Opening a docket on apartheid's literature police
The discussion was hosted by the English Department and the Archive and Public Culture research initiative in response to McDonald's book, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences, which was first published by Oxford University Press in February 2009. Well received by critics around the globe, the book has been described by JM Coetzee as 'indispensable reading if we wish to understand the forces forming and deforming literary production in South Africa during the apartheid years'.
'When we think about censorship, we imagine faceless, unimaginative bureaucrats, who ban things like Black Beauty or Noddy or who put the stars on the nipples of the women in Scope magazine,' said Hedley Twidle in his opening remarks. 'We have this stereotype of the faceless automaton, but Peter's work shows us that the employees of the censorship board were not unsubtle brutes, but highly trained literary professionals and academics who believed themselves, in an uneasy hybrid of liberalism and nationalism, to be preserving and protecting the space of the literary.'
During the 10 years McDonald devoted to exploring and researching the ramifications of the once-secretarchives of the censorship bureaucracy,he unearthed 'many unexpected linkages between the censorship and educational systems', pointing to 'the strange contradictions of intellectual life in South African universities at the time'.
In some instances authors even had their work banned by their former lecturers. Authors Jonty Driver and Albie Sachs, for example, both had work censored by Professor AH Murray, who had taught them both. Murray was a Professor of Philosophy at the universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape with a special interest in ideas of political pluralism. He joined the Dekker Board in 1963 and served as a key security censor until the mid-1980s. 'Andre Brink had the same problem with a former teacher,' said McDonald, who is a Fellow of St Hugh's College and a Lecturer at the University of Oxford.
McDonald has written extensively on the history of 'literature' as a category from the nineteenth century to the present day, on publishing history, and on the relationship between literary institutions and the modern state. In telling the strangely tangled stories of censorship and literature in apartheid South Africa, he uncovers an extraordinarily complex web of cultural connections linking Europe and Africa, East and West.
The discussion also addressed questions relating to the protocols and ambitions shaping official records that are initially conceived to be secret. What is a secret archive? How secret is it? How is it different from an officially public archive? What does it preserve? What does it exclude? Since that state archive pointed to, and immediately raised questions about, a wide range of other more fragile and fugitive archives, whether of publishers or resistance groups, the discussion also turned on questions of archival survival and preservation. What happens when the official archive appears to hold the only surviving traces of its unofficial rivals? What are we to make of the fact that many of those rival archives are still in peril today, if not already lost?
'If anyone emerges as the hero of the book it is Mike Kirkwood (Director of Ravan Press and joint founder of the magazine, Staffrider),' said McDonald, explaining that among South African publishers of the 70s and 80s, Kirkwood seems to have been the most self-conscious, deeply questioning his own understanding of the nature of the literary and how claims to knowledge were compromised by the distorting politics of the time.
McDonald's book is richly supplemented by an unusually generous website theliteraturepolice.com, featuring PDFs of various censors' reports on South African literary texts, a chronology, a bibliography, and a section devoted to responses to the project and 'further testimony' from parties involved with or affected by censorship.
The section entitled 'Censor Biographies' comprises a series of brief biographical sketches of just over forty notable or especially influential censors. The 'Database' constitutes the largest and most interactive section of the site. 'It represents the most complete record to date of decisions the censors made about works that can be identified as belonging to the corpus of South African literature published during the apartheid era, though it also includes some arguably non-literary titles by leading political figures (e.g. essays by Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko),' writes McDonald. 'It gives details relating to just over 450 decisions, some of which were reviewed, and is searchable by, among others, author, publisher, date and outcome.'