that surface in this study are that the
projected size and nature of a work’s readership can form a decisive factor in
the censor’s decision to ban and that the censor himself posits a certain kind of
reader when he evaluates a work.
The study of censorship in relation to literature also raises interesting
questions about fictionality. What is the status of the literary text in the
censorship process? How is the fictional quality of literature appreciated by
the censor? As I have already indicated, there is a difference between a
literalist reader who has a fundamentalist approach to literature and a reader
who acknowledges its fictional nature and allows allegory and symbolism to
function.
The literalist assumption of some forms of censorship precludes the
allegorical and the symbolic. Such an approach can work in favor of authors
who use evasive strategies that remove a text from a political frame of
reference that is considered dangerous by the censor.
In a situation of political repression the concept of fictionality itself is
also called into question. A committed author, that is an author committed to
change the status quo through his work, has to believe that his work does more
than present a fictional world in which references to the extraliterary reality
are irrelevant. Yet, authors whose work has been banned often defend them-
selves by referring to the fictional nature of their work.
A country that is pre-eminently suited for the study of the intricate
relationship between literature and censorship is South Africa. The choice of
South Africa allows for comparative study. That the South African authorities
under apartheid had divided the population along racial lines in groups whose
members had different rights within the system makes it possible to study the
Introduction 3
effect of censorship from different angles.
Also, in South Africa, as far as publications were concerned, there was
no pre-publication censorship. The system was based on the evaluation of
books after publication. The result was that the censorship process partly took
place in the open. Thus, more material on the censorship process is available
than would be the case with pre-publication censorship.
In South Africa, as elsewhere, the goal of state censorship was the
repression of potentially subversive material. The control of publications was
one way to protect the status quo. Those in power dictated the terms of
censorship. For the South African situation, I will outline these terms and their
ideological foundations. A comparison with the goals and beliefs of South
African writers and the way these were expressed in their work will give
insight into the clashes that occurred between them and the censor.
This book is a study of the influence of censorship on literature in South
Africa between 1963 and 1985. These dates present legal boundaries: in 1963
the first censorship law was adopted and in 1985, while literary censorship
had relaxed considerably, a state of emergency suspended all normal legal
procedure. The last chapter provides an analysis of the most recent develop-
ments in the censorship rules, including the new legislation that is under
consideration by the Senate as of November 1996.
I distinguish three groups of writers: white writers who write in Afrikaans,
white writers who write in English, and black writers who write in English. This
distinction is a general one which admittedly takes limited account of the
complexity of the South African literary landscape at the time. There were
black writers who wrote in vernacular languages. There were Coloured writers
who wrote in Afrikaans. There were writers who lived in South Africa and those
who lived abroad, voluntarily or involuntarily. For the purpose of this study of
the effects of censorship, however, the distinction in three groups is a valid one,
as will become clear in the following chapters.1
Each group had its own relationship with the power structure. This
relationship determined the way it was treated by the censor. The different
approaches writers used to cope with the system depended on their cultural
and political position in the society.
White writers had the option to develop evasive strategies. One of these,
found in works by Afrikaans writers, is dislocation: changing the setting (time
1. The same distinction is used in Viljoen 1985.
4 Introduction
and/or place) of a work that otherwise has strong thematic connections with
the contemporary situation in South Africa. In white writing in English one
finds similar devices such as indeterminacy of time and place (a form of
dislocation). Allegory and utopia have also been used to move a story to a
different level of abstraction.
Black literature in English hardly reveals the use of these strategies. Such
strategies were not a viable option for black writers to circumvent censorship
for two reasons. One, the function of black literature was primarily political.
That function would have been jeopardized if black experience had not been
conveyed in a direct way. A masking way of telling also masks the political
message. Moreover, the devices used in white literature assume a cultural
framework on the part of the reader without which the reader cannot decode
the message. That framework was not the same as that of black readers. The
primary option for a black writer was to ignore censorship even if this meant
that his work would be banned.
To date there has been surprisingly little comparative work done in the
area of literature and censorship in South Africa. Studies on censorship in
general focus almost exclusively on control of the media. Studies on South
African literature often avoid the question of censorship altogether. Authors
of literary surveys consider a corpus of works, taking the publication of these
works for granted. Although they sometimes complain that censorship has
made their own research more difficult, they seldom consider when and how
the works they study have passed the censor.2
In the aftermath of apartheid two books by South Africans have recently
appeared on the subject of censorship. One of South Africa’s most prominent
authors and scholars, J.M. Coetzee, has written Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship. In these essays Coetzee presents a number of analyses of various
censorship situations ranging from Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1509) to the
feminist debate on pornography in the United States. He also considers the
Soviet Union and South Africa.
Coetzee has clearly given much thought to the subject of censorship. The
publication of these essays (written over a period of eight years) after the end
2. In her history of black South African literature in English, Ursula Barnett, for example,
remarks in the introduction: “It is no easy task to study black writing comprehensively inside
South Africa. At every turn one is frustrated by the ever-changing censorship-laws.” (Barnett
1983: 8). However, in the more than 300 pages that follow, censorship is not a subject in relation
to the works studied.