The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences (review)

Unlike most of the literature on South African censorship, this book does not question its existence as a means of preserving the apartheid regime. Instead, the author, a South African teaching literature at Oxford University, is more concerned with describing the participants involved in the system. These are defined in part 1 under the heading "Creating Spaces/Guarding Borders" and include the censors, the publishers, and the writers. Part 2, headed "Singular Situations/Disruptive Moments," contains examples of the literature that has attracted the intervention of the censors, such as the "Volk avant-garde," "Black (Anti-)Poetics" and "Third World People's Stories."

Among the authors featured in this part are Nadine Gordimer (chapter 4) and J. M. Coetzee (chapter 8), both winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite their international fame, however, some of their writings were still banned under the prevailing censorship legislation (especially Gordimer's, since she was also known to be a supporter of the African National Congress [ANC]). In retaliation, she continually voiced her protests in the New York Review of Books (and other overseas publications) that were beyond the reach of the censors. Although somewhat protected by being one of the Volk, Coetzee also spoke out, particularly in his book condemning censorship called Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (University of Chicago Press, 1966).

Perhaps the most original feature of this book is the detailed description of the bureaucracy of censorship, headed by the Publications Control Board (PCB). While earlier books on this subject have tended to regard the PCB as a collection of faceless bureaucrats, the author of this book actually quotes each of them by name and distinguishes between them in accordance with their relative position on a scale ranging from mild toleration to outright bigotry, best represented by N. P. van Wyk Louw at one end and Geoffrey Cronje at the other. For example, as a spokesman for the Volk avant-garde in their journal Standpunte, Louw wrote that "censorship should be opposed because it was in itself a sign of national weakness" and that "stable and powerful cultures do not need it" (30).

But instead of becoming redundant (as Louw wistfully imagined), censorship became increasingly harsh in the 1960s with the state of emergency imposed after the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC. In addition to a new Publications and Entertainment Act in 1964 (strongly opposed by PEN South Africa), other punitive legislation, such as the General Law Amendment Act, was used to silence antiapartheid writers. Consequently, over the decade more than ten thousand publications were banned and only thirty appeals allowed, most of them concerning Scope, a popular and mildly titillating local weekly.

A final effort to defend the apartheid regime was made a decade later with new legislation that contained a sweeping definition of "undesirability" and included what could be deemed "morally repugnant, blasphemous, socially subversive or politically seditious" (34). Under these terms, the PCB functioned until the end of apartheid two decades later. This period is described by the author according to the terms of each of the PCB chairmen: the Dekker Years, the Kruger Years, and the Pretorious-Synman Years.

Inevitably, there is some duplication in part 2, since many of the writers and publishers referred to there also appear in part 1. But it does provide additional "spaces" for considering and comparing groups of writers, such as the dissident Afrikaners known as the Sestigers (or Sixties), which included Chris Barnard, Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, Etienne Leroux, Adam Small, and Bartho Smit. Also considered are the African writers who appeared in the Ravan Press's Staffrider Series; as Mothobi Mutloatse's anthology Forced Landing described their mission, "The Staffrider Series aims at bringing new books at popular prices direct to the readers of Staffrider magazine," and two books banned in 1979—Ingoapele Madin-goane's Africa My Beginning and Mtutuzele Matshoba's Call Me Not...