by Wilbur Smith
New recruits were brought in by Teba, the Employment Bureau of Africa, and Wenela, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association. They would come from the deep bush, be signed up and brought in on trucks. Once in the mine compound, they were assessed by the trained mine captains who gauged their various abilities before allocating them to suitable teams. They were often under-nourished and weak when they arrived. Most would have to be trained before the captains would send them underground. As well as submitting to the steam rooms, they would be introduced to a healthy, rich diet, full of corn meal and meat, very different from the diets they were used to. Doctors would oversee them as they worked on treadmills and in group exercises until they reached a good level of fitness and were ready for the mine.
For the first time in their lives, they would be educated. Some of the mine captains saw this as a civilizing process, taking men who had lived their entire lives in the bush and helping them face up to the demands of the modern world. They learned how to use tools and mine machinery, and also new languages. Fanakalo was a fascinating lingua franca that I heard echoing throughout the mine, a pidgin language I already knew from my days on my father’s ranch, where he used it to communicate to his laborers. These days it is fashionable to decry Fanakalo as racist and colonial, but it is still being used on the South African mines because the people who use it trust it with their lives. The men came from all over sub-Saharan Africa—from what is today Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia and Lesotho, to say nothing of the Eastern Cape and the rest of the South African hinterland—but, by the end of the induction phase, they were able to communicate and work together using a common language in a close, highly specialized, dangerous environment.
Most of the workers would spend two or three years on the mine before going back to their villages with enough capital to acquire wives, buy fifteen head of cattle, and become important men in their communities. They would return as educated men of the world, having learned skills from machinery operation to catching trains, and having been exposed to different people from all over Africa and the wider world. The lessons they brought back with them would contribute to the welfare of their native communities.
Gold Mine was a thriller, and the mine overseer who was leading me through this subterranean world was to become the model for Rodney Ironsides, the underground manager—thirty-eight years old, divorced and desperate to succeed—who had got where he was on the strength of his natural ability and his work ethic. Like the man who was allowing me to shadow him, Ironsides had reached the top of his profession but he could go no further because he wasn’t a university graduate, and the holy grail of running his own mine was out of reach. Soon he would be offered a break but it would lead him into crime. Along the way, he would fall in love with the managing director’s young wife, while somehow keeping on top of the everyday stresses of controlling tens of thousands of staff. It would be a lean, claustrophobic novel—the only one I ever wrote that would unfold solely in one location, in the cramped tunnels of the mine. To conjure the world realistically, I would spend another two months there, walking the deep level tunnels for up to eight hours a day, going to an inordinate amount of trouble to get certain facts right and to pick up the prevailing attitudes of the mine. I had a tin hat and overalls and I walked around looking officious, but I don’t think anyone even knew who I was. At nights, I lived in the mine’s single quarters, drinking and carousing with the miners, listening to their stories, and I read voraciously, anything that I could lay my hands on about gold mining.
•••
The lessons I had learned in writing Gold Mine would stay with me across the novels of the next ten years. I had known, from early on, that if my novels were to be successful, they would have to be rooted in hard-won personal experiences. That had been as true for “On Flinders’ Face” as it had been for When the Lion Feeds. But Gold Mine taught me that I could go out there and have new experiences on which to build novels, that research did not have to be conducted inside an encyclopedia or library. Later, when it came to composing The Diamond Hunters, the novel I wrote in 1971, I took my research just as seriously. Growing up in southern Africa had left me with a fascination for precious metals and stones and the rich stories that our obsession with them conjures up. My fascination with gold had been explored in Gold Mine, and now I turned my attention to Africa’s other glittering resource: the diamond. The Diamond Hunters was to take more than eighteen months to produce—one of the longest periods I have ever spent involved in a single project. As part of my research I traveled to Luderitz in present-day Namibia, what was then South West Africa, and went onto the diamond barges which were recovering diamonds off shore. I spent a lot of time talking to the men and to absorb the atmosphere I ventured in a Land Rover into the surrounding desert that is rich in diamonds. I walked along the beaches to watch the miners conducting beach recovery, and I was allowed to touch and feel the diamonds. It’s always such a thrill to have a real diamond in the palm of your hand and to think that it was produced by the immense temperatures and pressure typically found at depths of 87 to 118 miles below the Earth’s crust, and over a period of time from one billion to 3.3 billion years. Diamonds are brought near the earth’s surface in a blaze of glory when volcanoes erupt and the magma that contains the diamonds cools into igneous rocks such as kimberlite, named after the town of Kimberley in South Africa where the Star of South Africa, an 83.5 carat diamond, was discovered in 1869. It set off a diamond rush and the creation of the enormous open-pit mine, the Big Hole, which 50,000 miners dug by hand using picks and shovels. The Star of South Africa was found by a Griqua shepherd boy on the banks of the Orange River. He sold the stone to a neighboring farmer for 500 sheep, 10 oxen and a horse.
I’ll never forget the excitement when the miners brought out a pint of recovered diamonds in a container and let me run my fingers through them—nor the incredible moment whenever a “wild” diamond was captured. Recovered diamonds are small diamonds extracted from the kimberlite host rock, which is crushed, mixed with water to create a slurry, often known as a “puddle,” and then subjected to centrifugal forces which cause the heavier diamonds to sink to the bottom of the mix. A “wild” diamond is a rare find, an individual, large gemstone glinting in the sun, prompting huge celebrations. Combining the details I gleaned from these expeditions with book research, I built up a picture of the broader diamond market, the international cartels involved and the ethics of the trade in what would ultimately become known as “blood diamonds”—sometimes called “conflict diamonds,” rough diamonds used by rebels to fund military action against legitimate governments.
Both The Diamond Hunters and Gold Mine would go on to have second lives on the silver screen—but, first, Gold Mine had another, more unusual honor: it was the first novel I had written not to fall prey to the South African Board of Censors. Until this fifth novel was published, none of my work had been readily available in the country I had called home for so long. My novels were considered too incendiary to be safely enjoyed by what the Board thought was a prudish, easily offended South African readership. They were banned.
7
THE LAW IS AN ASS
By September 1964, I was married (for a second time) and living the life of a writer in Onrus in the Western Cape.
When the Lion Feeds had been published ten months before in the US and the UK, but was yet to be published in South Africa.
I had come down to Johannesburg in April 1964 to launch the book. I was jubilant at its success. US bookshops had ordered another 1,500 copies, Heinemann in the UK had sold another 20,000 around the world, I’d just signed translation rights for nine countries, the BBC was serializing it and Reader’s Digest was condensing it—but South Africa’s Publications Control Board was banning it, although not before a brisk 10,000 copies were sold.
The problem seemed to be about 1,000 words of the 160,000 total word count. Booksellers themselves were puzzled and even the reviewer of The Star, South Africa’s d
aily newspaper, noted: “There is one minor sex incident near the beginning and even that, in modern literature, cannot be termed offensive except by a prude.”
The Board had catholic taste and so When the Lion Feeds had company. At the same time the Board banned all editions of Fanny Hill, all future issues of Playboy magazine, Brian Bunting’s The Rise of The South African Reich and Patrick Duncan’s Volume 2.
Brian Bunting was a lifelong communist. A former journalist on the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, he edited no fewer than six political newspapers in South Africa, all subsequently banned, before going into exile in Britain and becoming a correspondent for Tass, the Soviet Union’s news agency. Patrick Duncan was the son of a former governor-general of South Africa, a former national organizer of the soon to be banned Liberal Party and the first white member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a South African political party campaigning against apartheid. Fanny Hill was an erotic novel by English novelist John Cleland, first published in London in 1748 and widely regarded as the first of its kind in the world, while Playboy was paradoxically acclaimed not for its nudes but the quality of its journalism.
It was typical of South Africa at the time though, as an increasingly confident National Party government had weathered the storm of the PAC–organized pass law boycott—the pass laws were an internal passport system designed to control the movement of Africans under apartheid—which had led to the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 when police opened fire on protesters at a peaceful anti-pass campaign. The government had then begun clamping down on the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid political party, and the PAC with every tool at its disposal, legal and otherwise. In June 1964, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC’s new uMkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation liberation army, the military wing of the ANC, had already started serving what would be a twenty-seven-year sentence on the notorious Robben Island, on his way to becoming the most famous political prisoner in the world.
Heinemann took the case on appeal to the Cape Division of South Africa’s Supreme Court in Cape Town. It was a test case, the first of its kind to examine just what constituted “indecent, objectionable or obscene” grounds.
The Publications Board said in its papers to court that When the Lion Feeds had the “tendency to deprave or corrupt the minds of persons who are likely to be exposed to the effect or influence thereof. It is offensive and harmful to public morals. It is likely to be outrageous or disgusting to persons who are likely to read it. It dealt in an improper manner with promiscuity, passionate love scenes, lust, sexual intercourse, obscene language, blasphemous language, sadism and cruelty.”
The case had to be heard twice. At the first attempt the two-judge bench of Mr. Justice Van Zijl and Mr. Justice Diemont couldn’t agree, so the whole process had to be repeated, this time with the division’s Judge President, Mr. Justice Beyers, sitting in. After the second hearing, the decision went our way 2:1 with Judge Diemont still dissenting.
There were moments of levity and humor, as there always are in court cases of high tension. Advocate G. Duncan QC, appearing for the Board, had a battle on his hands with Judge Beyers grilling him on the issue of morals. “Times change,” he put it to Duncan. “There was a time when table legs were covered with all sorts of drapes, because they gave people all sorts of ideas. I live at Clifton [a well-known Cape Town beach] and I see a lot more than table legs.” To which Duncan replied that there were two extreme points of view: from the one that claimed table legs should be covered, all the way through to total nudity. The judge retorted: “It is very difficult for me, I am a Bachelor’s Cove man. You see what I mean? It depends entirely on the judge you get.” Duncan diplomatically responded that perhaps the solution would be to take a middle course. He objected to statements that the frank treatment of sex was customary in contemporary society. Judge Beyers, on hearing this, turned to his fellow judges and said, “I don’t know why he says ‘contemporary.’ Has it not been discussed ever since literature was born?”
Delivering the majority judgment Judge Van Zijl found that no part could be singled out from a book and given extra weight because it suited the complainant: “The impact of the part—its effect or influence—on people must in a large measure depend upon the impact of the whole, the part’s relationship to the whole and its relationship to the other parts making up the whole. It is the weight of this impact upon certain specified matters that determines whether the book should or should not be declared to be an undesirable publication.”
Apart from taking a dig at me for the “poor literary quality” of When the Lion Feeds, and for “the falseness of ascribing to two children the sophisticated love passage, that is described at pages 71–72 as taking place between them,” Judge Van Zijl found that these were not grounds for either the Board or the court to find the book undesirable.
“The first passage concerns an incident in which Anna, a girl of about 17, seduces the hero of the book, Sean, a boy of about the same age. The tale tells of how Anna forces her company upon Sean who is going fishing; of how when they get to the fishing spot, she became bored, dives naked into the pool and entices Sean into the pool and now, after a brief physical encounter in the water, she goes out onto the bank, and of how they sit naked next to each other and she asks him to have intercourse with her.”
Sean and Anna then chat about what has just happened and Sean confides to his brother Garrick when he gets home. Judge Van Zijl found there was nothing in these four pages that would tend to corrupt or deprave the minds of those likely to read it. There was nothing, he said, that the elder teenager could not have thought of for him or herself. The passage, the judge found, had been written with restraint and could not be said to advocate immorality.
The second passage covered a page and a half, but the piece that had riled the Board was barely ten lines long. This piece, said the judge, described sexual behavior which in all probability deviated from the normal. But the knowledge imparted in the passage could be gained from any standard work on sex or sexual behavior and Judge Van Zijl could not see any ground on which it could be contended that the passage could in anyway be held to “corrupt or deprave the mind of an adult.”
We had won, but it was a pyrrhic victory because Judge Van Zijl granted the Board leave to appeal to the apex court (the supreme court) at the time, the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein, and banned any sale of copies of When the Lion Feeds until the appeal was heard. It was a double blow because I had funded the legal suit not wanting to burden my publishers with the case. Charles Pick had said Heinemann would foot the bill, but I was adamant. It was a small price to pay to reinforce the deep mutual respect Charles and I already had for one another.
My second novel, The Dark of the Sun, published in January 1965, was also banned. A year later, the Board would ban The Train from Katanga, which was the American version of The Dark of the Sun. The good news though was that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had already paid £26,250 to buy the film rights when the book was published in the UK. Ironically the book wasn’t banned in Rhodesia, where it clearly hadn’t offended anyone.
The Appellate Division announced its finding on When the Lion Feeds on August 26, 1965. The country’s most senior judges weren’t as sanguine as their brothers in Cape Town. A full bench consisting of five judges, led by Chief Justice L.C. Steyn, heard the appeal.
The chief justice lashed my writing style. When the Lion Feeds, he said, was not “a publication for any select circle of mature literary connoisseurs.” He continued witheringly: “Making due allowances for the trends of our time, there are passages which I consider calculated to incite lustful thoughts and to stimulate sexual desire in at least a substantial number of persons: ordinary men and women, of normal mind and reactions, including some of the younger generation, who will be the probable readers of this book.
“However much fashionable sophistries obscure the simple truth, the plain fact remains that the sexual urge is much too powerful to be so dulled and blu
nted by exposure to the more indirect daily stimulants of our times that there is no longer a substantial number of ordinary men and women who are liable to be appreciably stirred by descriptions such as these of matters so directly, closely and intimately associated with actual consummation.”
Two of the judges, F. Rumpff and A. Faure Williamson, dissented. In his dissenting judgment, Judge Rumpff managed to pull back a small victory for common sense. As far as he was concerned, the book taken as a whole could not possibly be said to have the tendency to corrupt or deprave. In fact, if the average modern reader with a healthy mind, said the learned judge, wanted to read about sex in a manner which left little to the imagination, it was not for the court to say that he should not do so.
The decision had been political. Charles had no doubt of the outcome before the court had even reconvened. “Of the five judges, two came out in our favor and the other three served their judgment for the recess. I was told by a South African ex-judge living in England that this was going to be a political decision and that there was little chance of the three judges coming down on our side.
“By chance, I met the South African ambassador at a private cocktail party in London and couldn’t resist mentioning the subject to him,” wrote Charles in his unpublished memoirs. “I was immediately up against a brick wall. He went on about how he wouldn’t allow his daughter to walk through the streets of London because the bookshops were so full of filth and pornography and that the South Africans had the right idea in banning books. I came away from that party very despondent.
“Sure enough, the three judges voted against us and there was no appeal against this decision until a further ten years had elapsed.