Memories of Censorship

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Notes

¹ Kannemeyer, Geskiedenis van die Afrikaanse literatuur, vol. 2, 231–36. Before McDonald, the more overt features of the South African censorship system were described and analyzed by, among others, Brink, “Censorship and Literature”; Merrett, A Culture of Censorship; J. M. Coetzee, “The Work of the Censor: Censorship in South Africa” in the collection Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, 185–203; and De Lange, The Muzzled Muse: Literature and Censorship in South Africa. Commentaries on the laws governing censorship were published by Geldenhuÿs, Pornografie, sensuur en reg; and Van Rooyen, Censorship in South Africa; Being a Commentary on the Publications Act.

² Ampie Coetzee, “Literature and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Afrikaans Literature and Afrikaner Nationalism,” 345, quoted in McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences, 38. Further references to McDonald parenthetically in the text.

³ The difficulty persists, as censors after 1996 must recognize a Constitutional right to “freedom of expression,” including “freedom of artistic creativity,” but are left as the sole arbiters of what qualifies as art; see McDonald 347, 353. McDonald draws attention to the same problem in an opinion piece written in response to newly proposed censorship legislation, which exempts “publications deemed to be ‘of literary or artistic merit’”; McDonald, “Comment,” Mail and Guardian, 1 May 2009.

⁴ Coetzee, Giving Offense, 117.

⁵ See also 195, 207.

⁶ Coetzee, Giving Offense, 38.

⁷ See also Louw, “In The Heart of the Country: A Calvinist Allegory?”

⁸ The full document relating to the censors’ decision on Life & Times of Michael K, “Publication or Object: Application for a Decision/ Review (Publications Act, 1974)” (serial number P83/10/168), is available at McDonald's book's supplementary website: http://www.theliteraturepolice.com/. Accessed July 5, 2009.

⁹ Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K, 246.

¹⁰ See “Publication or Object: Application for a Decision/ Review (Publications Act, 1974)” (serial number P83/10/168).

¹¹ Referring to the Sorbonne theologians who sought to censor his books, Rabelais writes: “every one of them has so handled my books as to beshit them all over, decrying and calumniating them with the intention that no one, apart from their Reverend Lazinesses, should heed them, no one read them. With my own eyes (not my own ears) I have seen them at it, going so far as to keep my books religiously with their night things, as breviaries for everyday use”; Rabelais, “Prologue to The Fourth Book of Pantagruel” (1548), 626.

¹² Coetzee, Giving Offense, 38.