Coming as I do from a country which has regarded itself as part of the Western world (a claim somewhat in dispute …), you will forgive me if I take as my paradigm what has prevailed there, with emphasis on the immediate past.
Censorship in the conventional sense we have had with us since the early 1960s, with some amendments to the law, over the years, that made it worse. The right of appeal to the courts of law was removed, and with it the Western principle of the accused being innocent until proved guilty. Ever since, the author of a banned work – book, play, film – has been declared guilty of offence before he/she has the right to appear before the mock-up court of the Publications Appeal Board with its jury of ‘experts’ appointed by the Minister of Home Affairs. The institution of Appeal Board hearings was one of the first of many moves by which the rule of law has been bypassed as the South African white minority has twisted and turned its avowed ‘Western’ values to maintain apartheid power.
In 1988, 824 publications, films and objects (this usually means calendars and posters) were banned. Few of these bans applied to what, even in the broadest sense, we writers would term literature. The fact is that latterly the banning of serious literature, even that dangerous stuff, political non-fiction, as distinct from tracts, which are consistently banned, has become rare. A factor has been the worldly sophistication of the man who was the Chairman of the Board until April 1990, Professor Cobus van Rooyen. He realised that in a country where the masses are neither book-literate nor have libraries which would help them to become so, serious literature, whether by black or white writers, at home or from abroad, and no matter how potentially ‘inflammatory’, reaches only a section of the population that already has contact with such influences. But the principal reason for apparent leniency is that a vast proportion of the masses is newspaper-literate, media-literate, and therefore the focus of state information and thought control must be the media.
For this purpose, the Publications Control Board has no authority, nor is it needed. In 1989, under the provisions of the second and third of our successive States of Emergency, four newspapers and journals were threatened with suspension, two were closed down, fifty-two journalists covering a protest march were arrested and held for some hours; there were twenty-four separate trials with 198 defendants involving journalists and a few other writers, and there were dockets opened against journalists from a spread of ten papers, both alternative press and mass circulation, for infringements under the State of Emergency and its related Acts.
The South African Broadcasting Corporation also had no need of the Publications Control Board, or even the State of Emergency, in order to censor: it admitted that there were about a thousand songs ‘we just don’t play’, ranging from the soundtrack of Cry Freedom to George Michael’s disc, ‘I Want Your Sex’. I wonder whether the Cry Freedom track will ring out over the SABC, now that under the de Klerk regime of ‘new enlightenment’ the film has been released from ban; I don’t know whether George Michael’s plea will be heard …
In February this year, with President de Klerk’s unbanning of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and other political organisations prohibited since 1960 or earlier, the removal of a number of people from the list of those who may not be quoted, the lifting of gagging restrictions on other organisations and individuals, and the release of some political prisoners, a wall (on our side of the world, as well) was breached, and information and ideas dammed up for at least three decades began to flow in a way we had forgotten.
But as Gilbert Marcus of Witwatersrand University’s Centre For Applied Legal Studies54 notes, ‘there remain over one hundred laws that restrict the free flow of information … the “new enlightenment” of February 1990 has left all of these laws untouched’. Journalists may be ordered out of an area or detained, organisations and the activities of individuals restricted. The Internal Security Act, with such powers, is still in force; the Police Act has severe controls on the reporting of police activity – my son, happening to have a camera on him when he dropped in to visit a friend in hospital last month, only just managed to talk his way out of arrest by attendant police when he paused to take a picture of a demonstration by hospital personnel on strike. There is the Prisons Act, which keeps what happens in prisons from public scrutiny, the Defence Act, which restricts reporting of any troop movements, and has on occasion made it possible for a military action never to be known about by the public, and the Protection of Information Act, which prevents the publication of information on virtually all official documents.
The Media Council, a conservative body, is now to review all legislative restraints on media reporting. ACAG, the Anti-Censorship Action Group,55 is sceptical: ‘It remains to be seen whether this is an exercise to gain the backing of media people for the retention of some of these laws.’
The government complains that we in radical opposition to censorship always move the goalposts when the law scores a piecemeal reform.
Of course we do; and that is why we have made the gains we have in our determination to win freedom of expression. Early this year the extraordinarily courageous editor of a newly-launched Afrikaans weekly, Die Vrye Weekblad, ran away with the grim game against suppression of information by exposing the existence and connection with the police of the incredibly named ‘Civil Co-operation Bureau’ – the death squad which, over more than a decade, has murdered opposition activists, including lawyers and an academic. Taken up by other newspapers and arousing public outrage, the exposé led to revelations of Defence Force involvement in the death squads with the possible knowledge of members of the government. A judicial commission of inquiry, the Harms Commission, was set up. That, we must grant ‘the new enlightenment’, is unlikely to have happened during the Botha regime. And the sticky network of revelations consequent upon a single editor’s vigilance did not end there. Other papers took new courage in investigative reporting. Another commission, the Hiemstra Judicial Commission into ‘alleged’ irregularities in the Johannesburg City Council, revealed that the council has employed spies to infiltrate all manner of progressive gatherings to report who said what. In addition there were files kept on many vocal local citizens, including myself.
Mr Louis Pienaar, Administrator-General of Namibia, was out of a job when Namibia became independent; in April he was appointed new Chairman of the Publications Appeal Board. The daily newspaper, The Star,56 reported that he is ‘widely regarded as an enlightened thinker in the field of the arts’, but gave no examples of people who do the regarding. ACAG57 recalls that he was certainly ‘not noted for his support of the press’ during his tenure in Namibia. The Weekly Mail58 reminds us that he will find himself faced with a mass of appeals for the unbanning of African National Congress and other liberation organisations’ media material; because of the ancillary laws I’ve cited, these have not been automatically released by the unbanning of the organisations themselves. We’ll see how Mr Pienaar deals with this long-suppressed expression of the ideas of a vast majority of South Africans. While declaring59 that he sees his most important task as promoting ‘dialogue along with the changing circumstances in South Africa’, he wants to ‘make it clear … that violence and intimidation are not part of democracy, and where these appear in publications I will take very firm action’. Gilbert Marcus60 comments: ‘Democratic principles are predicated on freedom of expression as a priority. And for this reason there has to be respect for views which are contrary, strident and militant. The proper discharge of Pienaar’s duties will also entail a recognition that people are generally moved to violence not by what they read or see, but because of the conditions under which they live.’
‘Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp?’ John le Carré’s statement,61 vis-à-vis the Rushdie case, surprised some people and disgusted others – including myself.
Yes, yes, we do believe that. It is surely one of
the tenets of the stand against censorship that the abuse of human sensibilities – which is what pornography and pornographic violence are, since their content is lifted completely out of the complex context of life to which sex and strife belong – cannot be confused with works in which that complex context is encompassed in the creative spirit of exploration and daring. The object of the one is selective exploitation; that of the other is the writer’s huge and hazardous attempt to make sense of the whole of life.
We admit that it is difficult to protect society from the first while freeing the second. Yet the basic principle in doing so is to disavow the totally false equation. The task is to find a legal framework that will protect freedom of expression while dealing with the abuse of human sensibility, whether sexual, social or political.
This last – the political – is the great issue in South Africa. Albie Sachs, the African National Congress’s constitutional adviser and a fine writer, visualises for the post-apartheid future ‘an entrenched Bill of Rights in a constitution which declares certain fundamental rights and freedoms and establishes an independent judiciary to ensure they are maintained … Then, if parliament were to adopt any law, or if there were some executive act which abridged the freedom of speech in any unconstitutional way, a citizen could go to the courts and have that act struck down.’ We should ‘look at legislation in democratic countries throughout the world … study very carefully what they have done in relation to the limits of freedom of speech when it comes to racial defamation and incitement to racial hostility, and try to distil from that some kind of common minimum factor whereby the limits are set’. And he says what needs to be said for all of us, everywhere, who are concerned with the freedom of expression: ‘… the issues go well beyond speech. They touch souls.’62
To turn more specifically to writers of literature. There is not one of us writing in South Africa today who has not either begun or spent the major part of a working life under conventional censorship and the chain-mail laws which reinforce it. While most have chafed at and some fiercely fought censorship, we have got used to it. To paraphrase Graham Greene, every country becomes accustomed to its own restrictions as part of its own violence. We have defied censorship and/or found ways round it. At the same time, inevitably, it has brought about deeper reactive consequences in our writers. And what is true of us is surely true of any other country where the very defiance of oppression creates defining restrictions of its own. I was in Hungary at a Wheatland Conference last year, and the session devoted to our host Hungarian writers revealed in them what I can only call fear of freedom – fear, for a writer, meaning not knowing how you are going to write next. Although they were overjoyed, as citizens, at their new freedom, they were bewildered about its meaning at the internal level from which the transformation of the entities of living into the writer’s vision takes place. With the head-clamps on the writer removed, there disquietingly is revealed – an aftermath of censorship I believe we’ve never considered – cramped and even distorted imagination.
For when I speak of the reactive consequences of censorship I am referring to the other pressure upon the writer that censorship calls into being. The counter-pressure of resistance also, ironically, screws down the head-clamp. Defiance of censorship and the regime it serves calls upon the writer to cut and weld his work into a weapon. It is necessary. But he may have to discard much of his particular insight in the process. It is impressed upon him that certain themes are relevant; certain modes are effective. Accustomed to the confines of allegory and allusion, our Eastern European colleagues now have to teach themselves the choice of numerous other modes to express life experience. Accustomed to the obsessive demands of choosing every situation and word for its trajectory against apartheid, South African writers will have to open themselves to a new vocabulary of life.
Many are ill-prepared, particularly the young writers. For everywhere where there has been censorship the counter-orthodoxy of resistance in literature has also come about. It has been an era when, in Brecht’s words, ‘to speak of trees is treason’. And to quote Albie Sachs again: ‘Instead of criticism, we get solidarity criticism. Our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work, it is enough to be politically correct … It is as though our rulers stalk every page … everything is obsessed by the oppressors and the trauma they have imposed … What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?’63
We must not think that when tyrants fall and there is a new constitution in his/her country the writer regains all that has been lost. It is not a matter of not having anything left to write about. Only those who jumped on the anti-apartheid and anti-communist bandwagons, having nothing in their baggage but the right clichés, will lose their dubious inspiration and need to find some other way of selling themselves. The real writers, on the contrary, will have the less sensational, wonderfully daunting task of finding the way to deal with themes that have been set aside in second place while writing was in battle dress – the themes of ‘humanity in all its forms’, human consciousness in all its mystery, which demand not orthodoxy of any nature, but the talent and dedication and daring to explore and convey freely through the individual sensibility. Many writers, constricted by censorship on one side and the orthodoxy of the anti-mode on the other, have never developed the ability to deal with anything outside the events and emotions their historical situation prescribed.
And what of the writer under that most damning form of censorship, exile?
Does the possibility of a return home for Kundera, Milosz, mean that the moment they set foot there the years of imaginative growth on their home soil, lost to them, will be instantly restored? Who can give to South African writers in exile, Dennis Brutus, Mongane Wally Serote, Mandla Langa, a whole roster of others, the experience of the life and languages of their own people – a writer’s bread and being – they have missed?
There is no form of censorship that does not affect a writer’s sensibility, whether suffered for years or as an isolated event. Commenting on the indecency case against Madame Bovary after he won it in 1857, Flaubert64 writes of this and of another aftermath of censorship: the establishment of spurious literary values. ‘… my book is going to sell unusually well for a writer’s first. But I am infuriated when I think of the trial; it has deflected attention from the novel’s artistic success, and I dislike to be associated with things alien to it. To such a point that all this row disquiets me profoundly … I long to return, and forever, to the silence and solitude I emerged from; to publish nothing; never to be talked of again.’
Which brings me to the ghastly reversed fulfilment of that particular traumatic response among many that censorship calls forth in its distortion of a writer’s life. Salman Rushdie is not with us today, condemned to incarceration, silence and solitude, talked of endlessly under the cruellest and most depraved form of censorship this century has known, notwithstanding the Gulag. He is a writer of prodigious vitality and gifts, and nothing will stop him writing. But when he is free to live in the world again, nothing can give him back the time that evil religious fanatics took from him, and that the world allowed the perpetrators to take, nothing can restore to his novel, cleansed of the dirty fingerprints of those who manhandled it, raised from the ashes of those who burned it, the artistic attention that, alone, belongs to it.
While we rejoice at new freedom for writers in many countries long denied it, and work for freedom for writers in those countries where the many devices of censorship still prevail, some perpetrators carrying their gags and guns and book-burnings all over the world, we must also remember that writers are never freed of the past. Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, for ever. Where censorship appears to be swept away in the rubble of toppled regimes, let us make sure that it does no
t rise again to the demands of some future regime, for the generations of writers who will grow up, anywhere in the new world in the making. As Barbara Masakela,65 Secretary for Culture in the African National Congress, has said bluntly, and surely for all of us: ‘We are not prepared to see culture become a case of arrested development, frozen at the point of liberation. Nor will we be content with a culture vulnerable to becoming the fiefdom of some future oppressive ruling class.’
1990
Joseph Roth
Labyrinth of Empire and Exile
Strangely, while I have been writing about Joseph Roth, the wheel of karma – or historical consequence? – has brought Roth’s territory back to a re-enactment of the situation central to his work. In Roth’s novels – and supremely through the lives of the Von Trotta family in his masterpieces, The Radetzky March (1932) and its sequel The Emperor’s Tomb (1934) – we see the deterioration of a society, an empire, in which disparate nationalities have been forced into political unity by an overriding authority and its symbol: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the personality of Emperor Franz Josef. There the rise of socialism and fascism against royalism led to Sarajevo and the First World War. After World War II the groups that had won autonomy were forced together again, if in a slightly different conglomerate, by another all-powerful authority and its symbol: the Communist bloc and the personality of Joseph Stalin. Now restlessness and rebellion, this time against the socialism that has not proved to be liberation, brings once again the breakup of a hegemony. Passages in Roth’s work, about the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, could with scarcely a change describe what has happened in Yugoslavia in 1991.
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