Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Much has been made of the concession of the right of appeal to the courts, not included in the Act in its earlier forms (there have been three), but now granted. An author now has the right of appeal to the Supreme Court after his book has been banned by the Board, but he must lodge notice of the appeal within thirty days of the Board’s decision. As a book may be banned, at the instigation of anyone, at any time (maybe months or years after publication) and the notice of its banning is not communicated to the author but merely published in the Government Gazette, it could easily happen that the thirty days might elapse before the author became aware of the ban. And a Supreme Court action is an extremely costly privilege by means of which one is allowed, at last, to defend a work which has already been condemned without trial.

  The censorship system applies to magazines and periodicals as well as books, of course, and also to exhibitions, films, plays and entertainment of any kind. (The long list of special restrictions on films includes any scene that ‘depicts in an offensive manner intermingling of white and non-white persons’.) The daily and weekly press, both opposition and government, is exempt because the Newspaper Press (Proprietors) Union of South Africa accepted a ‘code’ – self-censorship responsible to their own organisation – as the lesser evil, when confronted with the alternative of government censorship. The radical left-wing and liberal publications – weeklies, fortnightlies, and monthlies – have been successfully decimated (the last may have disappeared by the time this is in print) without the help of the new Act, by the simple means of making them staffless – first under the Suppression of Communism Act, by prohibiting all people banned under the Act, or who were even only members of an organisation suppressed by it, from association with any organisation which ‘in any manner prepares, compiles, prints, publishes, or disseminates’ a newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, handbill or poster; second, under the General Law Amendment Act, 1962 (commonly called the Sabotage Act), by prohibiting five journalists from in any way carrying on their profession.

  The special provisions governing paperbacks are making booksellers wish they had become bakers instead. For example, the importation of paperbacks that cost the bookseller less than 2s. 6d. each is forbidden. This piece of legislation was no doubt genuinely intended to keep out trash; but it failed to take into account that thousands of reputable books, including classics, reference, and handbooks prescribed for schools and universities, are imported in paperback editions. If the bookseller wants to import any particular book or series, he may apply, on payment of a fee, to have the Board examine it, decide whether it is ‘undesirable’ and, if not, grant him permission to import it. Similarly, exemptions may be granted in the case of books published by a specified publisher; or a specified class of publication from such a publisher; or if they deal with any specified subject. Of course, these blanket releases work t’other way about, too: blanket bans may be invoked for specified books, series, editions and publishers. As for magazines, presumably if one number were to be pronounced undesirable, either that particular number could be banned, or a blanket ban could descend on the magazine.

  All the dreary legalese through which I have followed the writer’s situation thus far belongs to the hot war of censorship. But there is also a cold war going on all the time, outside the statute books, and as it is likely to get colder and colder with the new Act, I should like to explain it. One hears a lot (quite rightly) about the effect the new internal censorship will have on South African (virtually, Afrikaans) publishers: how they will hesitate to publish if they feel there is any risk of banning, so prejudicing the chances of existing or aspirant writers who publish in the Republic. But this censorship cold war began long ago for writers with a wider public, that is abroad as well as in their own country, whose books are published in England and imported to South Africa as part of the literature of the English-speaking world.

  South African booksellers are wary of books by serious South African writers who deal with the contemporary scene. Whatever the interest of the book, whatever the selling power of the author’s name, the booksellers risk only very small orders, perhaps a third of what they know they could sell, because they fear to find themselves burdened with hundreds of copies of a book that may be banned either on arrival in the country, or later. (Some publishers ship copies on the understanding of return in the case of banning; others do not.) Publishers are afraid to risk advance publicity for the book in the Republic; the general idea is that it is better to have the book slip in quietly and sell modestly than to be unable to sell it at all. If the book is subsequently banned, the author has the satisfaction of knowing that at least it has had some chance to be read, if not widely. If it is not banned, its potential distribution and readership have been limited by the intimidation of censorship to an extent that, especially in the case of lesser-known writers, cannot easily be made up by subsequent sales. By the time the bookseller feels ‘safe’ to re-order (remember, anyone can submit the book to the Board at any time), interest in the book may well have died down.

  Back to the hot war, now. As I have already indicated, not only censorship afflicts writing and writers in my country. So far as I know, only one author has been affected as yet by what one might call the Mutilation Act, one of the gagging provisions of the Sabotage Act. Tom Hopkinson – South African by adoption for a number of years – was obliged to remove from his autobiographical record of experience in Africa a statement by Chief Luthuli, who, like all banned persons, may not be quoted. Not a matter of much importance in this particular book, maybe; not enough to distort it seriously: but quite enough to establish the principle of mutilation of books through censorship. Enough to show the authors of non-fiction – the sociological, historical, and political studies, the analyses, reminiscences, and biographies – that they are no longer free to present as full a picture of South African life and thought as their subjects and talents can command. The balance has gone from the picture; and the truth, in direct proportion to what must be left out.

  The links between this and the Sabotage Act are clear. Under the Sabotage Act it may be considered a crime ‘to further or encourage the achievement of any political aim, including the bringing about of any social or economic change in the Republic’. (As usual, my italics.) The gagging clauses of the Act make the incredible provisions whereby more than 102 people have been forbidden to make any communication whatsoever with the public, either in speech or in the written or quoted word. Among these people are twelve journalists and two or three creative writers – the number does not matter; so long as there were to be even one, this Act would provide an example of suppression of writers that far exceeds any restrictions suffered by any other profession. The gagged journalist and writers are prohibited from publishing any writing whatever, however remote from politics it might be. This means that Dennis Brutus, writing poetry, Alex La Guma, writing a novel while under twenty-four-hour house-arrest, cannot publish either.

  Censored, banned, gagged – the writers of my country may be said to be well on the way to becoming a victimised group. They have resisted variously. So far as censorship is concerned, English-speaking writers began to oppose its growth several years ago, with vigour in the case of individuals, rather ponderously and timidly in the case of our only English-speaking writers’ organisation, pen. Nevertheless, pen did submit to the Select Committee on the Publications and Entertainments Bill an excellent memorandum that probably had a mitigating effect on the form in which the Bill finally became an Act. With the exception of a few splendidly outspoken people, such as the poet Uys Krige, the Afrikaans writers seemed to feel that censorship was none of their business until the new Publications and Entertainments Act, with its provision for internal censorship, right here at home where their books are published, changed their minds for them. Once this happened, they began the familiar round of collecting signatures for protest, etc., with which the English-speaking writers were already so familiar, and which, alas, while in the combined effort may have sof
tened the Act a little between its first draft and final form, did not, could not hope to succeed in getting it scrapped.

  The attitude towards gagged writers and journalists is more complicated, because organisations and individuals in general are inclined to be frightened off by the fact that these are leftist3 writers and journalists, some of them named Communists. The sad old paradox arises of those who will fight for the freedom to write what they want to write, but are not sure it really ought to be extended to other people who may want to write something different. Perhaps, like the Afrikaans writers, who thought censorship wouldn’t touch them, people who keep silent on the subject of gagged writers will wake up, too late, to find that freedom is indivisible and that when professional freedom was withheld from one or two little-known leftist writers, it was lost to them, too. Individual writers and pen have issued protests on behalf of gagged persons. The South African Society of Journalists is putting up a strong fight on behalf of the gagged journalists.

  Within the small group of intellectuals in South Africa, writers represent an even smaller group; and for that reason perhaps the people of the country might be content to ignore what is happening to them.

  But what of the readers? What of the millions, from university professors to children spelling out their first primers, for whom the free choice of books means the right to participate in the heritage of human thought, knowledge and imagination?

  Yes, they still have a great many uncensored books to read, Shakespeare, Plato, Tolstoy, and many modern writers in world literature – though even the classics have been shown not to be immune from South African censorship (much of Zola; Moll Flanders; some of Maupassant as well as Marx); serious writers of all times and origins have been axed. But surely the people realise that no one can be well-read or well-informed or fitted to contribute fully to the culture and development of his own society in the democratic sense while he does not have absolutely free access to the ideas of his time as well as to the accumulated thought of the past, nor while, in particular, there are areas of experience in the life of his own society and country which, through censorship, are left out of his reading? It is interesting to note, in this context, that while the South African government is anxious to convince the world of its eagerness to raise to ‘civilisation’ the African people, it has at the same time largely suppressed the first proofs that some Africans have indeed already achieved complete emergence into the intellectual standards of the democratic world. Most of the writings of black South Africans who have recorded the contemporary experience of their people – including Peter Abrahams’s autobiography, the literary essays of Ezekiel Mphahlele, the autobiographies of Alfred Hutchinson and Todd Matshikiza, and an anthology of African writing which included stories and poems of a number of black writers from South Africa – are banned. These books were written in English and they provide the major part of the only record, set down by talented and self-analytical people, of what black South Africans, who have no voice in parliament nor any say in the ordering of their life, think and feel about their lives and those of their fellow white South Africans. Can South Africa afford to do without these books?

  And can South Africans in general boast of a ‘literature’ while, by decree, in their own country, it consists of some of the books written by its black and white, Afrikaans- and English-speaking writers?

  1963

  Great Problems in the Street

  People who don’t live in South Africa find it difficult to hold in their minds at once an image of the life lived by the banished, banned, harried and spied-upon active opponents of apartheid, and the juxtaposed image of life in the sun lived by a prosperous white population that does not care what happens so long as it goes on living pleasantly. Even those of us who do live here – once out of the country, the situation we have just left and to which we are about to return seems improbable. For the gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand. The place is not on the map of human relations; but, like most unmapped areas, there is a coming and going that goes unrecorded; there is a meeting of eyes at points without a name; there is an exchange of silences between strangers crossing one another far from the witness of their own kind – once you are down there on your own two feet you find the ancient caravan trails connecting human destiny no matter how much distance a man tries to put between himself and the next man.

  Of course, the committed know this – it is at the base of liberal and leftist politics, and most philosophies – but the indifferent don’t, or won’t. To them the desert seems absolutely foolproof, reassuringly impassable. Nothing can get to me through that, they are saying, when they turn to the sports page after a glance at the latest list of house arrests or banning orders. Those sort of people are black, or communist or something – they have nothing whatever to do with me, though I may be jostled among them in the street every day. If it happens to be a white person who has been arrested, the indifference may be enlivened by a spark of resentment – ‘people like that, ratting on their own kind, they deserve all that’s coming to them’.

  Kindly and decent, within the strict limits of their ‘own kind’ (white, good Christians, good Jews, members of the country clubs – all upholders of the colour bar though not necessarily supporters of the Nationalist government), the indifferent do not want to extend that limit by so much as one human pulse reaching out beyond it. Where the pretty suburban garden ends, the desert begins. This ‘security’ measure brings about some queer situations when the indifferent stray into the company of a committed person, as it were by mistake. During the State of Emergency after Sharpeville, a friend who is a frequent visitor to my house was among those imprisoned without trial. A couple who had met him when dining with us, and had found him amusing and charming, heard about his arrest. (Newspapers were forbidden to publish the names of people taken into custody in this way.)

  ‘Is it true that D— B— is in prison?’

  ‘Yes, he was picked up last Thursday night.’

  ‘But why? He seems such a fine person. I mean I couldn’t imagine him doing anything wrong—’

  ‘Do you think it’s wrong for Africans to demonstrate against the pass laws?’

  ‘Well, I mean, that’s got to be put down, that’s political agitation—’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Well, D— B— thinks the pass laws are wrong and so, quite logically, since he is a fine person, he’s prepared to do what he can to help Africans protest against them.’

  How could the indifferent keep at a safe distance this man whom they had accepted and who was at once the same man who sat in prison, nothing whatever to do with them? The subject was dropped into the dark cupboard of questions that are not dealt with.

  But it is not in private, drawing-room encounters that indifference meets commitment most openly. Nietzsche said, ‘Great problems are in the street.’ South Africa’s problems are there, in the streets, in the tens of thousands of Africans going about their city work but not recognised as citizens, in the theatres and libraries and hotels into which the white people may turn, but the black people must pass by; in the countless laws, prejudices, ‘traditions’, fallacies, fears that regulate every move and glance where white and black move together through the city. The great problems are alive in the street, and it is in the street, too, that (until now) they have always been debated. The street has held both the flesh and the word. For the meeting-halls of African political movements have been the open spaces in the streets, in the townships and on the city’s fringe, and progressive movements in general have used the City Hall steps in Johannesburg as a platform, and also as a final rallying-point in protest marches. In the townships or down in Fordsburg the supporters gathered close to hear Mandela or Tambo or Naicker speak, while the Special Branch took notes, and idlers and children hung about; in times of a campaign the crowd of supporters swelled enormously. At the City Hall steps at lunchtime speakers from the Congress of Democ
rats, the Liberal Party, or some other liberatory or progressive movement would stand among their placards with a small band of supporters. Slowly their numbers would grow; the pavements thicken with silent faces, black and white, office cleaners and executives, young students from the University and old bums from the Library Gardens. The antenna of an attendant police car would poke a shining whisker out of the traffic.

  Probably the meetings in the townships will prove to have been the decisive ones in the future of this country, in the long run. But the meetings on the City Hall steps made the flesh and word of great problems curiously manifest because these meetings took place in the one place where black and white participated in them together. And they happened right in the middle of the daily life of the city, under the eyes of all those people who were going about their own business – which excluded, of course, things like the Extension of University Education Act (it provided the exact opposite; not extension but restriction of the universities, formerly part ‘open’, to whites only) or the Group Areas Act (it has enabled the government to move Africans, coloureds and Indians living or trading in areas declared white). Their children were white and would have no difficulty in getting into a university; they did not fall into any racial category affected by removals; these things had nothing to do with them. Yet they were confronted with them in the street, they read the posters on the way to pick up the latest kitchen gadget at the bargain basement, they paused a moment (another face showing among the dark and light faces in the crowd) or walked quickly past to the business lunch, carrying with them a snatch of the speaker’s words like a torn streamer.