A Fork in the Road Page 27

  When Daantjie learned of the dead end I had run into with Human & Rousseau, he was immediately enthusiastic about taking over the manuscript for his own small publishing firm, Buren, named for one of the bastions of the Cape Town castle. It was the beginning of a road of mad and wonderful adventure we travelled together, until his deeply lamented, untimely death, of colon cancer, in 1995.

  The reaction to the book was immediate, and staggering. There had been love affairs across the colour bar in English novels before this, most movingly in Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving (1960). But where this had been depicted in Afrikaans previously, it had invariably been placed in a context of moral outrage; here it was presented, simply, as a part of human experience. In fact, the main criticism a respected literary critic, and a good friend, voiced against the book was that the brown man, Joseph Malan, ‘acted and reacted just like a white man’. Which was more or less what I had hoped to achieve. An ominous undertone to all the reviews, good and bad, was the question: What will the censors say? And depressingly, from that time on, young aspiring writers who sent me their manuscripts for comment, changed their tack: previously, the key question in the accompanying letters would be Do you think it is good enough to be published? Henceforth the question would be: Do you think it will pass the censors? A devastating comment, indeed, on the state of South African letters in the seventies.

  When news came that the novel had actually been referred to the Publications Board for a decision, it led to a feeding frenzy. For weeks on end the story was front-page news. And it travelled abroad, to Time and Newsweek, to newspapers in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, even in Japan. Within days the book was sold out everywhere. Daantjie was eager to reprint – but knowing it might be banned, he hesitated. The financial situation at Buren had always been precarious. And were a ban to materialise, he simply couldn’t risk losing all his stock and having all distributed copies returned. In terms of the Publication Act, no bookshop or library was allowed to keep it on the shelves.

  Then came the news that the board had considered the book and had come to a decision: but the public had to wait for the following week’s Government Gazette before it would be official. Daantjie was frantic. Pressurised from all sides, I decided to bite the bullet. I telephoned Jannie Kruger. When I put the crucial question, he sniggered. ‘I’m sorry, my friend,’ he said, with that peculiar intonation that can turn my friend into one of the most odious expressions in any language, ‘but I’m afraid you will have to wait for next Friday’s Government Gazette.’

  I explained Daantjie’s predicament to him: a simple answer could save the publishers thousands of rands.

  ‘Sorry, my friend,’ he said in his most mellifluous voice. ‘But the law is the law, you know.’

  ‘Surely,’ I said in exasperation, ‘as the author of the book I should have the right to know?’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ he said, ‘no, no, no, no. If you want to stay on the right side of the law, there is only one way to get an answer before it is published in the Gazette.’

  ‘And that is?’ I persisted.

  ‘That is for you to lay a charge against the book yourself. You see, a complainant has the right to be informed the moment a decision has been taken.’

  I was flabbergasted. ‘You don’t really expect me to complain against my own book?’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked blithely.

  I could not think of an answer.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you don’t want to do that, you’ll just have to wait for next week’s Gazette. Or,’ he added as a mischievous afterthought, ‘just wait until this Sunday, and read it in Rapport. They always know everything, don’t they?’ He obviously knew that I wrote a regular column for that Sunday paper.

  ‘Thank you, Oom Jannie,’ I said in what must have been a rather strangled voice, using the overly familiar and slightly deprecating appellation by which the Afrikaans press often referred to him.

  ‘Goodbye, my friend,’ he said. ‘And give my regards to your family.’

  I was livid.

  I telephoned my close friend Coenie Slabber at Rapport, a journalist of remarkable integrity who had helped me through many a tight spot, and told him about the conversation.

  ‘We’ll see what we can do,’ he said. ‘But it’s not going to be easy.’

  And it was while he was saying this that an outrageous idea came into my head: why not follow Oom Jannie’s suggestion to the letter? My book had already been referred to the board; they had taken their decision; nothing I did could make any difference to the outcome.

  I telephoned my friend Naas in Johannesburg. Within the hour he called in his secretary, who was also a good friend, and discussed with her the possibility of laying a charge against Kennis van die Aand. Before the end of the day her complaint was on Oom Jannie’s desk. Two days later his reply, with the official verdict of the board, was in her hands. From there it was whizzed to me, to Coenie Slabber, and to his editor. On that Sunday, Rapport broke the news about the ban, with a photocopy of the official letter.

  The following months brought an inordinate amount of hard work. Buoyed by the expressions of goodwill and support Daantjie and I received from all over the country, we decided to take what seemed then the only dignified course: challenging the ban in the Supreme Court. We had several approaches from senior counsel to argue our case pro amici, but the costs of a trial still threatened to be prohibitive. Some initial trepidation was overcome by newspaper reports about contributions and pledges from people all over the country to fight the ban. Most of these were in the form of small amounts from private individuals: ten rands, five rands, two rands at a time, but soon escalating into the thousands. At the same time, publishers abroad began to show interest. Daantjie somewhat precipitately accepted the first offer, from the now defunct W. H. Allen in London. Not a good choice, with hindsight. The one wonderful advantage of it was that this firm’s foreign-rights manager at the time was Carole Blake, now one of the most successful literary agents in the UK: in an amazingly short time she succeeded in clinching foreign deals with twenty or more publishers in the US, Europe and elsewhere, even as far as the Soviet Union and Japan. All of this firmly launched me on a road to heady international success. Unfortunately, W. H. Allen turned out not to be a writer’s best friend and in due course the association led to a devastating conclusion and deep unhappiness all round.

  But for the time being, the prospects seemed good – provided I could get a translation done as soon as possible. At that stage I really did not feel confident about writing in English, but in a crisis one starts drawing on reserves one never realised one possessed. There was only one thing I was absolutely sure about: I would not play into the hands of the censors by allowing them to silence me. As an Afrikaans writer working exclusively in a small language isolated from the rest of the world, I found myself utterly at the mercy of the South African authorities. That I refused to accept. The only remedy was to make my work accessible through other languages.

  Fortunately there were a few English-speaking friends more than prepared to advise and help me. Even when it came to typing the English translation, there was a way out: all my life I have typed with one finger only, which slowed down the process quite drastically; and on this occasion it was advisable to have an English text ready as soon as possible. The daughter of a good Indian friend – the man who had been the original inspiration behind the character of Dilpert in the novel – offered to do the typing. The only drawback was that she identified so strongly with the story that she was crying through large sections of the narrative, and I regularly collected completed pages of the manuscript so stained by tears that I had to use Estelle’s hairdryer to make them presentable.

  In the meantime our campaign against the ban was taking shape. I pledged most of our foreign advances and royalties to the looming battle, Daantjie, in a deeply touching move, sold the small flock of goats he owned on the farm of a friend in the distant Namaqualand: this had been his
insurance policy for the future, the ‘pension’ saved for his old age. But together we prepared to take on whatever windmills the world could offer.

  The Publications Control Board furnished us, as decreed by the state, with full reasons for the ban. If the matter had not been so serious, it would have led to much mirth. The three areas of offensiveness were as follows:

  – Blasphemy: every single instance of the (mis)use of God’s name was listed as proof of this ungodliness, including every time a character exclaimed something along the lines of, ‘My God, it’s hot!’

  – Pornography: every act of love in the book, every reference to intercourse or the mere possibility of intercourse, featured on the censors’ laundry list, with pride of place reserved for the episode in which Joseph has sex with the Dutch girl Annamaria and, outraged by his pedantic attitude, she exclaims: ‘Just stop talking, Joseph, Jesus! And fuck me!’

  – Endangering the security of the state: the overall set-up of a brown man and a white woman daring to love each other sexually was a frontal attack on the official government policy of apartheid, thereby placing at risk the very foundations of the ideology that kept apartheid going; moreover, the portrayal of the security police was branded as mendacious, insulting and offensive.

  Our legal team comprised three lawyers who all, in due course, were appointed as judges: Ernie Grosskopf, Hennie Nel and Gerhard Kuhn. Ultimately everything would depend on the bench. We rejoiced in advance when it transpired that the presiding judge would be Helm van Zyl, a broadminded man deeply sympathetic to the cause of literature and the arts. But then it was reported that the Cape judge president, Justice Theo van Wyk, had intervened in a manner which, our contacts assured, was entirely irregular, and insisted on taking over himself. Known as an arch-conservative, narrow-minded rightist with a number of axes to grind with liberals in general and in this matter in particular, his presence made the outcome predictable. All we could do was to pin our hopes on his colleagues: Justice Diemont, known as a fair man but one who followed the letter of the law most punctiliously; and Justice Jan Steyn, a perspicacious and humane man of culture and understanding. With luck, we thought, we might expect a verdict of two to one in our favour at best, or two to one against us at worst.

  When the decision was finally announced, a full six months later, it was devastating: three-nil in favour of a ban. Justice Steyn confessed later that in his heart he supported a verdict for us; but the terms of the Act simply did not allow him to support any verdict other than one in favour of the decision by the Publications Control Board.

  We could still take the matter to the Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein. But the verdict suggested that we had little hope of success there. And we simply could not risk losing any more money. Already, the trial had signalled the end of Buren Publishers. The enormous support from ordinary citizens could be construed as something of a moral victory; the continued success of Looking on Darkness and subsequent novels abroad, ensured a widening interest in South African literature in general in the world outside; the way in which local (Afrikaans) writers began to organise resistance against future censorship – leading to the founding of the ‘informal’ publishing concern of Taurus and the establishment of the Afrikaans Writers’ Guild in 1975 – bolstered the cause of literature. But in real and immediate terms we had lost. And the future looked bleak.

  It looked even bleaker when in the same year of our trial, 1974, the existing form of control was replaced (a move in which the later state president F. W. de Klerk played an active role) by a more draconian board, no longer allowing any more right of appeal to the courts, and placing more direct power in the hands of the minister. A new chairman of the Appeal Board was appointed, an odious little man, Judge Lammie Snyman. In this new dispensation the causes of extreme nationalism and fundamentalist religion were well served; but literature became a primary victim. The infamous Jakobsen’s Index of banned publications, which included the work of hundreds of the greatest names in world literature, including Nabokov, Sartre, Faulkner, Steinbeck and numerous others, was expanded to well over 20,000 titles.

  * * *

  Censorship does not happen in a vacuum. As I was soon to find out, the fact that a book had been banned, almost inevitably made the security police prick up their ears – most particularly of course when ‘endangering the security of the state’ had been cited as a reason for such action. Since the ban on Kennis I was no longer free to come and go as I pleased in South Africa; even my visits abroad were closely monitored. From then on, my telephone was tapped and all my mail, incoming and outgoing, was opened – invariably in such a conspicuous way that it was clearly the intention to make me aware of the surveillance. Even so, initially at least, the Special Branch kept a relatively low profile. Until 27 October, 1975, that is. On that day the gloves came off.

  What triggered it, was a radio interview in which the South African ambassador to Washington and the UN, Pik Botha, in his customary blustering way defended his country’s racist policies and blithely denied the existence of apartheid. This was well before the explosions of 1976 and 1977; even so I felt sufficiently outraged to take on the ambassador. He was a man who believed in getting his retaliation in first.

  On that date in October the New York Times published this letter I had dispatched in the wake of Botha’s brazen protestations:

  It has been reported in the South African press that this country’s ambassador to the USA and the UN told Americans in an extensive radio interview: ‘You are all the time referring to apartheid, apartheid, apartheid. Multinational development is not apartheid in the sense that the government is keeping peoples from one another – peoples who want to join are free to join.’

  Perhaps His Excellency should have somewhat qualified his assertion. As far as individuals are concerned, people of different colours in South Africa are indeed allowed to communicate or ‘join’, provided they do not worship in the same churches; provided they do not attend the same schools or universities; provided they do not use the same toilets or public transport; provided they do not enjoy cultural, recreational or sports activities together (except with special permission or permit); provided they do not build their houses in the same areas; provided they do not share government bodies, trade unions or scientific or arts institutions; provided they do not fall in love or wish to get married.

  It is, the ambassador said, ‘a voluntary way of life, voluntarily decided upon by all the important leaders in my country’. It should, of course, be added that this wholly voluntary way of life is rigidly enforced by probably the most formidable framework of racialistic legislation in the world and, among other things, by a vast organisation of security police who contribute their voluntary bit in the way of detentions, torture and inexplicable deaths. ‘All the important leaders in my country’ are, of course, part of, or appointed by, the hierarchy of the Nationalist Party.

  I do not question the ambassador’s right to defend his country. But I do challenge his obvious assumption that this should be done through lies and distortions.

  From that moment my experience of censorship became inextricably linked to all ‘the battalions of lies and the armies of hate’ the Special Branch could muster to crush any individual who dared to challenge their authority as the true rulers of the apartheid state. That was when censorship revealed its real face, of which Jannie Kruger and Lammie Snyman were but the obtusely grimacing masks.

  In the meantime, there had been notable developments in the midst of the Sixtiers group. Quite some time earlier, during my year in Paris, in 1968, a new journal, Kol (which could mean either Blot or Target), had been launched in Johannesburg by Bartho Smit and Chris Barnard, with the collaboration of some friends, including the dramatist P. G. du Plessis, the novelist and short-story writer John Miles, and the critic Ampie Coetzee. It did not last for long and never made much of an impact, but it caused a rift among the Sestigers: the Johannesburg group tended to stick to the earlier art pour l’art convictions of the
first wave of Sestiger writing, while Breyten and I, and soon also Braam de Vries, were pushed out because of our then more overtly littérature engagée approach. In due course, however, and most certainly following the Kennis van die Aand debacle, almost the whole group shifted resolutely towards more open political commitment.

  After Kennis had been banned, the censors abandoned whatever reservations they might previously have had about acting against Afrikaans books. They now actually appeared more eager to suppress Afrikaans texts than English ones, and writers like Welma Odendaal, André le Roux, John Miles and the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, among others, all bore the brunt of this shift. In the theatre, bureaucrats had a field day: as most of the theatres in the country – except some of the most exciting venues, like the Space in Cape Town and the Market in Johannesburg – were run by provincial authorities, it became possible for these managements to stop a play on the strength of only a single complaint by a member of the audience – and more than once such disapproving individuals were carefully and deliberately planted by the political authorities.

  Bartho, more than any other playwright, suffered under this kind of censorship. It took years before his plays were actually allowed on the stage – and as the widely acknowledged master of stagecraft in our midst, this was particularly painful to him; once a play by him was stopped on the very morning of its opening day. P. G. du Plessis, popular with the masses and never one to rock the boat, encountered no problems. But even I was hamstrung. My play Pavane was stopped before it could go into rehearsal; my production of Chris Barnard’s Taraboemdery, after a sell-out run in Namibia, was banned from performance in the Cape Province.