Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The workshop’s main business was with ways and means to open the minds of a long-neglected population not only to information but more importantly to education of a kind that provides the means to assess information intelligently. On this question, a few Old Africa Hands of a very different kind were raptly listened to. Alexander Katz, an American chartered accountant who many years ago quit the United States as a result of the McCarthy hearings and came to live in what was then Rhodesia, spoke about ‘the colonialism of the professions’. In a colonial regime, ‘the settlers know everything; the people nothing’. In the colonialism of the professions, which too easily survives the overthrow of colonialism, ‘the professionals know everything; the ordinary public nothing’.

  He proceeded to go through the annual report of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting and TV Corporation, pointing out how little this revealed of how public money had been spent during the Smith regime, and bluntly asking whether Zimbabweans were going to be intimidated by accountants’ jargon into accepting a comparable state of ignorance about what were now their own public affairs. Ruth Weiss, an English journalist (once a child refugee, in South Africa, from Nazi Germany) having the status of foul-weather friend of Robert Mugabe himself, could speak some plain truths about interdependence and dependency among the states of southern Africa.

  But the issue that contained all others was always there, and discussion faced with considerable if not complete honesty those sheer and slippery walls as it came up against them: will the ethics of the media be decided in the interests of the nation, or the truth?

  Even as I write, I don’t know whether to put the ‘interests of the nation’ in quotes, for that, too, is perhaps significant of a personal ethical bias … For a people just emerged from colonial rule as victors of a seven-year war in which they had to destroy their own homes as well as those of the people they were fighting, Lenin’s dreadful 1920 dictum may seem the voice of reason and right: ‘Why should freedom of speech be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticised?’

  Time and again, the quasi-divine dispensation of ‘doing what it believes to be right’ was a syntactical presence in our discussion, if not an open statement; it will be hard for Zimbabwe not simply to compensate fiercely for what it knows to be wrong: the Smith government’s absolute control of the media in exclusive promotion of views and information favourable to justification for white minority rule. But always among us was some black hand beckoning for the chairman’s permission to raise the question – how inalienable is a government’s right to believe itself to be right? What ethic silences criticism? The Minister of Information, Dr Nathan Shamuyarira, a former newspaper editor, abolished all the white Rhodesian government’s restrictions on reporting and on the entry of foreign newsmen as soon as the Mugabe government took power. Some of the latter, he feels, have abused their welcome by sensational reporting, particularly of minor remarks as policy statements. When we all parted, it looked as if a Press Council may be set up as a result of The Ranche House workshop. The problem it will have to deal with is not, as the outside world might be quick to conclude, simply to preserve freedom of the press, but rather to create it within a continent where it scarcely exists, in a new country struggling with a past that, though both Western and white-dominated, alienated most people from any such tradition.

  During the week I was in Zimbabwe the country became the 153rd member of the United Nations. Zimbabwe television still runs genteel British middle-class series (The Pallisers has followed The Forsyte Saga) and cute American children’s programmes suited to the taste of the majority of people who can afford sets – whites to whom England is not home and the US is foreign, but who have no indigenous culture. On the night of the event we saw Robert Mugabe, a black man, the Prime Minister of the country we were viewing from, being smiled on beneath the flags of the international community of nations. His American hosts beamed with particular emotion in Washington. But he came home with nothing substantial. He said that President Jimmy Carter was ‘well-disposed to giving Zimbabwe more aid, perhaps not in the near future, but in the long term’.

  Indeed, not in this term; not until after the American presidential election; and then will money be forthcoming only if Ronald Reagan does not become President in Carter’s place?

  Seen from Salisbury, there was something shameful about those banquets, ringing speeches, fraternal handclasps far away. What does pomp signify, if not practical help to enable the new human entity to survive?

  Mugabe came home with very little to a country which, though burgeoning with potential for world investors in minerals such as chrome and iron, agricultural products such as tobacco and sugar, even ethanol (fuel from maize), has now emerged from an economically devastating war and is enduring a drought that for two years has compounded the agricultural aspect of that devastation. Above all, Zimbabwe is facing the expectations of 30,000 freedom fighters who won the country’s independence and are now waiting idle in camps, waiting to live the normal life they fought for. At the Lancaster House talks, the Patriotic Front Alliance agreed to compensate ‘dispossessed’ white farmers on the condition that Britain and the West would provide the money to buy whatever land is needed to meet the requirements of black Zimbabweans. The amount discussed was between 560 and 800 million Rhodesian (then) dollars, and Lord Carrington indicated that an African Development Bank would be established with Britain supplying the initial capital and encouraging wider Western support. The metamorphosis of freedom fighters into citizens at peace is directly related to the question of land; it was envisaged that most would cultivate the land under a project called Operation Seed. But these promises from the West seem in danger of becoming procrastination. Of the total of $250 million in international aid available this year, so far the United States has given only $22 million, and President Carter’s statement in August to Robert Mugabe seems to bring into doubt the $25–$30 million the US promised for the fiscal year starting in October 1980, as well as the $20–$25 million for housing guarantees now under discussion with the US. Of the £750 million promised by Britain over three years, only £7 million has been given.

  Zimbabwe’s people cannot wait for their country’s potential to be realised; Robert Mugabe cannot uphold through an indeterminate transition period those civilised standards that the West now has high hopes of from him in its turnabout from regarding him as a terrorist. The West must put adequate aid into the country immediately, not merely because it was promised by Kissinger, or pledged by the Lancaster House agreement, but because to ditch Mugabe now by talk of helping him some tomorrow is to make it impossible for him to attempt what those UN celebratory smiles and handshakes were surely acknowledging – his ‘bid to establish a non-racial society … civil liberties … and a consolidating factor in all southern Africa’.11

  1980

  The South African Censor: No Change

  Sharing the preoccupations of my fellow writers, I was the first to express the conviction, now become a general stand, that the release from ban of a few books by well-known white writers is not a major victory for the freedom to write, and that the action carries two sinister implications: first, those among us who are uncompromising opponents of censorship with wide access to the media can be bought off by special treatment accorded to our books; second, the measure of hard-won solidarity that exists between black and white writers can be divided by ‘favouring’ white writers with such special treatment, since no ban on any black writer’s work has been challenged by the Directorate’s own application to the Appeal Board.

  I don’t claim any prescience or distinction for early arrival at this conviction – Burger’s Daughter (1979), my novel,12 happened to be the first released as a consequence of the Directorate’s new tactics. It was natural for me to examine the package very carefully when my book came back to me – apparently intact, after all the mauling it had been through. It was inevitable that I should come upon the neat devices timed
to go off in the company of my colleagues. It was not surprising that they should recognise for themselves these booby-traps set for us all, since a week or two later André Brink received the same package containing his novel A Dry White Season (1979). And then, in time for April and the seating of the new Chairman of the Appeal Board, came Afrikaans literature’s Easter egg, all got up for Etienne le Roux with the sugar roses of the old Appeal Board’s repentance and the red ribbon defiant of Aksie Morale Standaarde, the NGK and Dr Koot Vorster – of course, Magersfontein, O Magersfontein!13 was not released as the two other books were, as a result of the Director’s own appeal against his Committee’s bannings, but its release on an ultimate appeal by the author’s publishers transparently belongs to the same strategy in which the other two books were ‘reinstated’.

  I am one who has always believed and still believes we shall never be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Personally, I find it necessary to preface with this blunt statement any comment I have about the effects of censorship, the possible changes in its scope, degree, and methodology. Any consideration of how to conduct the struggle against it, how to act for the attainment of immediate ends, is a partial, pragmatic, existential response seen against a constant and over-riding factor. Today as always, the invisible banner is behind me, the decisive chalked text on the blackboard, against whose background I say what I have to say. We shall not be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Censorship is the arm of mind-control and as necessary to maintain a racist regime as that other arm of internal repression, the secret police. Over every apparent victory we may gain against the censorship powers hangs the question of whether that victory is in fact contained by apartheid, or can be claimed to erode it from within.

  What exactly has changed since 1 April 1980?

  What exactly does the ‘born again’ cultural evangelism staged with the positively last appearance of Judge Lammie Snyman and the previews of rippling intellectual musculature displayed by thirty-seven-year old Dr Kobus van Rooyen, mean?

  The Censorship Act remains the same. It is still on the statute book. The practice of embargo will continue. The same anonymous committees will read and ban; a censorship committee having been defined in 1978 by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court as ‘An extra-judicial body, operating in an administrative capacity, whose members need have no legal training, before whom the appellant has no right of audience, who in their deliberations are not required to have regard to the rules of justice designed to achieve a fair trial, whose proceedings are not conducted in public and who are not required to afford any reasons for their decision’. The enlarged panel of experts has some of the old names, among whom is at least one known Broederbonder, and the new ones are recruited from the same old white cadres. The powers of the Board are what they always were.

  There is no change in the law or procedure, then. Nor is any promised, or even hinted at.

  What we have is a new Chairman of the Appeal Board, in a position whose power we already know: although he does not make decisions alone, the Chairman of the Appeal Board is the ultimate authority and decision-maker in the whole process of censorship. We also know that the head of any institution – and censorship is an institution in our national life – interprets the doctrinal absolutes and directs the tactical course towards that institution’s avowed objectives according to his own personal ideas of how these should be achieved. His flair – for which quality he will have been chosen, all other qualifications being equal – will influence procedure, make innovations in the way the same things are done, whether the institution is a bank accumulating capital or a Directorate of Publications controlling people’s minds.

  Therefore it can only be the philosophy and psychology of censorship that have changed. Why and how is something we shall have to delve into in the months to come, beyond a first snap understanding of what was plain behind the unbanning of a small group of books in quick succession – the hope to placate certain white writers, the suggestion of an attempt to divide the interests of black and white writers. These actions were surely already the product of Dr van Rooyen’s thought, since he was running the Appeal Board for some time before he was appointed Chairman in April 1980. They were the first show of the quality of mind, the concept of culture, the concept of the relation of literature to society, to politics, to economics, to class as well as colour, the new Chairman has, and on which – as we see – the nature of what we are up against now will be dependent.

  Since he took office he has made policy statements – signification from which it will be possible to trace the grid of his purpose. Taking as given the ordinary motives of personal ambition and good pay in his acceptance of the job of chief censor, we need to know how he sees his particular mission. We need to know what his sense of self and other is. For that is the vital factor in the praxis of censorship, the phenomenon of censorship as a form of social and cultural control. Philosophically speaking, on this sense of self and other is the authority of censorship conceived. A we controlling a them. Dr van Rooyen won’t tell us what this private sense deciding his widely affective thoughts and actions is; but we have the right to find out. I’ll ask you to look at the evidence of his statements presently; first I want to return to the evidence of his actions – or actions behind which his hand can be detected – the unbanning of certain highly controversial books.

  André Brink has pointed out that the week that his novel, dealing with the death by police brutality and neglect of a black man in prison, was released from ban, Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s story collection, Call Me Not A Man, was banned. The reason for banning supplied to Matshoba’s publisher was objection to one of the stories only, ‘A Glimpse of Slavery’, dealing with the experiences of a black man hired out as prison labour to a white farmer.

  Death in prison or detention; the abuse of farm labour. Both are subjects whose factual basis has been exposed and confirmed in the proceedings of court cases and, in one instance at least, a commission of inquiry. Two writers, each of whom can make with Dostoevsky a statement of the writer’s ethic: ‘Having taken an event, I tried only to clarify its possibility in our society’; the work of one is released, the other banned.

  Now, in preparation for the new regime, from which we are being persuaded we may expect a new respect for literature, and are asked to accept this as a new justification for censorship, there has been much emphasis on literary quality in recent decisions by the Appeal Board. It seems that Dr Kobus van Rooyen wants to substitute the silver-handled paper-knife of good taste for the kerrie of narrow-mindedness and prudery, as the arbitrary weapon. But although it was decided by a censorship committee that there was ‘not inconsiderable merit in much of the writing in this collection of short stories by the African writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba … with regard both to the quality of the writing and to the author’s insight in the human situations which he interprets’, although the Committee members found the stories ‘generally of a high quality’, they banned the book because of a single story. They did this – again I let them speak for their anonymous selves – ostentatiously from the new ‘literary’ angle, claiming that this particular story was flatly written and the accumulation of its events improbable. But what was hatched beneath the peacock feathers was the ostrich with his familiar kick. They banned the book on one-seventh of its contents, to be precise. They returned, when dealing with a black writer, to the precept followed in the past, when a work was to be judged ‘undesirable’ or ‘desirable’ not in relation to the quality of the whole, but could be damned because of a single chapter, page or even paragraph.

  The sole basis for the ban on Matshoba’s book rested ultimately on a declared calculation made in the imperatives of political repression, not literary quality, although literary quality is invoked – the Committee stated that the appeal to the reader of the story ‘lies not in the literary creation but rather in the objectionable nature of the events which are presented … even if all these situations … had occur
red in this context in which they are set in the story, the presentation of these scenes in a popular medium would be undesirable’.

  The italics are mine. The standard used by the censors here is that of political control over reading matter likely to reach the black masses. If this is not so, let us challenge the Directorate to act in accordance with Dr van Rooyen’s statement that the banning of a book by the ‘isolation method’ would now be rejected, and therefore ask for the ban on Matshoba’s book to be reviewed by the Appeal Board.

  My novel, Burger’s Daughter, was released by the Appeal Board although, among all the other sections under which it had been deemed offensive, there were numerous examples cited under D Section 47 (2) of the Censorship Act. One was the remark by English-speaking schoolgirls mouthing prejudices picked up from their parents: ‘Bloody Boers, dumb Dutchmen, thick Afrikaners’.

  Miriam Tlali’s novel Muriel at the Metropolitan in the version found inoffensive and left on sale for several years, was banned in 1979 on the sole objection of three offences under the same section of the Act, the principal being the reference by the narrator-character to an Afrikaans-speaking woman as a ‘lousy Boer’.

  Well, these ugly racist epithets are not my personal ones, nor, I think, are they Miriam Tlali’s; but they are heard around us every day, and there are certain characters whose habitual inability to express themselves without them is another fact about our society no honest writer can falsify. Yet Tlali’s book, otherwise quite inoffensive from the censors’ point of view, is ultimately banned while mine is ultimately released. Is it more insulting for a white South African to be abused by a black character in a book than by a white one? What is clear is that a censorship committee regards it as necessary to prevent black readers from reading their own prejudices, their own frustrations, given expression in the work of a black writer; outside the considerations assiduously to be taken into account by a new and enlightened censorship there is an additional one, operative for black writers only that nullifies most of the concessions so far as black writers are concerned – they may not say what white writers say because they are calculated to have a wider black readership, and to speak to blacks from the centre of the experience of being black, to articulate and therefore confirm, encourage what the black masses themselves feel and understand about their lives but most cannot express.