A Fork in the Road Read online

  In a long argument with a professor who had been one of my literary mentors at university, he complained vociferously about the ‘filthy language’ in the book: there was no place in literature, he ranted, for a word like fuck. I could not help but remember Brendan Behan’s response to this kind of accusation: ‘But words,’ he told a complaining woman, ‘words are innocent little things’ – holding his thumb and forefinger very closely together in a graphic illustration of what he meant – ‘the filth is in your own fucking mind!’ And to emphasise his outrage the righteous professor thumped his desk: ‘And to think you studied at this university!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is a Christian university!’ ‘But Professor,’ I protested, ‘there is no single word in this book that I have not heard many times a day on this very campus.’ ‘Ah, but that’s different,’ he countered. ‘Those are spoken words. But here in your book those words are written.’

  Long live the written word, I thought. And fuck the rest.

  The debates and arguments went on and on, becoming more virulent by the day. Inevitably, this was where censorship played its hand.

  It has invariably been the handmaiden of any regime with totalitarian tendencies – most particularly when that regime feels itself threatened. Even so, in South Africa, censorship was not high on the list of priorities when the Nationalist government came to power in 1948. Not because it did not feel threatened, but because it perceived other threats as more pressing for the time being. Moreover, the presence of a large black majority, set to develop into the most important threat to continued white rule, could still be ‘kept in place’, through an extension of brutal colonial practices; and as most of this presence was still illiterate, the written word was not as yet much of a factor in the equation. The English were bound to criticise and attack, but they were expected to play by the rules anyway, and if not, at that stage no Afrikaner was likely to take seriously any opposition from that quarter. And Afrikaners themselves were unlikely to oppose their own leaders. Ever since the First Language Movement in the late nineteenth century the fledgling literature had allied itself most loyally to the political leadership: the language itself was largely perceived as a mere extension of the political struggle.

  But from the mid-fifties it became apparent that Afrikaans literature was developing modes of expression independent of, and at times even hostile to, the ideological thinking of the new regime. By the beginning of the sixties it was no longer possible for the authorities to take for granted the unquestioning support of writers and other cultural workers; and the same kind of rift was becoming obvious between writing and religion. Nationalist policies had always depended heavily on the support of the Afrikaans Reformed Churches, and the questioning of religious doctrine, even if only by implication, was seen increasingly as a threat to the political authority of the state as well.

  The groundswell of popular enthusiasm for the Sestigers, especially among the young, caught the government unprepared, which prompted hurried moves towards new forms of cultural control, specifically censorship. Initially at least, the authorities had to tread cautiously, trying not to offend either their traditional base of churchgoing, conservative supporters, or the increasingly visible and voluble younger generation eager to identify themselves with international trends that followed in the wake of the Second World War. They were, after all, the next generation of voters. If the government were indeed pushed to choose between these opposing constituencies, they were likely to turn to their traditional support base on the right; but for the time being they tried to walk a tightrope between the extremes. This provided us with some breathing space – but it was becoming more and more obvious that it could not last for long.

  We tried to use the gap with a vigorous campaign against the looming Publications Control Act, gaining the near-unanimous support of English and Afrikaans writers alike. It is shameful to reflect, today, that most of this campaign still concerned whites only, just as the first wave in the renewal of Afrikaans literature by the Sestigers was predominantly white, concerned with matters of aesthetic form and expression rather than political content or involvement. Almost all the heavyweights of white South African literature in English and Afrikaans – including van Wyk Louw, Dirk Opperman and other leading poets in Afrikaans, as well as Alan Paton and Nadine Gordimer and lesser but still significant lights like Jack Cope – joined the fray and petitioned the government to refrain from acting against literature. As early as 1961 van Wyk Louw had been bludgeoned by Prime Minister H. F. Verwoerd in a notorious confrontation about an historical play on the Anglo-Boer War, in which Louw had had the ‘temerity’ to ask questions about nationhood.

  After Jan Rabie and I had written the first few letters condemning censorship in the Cape Town newspaper, Die Burger, it turned into an avalanche; and on that memorable afternoon of 18 April, 1963, a group of us were gathered in the lounge of Jan Rabie’s rambling old house in Cape Town, when Ingrid walked in, barefoot and provocative, and the movement against censorship officially began, and the course of my life was changed.

  The petition we organised that afternoon, soon acquired momentum; and as the battle heated up, the godfather of the censorship bill in parliament, Ingrid’s father, Abraham, made such a hash of it that he lost all credibility and faded from the scene. We approached the two writers most likely to be ‘acceptable’ to the government, Bill de Klerk on the Afrikaans side, advocate Gerald Gordon on the English, to present our petition. On the surface, of course, it made no difference; but the censorship movement had been thoroughly discredited and the Act was launched rather lamely. Bowing to widespread pressure the government appointed as chief censor a respected professor of literature, Gerrit Dekker, who had been my main mentor at university; and when Etienne Leroux’s Silbersteins and my Lobola found themselves among the first books to be submitted to the Publications Control Board, it was obvious that – for the moment – we had nothing to be afraid of. But any book that could not rely on being regarded as ‘literature’ – a distinction that could not but cause some embarrassment to writers – could not count on any protection. And once the censors claimed their first victim, Wilbur Smith’s rather innocuous When the Lion Feeds, everybody realised that the hunt was now open.

  Even before Sestigers and Censors prepared for battle, there had been ominous signs that the forces of darkness were being organised against anything acknowledged – and branded – as ‘new’. Because what was ‘new’ was immediately identified with ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’: that is, strange and foreign to the core of the volk, the nation. The history of the publication of Lobola vir die Lewe provides a chilling, sometimes hilarious, illustration of these forces. When the novel was originally submitted, from Paris, to the leading ‘establishment’ publisher, Nasionale Pers, it was turned down, but in a private note accompanying the official letter of rejection, I was advised to submit it to the newly founded publishing house of Human & Rousseau. The novel was accepted, but it turned out to be very hard to find a firm that might be willing to print the manuscript, as most commercial printers had links with either the political establishment or one or other of the churches. At last an English printer was found; but when the book reached the stage of galley proofs, an enterprising Afrikaans-speaking proofreader got hold of it and made a number of impromptu, and extremely crude, translations of dubious passages which he submitted to his employers.

  Immediately, the publishing process was stopped. Koos Human persuaded them to send the proofs to Dr W. E. G. Louw, then arts editor of Die Burger, and younger brother of the great poet N. P. van Wyk Louw. Louw junior gave his approval, undertook to give it a favourable review in Die Burger, and the book could be printed. Even at that stage the publishers still regarded the undertaking as so risky that they did not expect more than a few hundred copies to be sold. It was consequently stipulated in the contract that no royalties would be paid on the first 1,000 copies. Only too relieved that the book would be published regardless, I signed. However, following W. E. G.
Louw’s rave review, it was sold out almost immediately, and seven or eight reprints followed in due course. I am happy to acknowledge that the contract was then amended, and I was paid for the first 1,000 copies after all.

  But the sense of risk, even of danger, persisted. All this had consequences on the personal level as well. There were close friends from my university days who formally broke off contact with me. I had become a traitor, an enemy, an adder in the bosom. Worst of all, I had become a ‘communist’, the ultimate in the vocabulary of swear words at the time. For me, the saddest loss of all came when my good friend, Koos Rupert, brother of the powerful tobacco and liquor tycoon, Anton, barred me from his house in Stellenbosch. On my very first trip to Europe, with the student tour of 1954, I had met his wife Rona and we’d become close friends. Years later, after she’d met and married Koos and I’d married Estelle, we met again in London and in Spain, and became a close foursome. Once back in South Africa, Koos became a manager in his brother’s business in Stellenbosch, and I a lecturer at Rhodes. We continued to see each other regularly. The first edition of one of my first novels, written on that early students’ tour to Europe when I was only eighteen, I had even dedicated to Rona; and after their marriage I’d changed the dedication to include both of them. After Lobola, the break came.

  I’d just arrived in Stellenbosch, where they lived, for a series of lectures; and telephoned immediately to find out when I could see them. Rona answered. She was strangely subdued. After a minute or two she excused herself: their little daughter was in the bath, she explained, and needed attention. Koos came to the phone.

  When I eagerly enquired about seeing them soon, he said very curtly, ‘I don’t think we have anything to say to each other.’

  ‘What on earth …?’ I stammered.

  ‘I assure you it is better this way,’ said Koos.

  It took some time to filter through: I had become an enemy of Afrikanerdom; in his position he could not risk being regarded as my friend. It would be bad for business.

  Coming from him, I had no choice but to resign myself. But Rona? She was just not that kind of person. I remembered our many eager conversations, on our European tour and afterwards; all the confidences we’d exchanged, our dreams for the future, our shared love of music, of literature, of art. Her ringing laughter, her sense of humour. Something in her had been denied and diminished by what happened that day. And until the day of her untimely death, years later, I never had a chance of discussing with her the break, or the dark forces that had precipitated it.

  Still, in those early days of censorship, such losses became part and parcel of a writer’s life. And not everything was depressing or regrettable. Sooner or later, we all knew, the Damocles sword would fall. The media remained interested and added their buzz to the situation. Not only the South African press, but newspapers in Britain and the US were reporting on it, promoting the Sestigers to a dubious status of almost-celebrity. The problem was that even talking to the BBC was widely seen in South Africa, most particularly in the government-supporting Afrikaans press, as an act of blatant betrayal. It made us more defiant; but at the same time it was cause for concern. Being regarded as a traitor, was not an easy thing to face.

  This mentality went very far back in Afrikaner history. The image of the small nation battling for survival against great odds, had fed into the Afrikaner psyche since its very origins – inspired, no doubt, by the example of the Israelites in the desert. The notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’ was part of what defined our existence. The memory of the Anglo-Boer War had only strengthened this image. To be ‘cast out’ was a fate worse than death.

  Yet it was an image that was being redefined through our own experience. During my student years at Potchefstroom University, we had witnessed from close up, a widely admired professor of law, L. J. du Plessis, attempting to defy the apartheid establishment on moral and legal grounds. When the government retaliated by turning on him the full, formidable state apparatus of ostracism, he was crushed. Yet only a few years later, another impressive man from Potchefstroom, the Revd Beyers Naudé, took the same risk, and this time it proved impossible to crush him – among other things, because he learned to find alliances elsewhere, outside of the Afrikaner laager. He transformed his early, chauvinist loyalty to ‘my people’ to the more inclusive notion of ‘our people’, and in the end he became one of the enduring heroes of the struggle for liberation. But the costs were almost unbearable: for years he could not pursue his vocation as a preacher; he no longer had an income to subsist on, he was banned and persecuted in unimaginably petty ways. Still, he had the moral courage to survive, and ultimately to prevail.

  As for the Sestigers, what saved us was the amazing support we continued to enjoy from the young white, Afrikaner generation. Rather than breaking us, the government risked causing a rift within its own ranks. The system survived. But it was the start of a long and tortuous political haemorrhage, fed by numerous other factors, that in the long run contributed to the demise of the National Party. Yes, they did their level best to cast us out into the wilderness: but because of the support we continued to enjoy from within the ranks of the nation, we simply refused to accept rejection. This was a moral victory, the importance of which took a long time properly to appreciate. And it was not only the young generation which supported us: with several notable exceptions, the literary establishment as a whole, including some of the poets and writers who had helped to define the very notion of ‘Afrikanerdom’, was essentially on our side. The divisions that began to run through all layers and dimensions of the volk were slowly but very surely being eroded, splintering the nation to its foundations. At the heart of this entire experience lay the acknowledgement that the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of earlier days were no longer as readily distinguishable as before: the enemy was now within, as suggested by Jack Cope’s book on the Sestigers.

  For the moment, we were still relatively safe from prosecution. The Publications Control Board was largely dominated by responsible and respected men of letters. Significantly, there were no women. Pressure from the mainly lunatic fringe on the right – crackpots like Professor Hennie Terblanche and the weighty dominee Dan de Beer of the Action Moral Standards movement, could be neutralised, even though their rage continued to simmer in the dark. And after Professor Dekker left the board, to be succeeded by a career journalist with failed literary aspirations, Jannie Kruger, ex-editor of the right-wing newspaper, Die Transvaler, we knew that we were living on borrowed time. The string from which the sword of Damocles was suspended, was becoming noticeably frayed.

  In January, 1974 the sword fell. By that time I had had some experience of informal censorship, but not as yet any open confrontation with the Publications Control Board. In 1964 I had written the novel Orgie (Orgy). The book was, among other things, a quite elaborate typographical experiment, and Ingrid and I spent hours configuring the final version. It had originally been submitted to Bartho’s publishing firm, APB; by the time I left in June 1964 to join Ingrid in Europe, it had reached the stage of galley proofs, the dust jacket had been designed, and production was well under way. But at that stage Bartho’s superiors intervened, the whole project was stopped and the book was killed. The trip to Europe having delayed the final signing of the contract and the publisher was able to get away unscathed. Subsequently, an enterprising one-man firm in Cape Town, John Malherbe, offered to take over the book, payed an advance of R300 (£150), and turned it into a beautiful bibliophile edition. This was the closest I had come to a brush with official censorship. Then everything changed.

  Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness) marked the beginning of my writing overtly in opposition to apartheid. Even a decade earlier, in Lobola vir die Lewe, there had been several passages prompted by the ‘South African situation’, specifically events to which I had been alerted by Sharpeville and by my readings in our embassy in Paris, concerning the infamous Sergeant Nic Arlow and others of his ilk. But most of these references had bee
n weeded out by the publishers before the book came out. This time it was different. The book depicted the coloured actor Joseph Malan as a contemporary Christ and above all, his relationship with a white woman and his torture by the Security Police. It was written largely, as Baldwin would have said, in ‘pain and rage’. And my publishers, Human & Rousseau, turned it down for fear of censorship. I approached my special friend Daantjie Saayman, previously a staff member of Human & Rousseau. He was an outrageous bon vivant, an inveterate bibliophile, an indomitable rebel, and an incorrigible adventurer. He had once walked up the length of Africa and spent some time with a tribe of Bedouins, before returning to become an itinerant bookseller and finally a publisher. In his youth, he’d worked as a traffic cop, but got fired because during his hours on point duty in Cape Town he would sit on his motorbike reading Schopenhauer without understanding a word, he assured me. As the driver of a bus loaded with books, he would top up his education and use books to seduce any females who crossed his way, before settling down, at last, but with his spirit still untamed, with an adorable, adored, and adoring family.