Living in Hope and History (16 page)

In 1963 I wrote about the proliferating forms of restriction of free expression in our country, in general, and the effect of the (then) new Publications and Entertainments Act in particular. I pointed out that most of the writings of black South Africans who had recorded the contemporary experience of their people were banned; the process is now completed. No association of writers or intellectuals, English or Afrikaans, has protested against this virtual extinction of black and Coloured
South African writers. One can only repeat, with a greater sense of urgency, the questions I asked then: 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 or 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 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?

—
1966

 

 

 

 

R
ecently I spent a strange morning in a library.

It was the Reference Section of the Johannesburg Municipal Library; I had entered, made my request to a solicitously-attentive librarian, followed her to a glass-fronted case, waited while she unlocked it and removed a large, looseleafed volume for me.

Now I sat down with the other users of the library at one of the drawing-room-glossy tables. It was good to find myself among people of all colours, absorbed in their reading; faded and ridiculous, those days not long ago, when to work here and take advantage of the courteous and knowledgeable help of the librarians whites kept for themselves. A crumbling at the edges of the apartheid fortress had at least taken place. Now all my fellow Johannesburgers were surrounded by books. Some had piled a lair against distraction; some stared at an array set out like a hand of patience. A young girl opposite me was making
notes, hovering from source to source above spread volumes. Quietly, with the creaking of boots or the lisp of crepe rubber, the offices of this temple of learning were performed as people went back and forth between the shelves, taking and replacing books, more books.

I alone had only one before me. It occupied me the whole morning; it was, in a sense, the Book of Books, whose word is set up against that of all others. My book was
jacobsen's Index of Objectionable Literature
, the bible of South African censorship. And so, while the search for knowledge, know-how, spiritual enlightenment, and the pleasures of poetry went on about me—like most writers, I am as practised a squinter as I am an eavesdropper, and I noted Wittgenstein,
Teach Yourself Accountancy, Pascal's Pensées, Seventeenth Century English Verse
—I read on down the lists of banned books in
Jacobsen
.

There is a great deal of trash, of course. Paperbacks of the kind that are twirled round on wire stands in chewing-gumand-smokes shops and airports; the titles of the banned ones don't sound any different from those I see on sale everywhere. The sheer volume of sub-literature swamps the resources of censorship, in that category. And there are books I suppose we could be said to be lucky to do without? Dr Rubin never gets a chance to tell us Everything We Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Were Afraid to Ask.

The ‘highest literary judgment' South Africans are constantly assured is a qualification of the government-appointed censors who consider literature, plays, and films apparently is just as good for extra-literary purposes: the censors are expected to bring this judgment to bear upon and indeed have banned T-shirts bearing saucy legends, a black fist, and even the peace sign. Let us not bother to recall the famous pantyhose packet; there was also a glass that, on being filled with
liquid, showed the figure of a nude woman. There they are, listed in
Jacobsen
.

But it's easy to laugh at the South African censors. Our amusement, their solemn ridiculousness—these have not undermined their power. Indeed, as we know, the renewed and tightened censorship legislation (it was first imposed in the sixties) that came into force on April 1 this year protects the newlychosen personnel both from ridicule and from exposure should their decisions be challenged. The right of appeal to a court of law against bannings has been taken from writers, and it is now an offence against the law to criticise members of the special Appeal Board set up within the censorship organization to hear appeals against decisions made by its own regional censorship committees.

Most titles my finger was running down, page after page, were banned by the old Publications Control Board, before April. They constitute virtually the entire
oeuvre
of black South African fiction writers, essayists, and some poets, including Lewis Nkosi, Alex La Guma, Ezekiel Mphahlele and Dennis Brutus, and individual works by myself, Jack Cope, Mary Benson, C. J. Driver, Andre Brink, and others, black and white.

Bans on British, American, and European writers include works by Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, John O'Hara, John Masters, James Baldwin, Edna O'Brien, John Updike, Frederic Raphael, Joseph Heller, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Han Suyin, James Purdy, William Burroughs, Erica Jong, Langston Hughes, Doris Lessing, Paul Theroux, Truman Capote, Alan Sillitoe, Sinclair Lewis, William Styron, Alison Lurie, Phillip Roth, Jakov Lind, J. P. Donleavy, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. Translations include books by Joseph Kessel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Romain Gary, Alberto Moravia, Carlos Fuentes, Roger Peyrefitte,
Jean Genet, Francoise Mallet-Joris, Junichiro Tanazaki, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Colette, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Jarry, Vasco Pratolini, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marguerite Duras, Guy de Maupassant, and Pierre Louys.

Among contemporary thinkers there are works by Herbert Marcuse, Oscar Lewis, Salvador Allende, Wilhelm Reich, Louis Althusser, and Leszek Kolakowski.

Some of the bannings of the new censorship organization were too recent yet to have found their place
in jacobsen's Index
. Iris Murdoch's
The Black Prince
was one. Wopko Jensma's
Where White Is the Colour, Black Is the Number
, Mary Benson's
The Sun Will Rise
, and Breyten Breytenbach's latest work, were others. And the day after I spent my morning in the library reading about what we may not read, our new and greatly enlarged team of censors showed nothing if not extraordinary breadth of literary judgment—at one eclectic stroke they banned George Lukács's
History and Class Consciousness
and thirteen pairs of men's underpants bearing legends such as ‘Long John Silver'.

If you don't believe me, you can go to our library and look it all up in the Book of Books.

 

 

 

 

P
ascale, my French granddaughter, aged four and enraged at not getting her own way, would shriek at her mother,
‘Vilaine!'
It seems to me there's something both childish and archaic about the word ‘villain', although the English epithet has a harsher meaning. More or less dropped out of common usage, it belongs to vanished melodrama and has somehow reverted to that definition listed in the OED as ‘now rare': someone boorish, clownish rather than evil. But if I am to accept the word as current coinage for an evil person, I'm not sure I know any villains personally. And we all know that so far as public figures are concerned, one individual's villain is the next one's hero. Many of us live or have lived under regimes whose morality has never been described better than by Chinua Achebe in his novel
A Man of the People:
‘Overnight, everyone began to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government . . . everybody said
what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion next morning. And these were the same people that only the other day owned a thousand names of adulation, whom praise-singers followed with song and talking drum wherever they went. In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderers in the chest—without asking to be paid.'

Substitute the front page and CNN for those societies lacking song and talking drums, and you have a description of wide and timely application, eh.

In a novel I wrote in the seventies I had one of my characters remark that it was strange to live in a country where there were still heroes. Her country was mine, and this is something I, too, am aware of. To sit out more than two decades as a prisoner of conscience, as my heroes Mandela, Sisulu, and others whose names wouldn't mean anything to you, have done, and come out whole, sane, wise, and humorous, is unambiguously heroic. To endure the amputation of exile is heroic; I see that in men and women who are returning home to South Africa now.

I have known some of these heroes quite well; a wonderful and salutary experience I count as one of the most important even among the intimacies of my life. This is because such people cut one to size in terms of one's own worth and yet assert with authority, in their very existence, that life is passionately worth living. Is this where heroism and villainy meet, in the electrically-charged field of avid energy? We look on from the outside, aghast in the one instance, admiring in the other. The persistence of evil appalling, the endurance of good awe-inspiring.

But some heroes present a categorical enigma. They started off in the ranks of evil, so far as the judgment of people who reject any practice of racism is concerned, and then they rebelled against and rejected the convictions of those ranks.

This was not an easy matter of making statements, resigning from some political formation; often it meant losing professional position, livelihood, and being prepared to face a probation of suspicion in the ranks of opposition to racism.

In a house not far from mine there is one of my heroes who lived for some years as, in my apartheid code, a villain. Dr. Beyers Naude is an Afrikaner who was brought up in the era when the National Party was still avenging the defeat of the Boer War and seeking through that pious villainy, nationalism claiming authority from religion, to restore its dignity by coming to power. He became a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and a member of the
Broederbond
, the band of brothers, a secret society of ideological guerrillas who dominated successive apartheid governments under prime ministers who were their Broeders. When he was a young man with a wife and children he committed the heresy of declaring apartheid sinful and he was stripped of his ministry; he rejected the
Broederbond
and consequently was blackballed from any secular position in Afrikanerdom.

He looked, and still looks, like the prototype Afrikaner
dominee
, wearing the Afrikaner outfit of safari suit, with plastered-down hair above his earnestly smiling face. But out of this (believe me) endearing image—which somehow subconsciously demonstrates his belief that within the conventional Afrikaners he resembles outwardly there is light like his own waiting to be self-realized—has come amazing courage. He was banned, vilified, and harassed by apartheid governments. He had no ministry, but we were all, all of us in the struggle against racism, his congregation. The enormous risks he has taken to support black liberation can't yet be fully told, because that liberation is not by any means fully achieved, but to the black liberation movement he has become the most trusted white individual in South Africa.

How is it that ‘villain' and ‘hero' have existed in one man in one lifetime? He would put his conversion down to God, I know. But as I have no god, I am still looking for an explanation. Conscience? Isn't that an atavistic conditioning that comes from the
thou shalts
and
thou shalt nots
, even in unbelievers? Sense of justice, that spirit-level indicator, origin unknown?