Research Paper---EEK!!

[Sister Grace]

Being the slacker that i am, i have put off finishing my research paper for too long and now the deadline is almost here. Anyways, I'm doing it on banned books and was wondering if anyone knew of any good examples such as Voltaire's Candide? or even maybe some good articles online discussing censorship?
I wanted to do my paper on banned films, but alas, someone grabbed it before me... oh preppy girl with big hair in the second row, how do i loathe thee?...let me count the ways...

[Ash]

The only banned book that I know of is "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie.
It is SO banned in Middle Eastern countries that the Islamic elite issued a fatwa against him.

Meaning a death sentence for Rushdie if they ever get their hands on him.

[Derf]

I just did a Google search for "banned books" and the very first result was from the American Library Association, and it looked to have some interesting information. The next results were from university web sites, all of which should be reliable sources for research projects. I generally tell my students (I teach English classes) to avoid doing Google searches because they can't always discern a good source from a bad one, but if you are careful to choose only university sites or sites that are authoritative on the subject (personally, I wouldn't use the Wikipedia entry as authoritative, but it might steer you to some other sites that are).

One other site to note would be the University of Michigan's site here. It contains lists of banned books and the reasons they were considered controversial. It's somebody's personal site, so I don't know that I'd use it as an authoritative source, but it should help with your initial research, giving you a list of books to look into.

[indianasmith]

The most famous list of banned books is the Catholic Church's Index Prohibitorium . . . which at one time included every single non-Latin translation of the Bible!

[Allhallowsday]

How about a history of book banning or discussion of fun, readable banned books like LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER or CATCHER IN THE RYE or TROPIC OF CANCER? 

FARENHEIT 451, though not banned anywhere that I know of, might be used illustratively...

[Rev. Powell]

Not sure what the boundaries of the assignment are.  Just wanted to mention Reading Lolita in Tehran, about a secret reading group in a society where classics really are banned.  It sort of dovetails with Ash's suggestion, too. 

[flackbait]

Trevor might have some interesting tales on what used to be banned in in South Africa.
I remember long ago when the first Harry Potter book came out their were plenty of small town libraries in my area trying to ban it. West Michigans just a little religiously conservative. 
If you want to go to the past try looking into russian literature there were plenty of stuff banned and censored back in the 19th century. Off the top of my head I can only remember A Hero of Our time,

[Killer Bees]

The only one I can think of might be The Jungle (Uncensored Version) by Upton Sinclair.  I haven't read it, but I read about it on Amazon a while back and it sounds really interesting.

You could always do the classics like Nabokov's Lolita and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover but I'm not sure if those books were actually banned.

How about a modern story?  Andrew Morton's biography on Tom Cruise seems to be kicking up a bit of a storm, and I can't even get it in the country I have to go online.

Good luck!

[Trevor]

  Hi SisterGrace.

You can use the following paper for yours, either wholly or in part with my pleasure.

“What Did You Tell The Librarians?” ~ Or the horrors of South African literary censorship

Trevor T. Moses
Film Archivist / Client Services Practitioner
National Film, Video and Sound Archives
Pretoria
South Africa

Tel: (002712) 343 97 67
Fax: (002712) 344 51 43
Email: trevormoses@hotmail.com or trevor.moses@dac.gov.za.

__________________________________________

Before I commence my presentation, I would like to ask how many of the people present were at the IFLA conference in Durban in 2007? It was South Africa’s sincere pleasure and privilege to host all of you there and I trust that you all enjoyed yourselves very much: I bring you warm greetings from South Africa.

The title of my paper comes from a rather rude telephone call that the filmmaker Michael Moore received from his publisher regarding his book “Stupid White Men”. The publisher demanded to know what was going on because “we’re getting hate mail from librarians”. What had happened was Mr Moore had told his guests at a lecture in New York that, due to the tragic events of September 11, 2001 (my birthday, unfortunately) his book would not be released and the stored 50 000 copies awaiting distribution and sale would most likely be pulped. What Mr Moore was unaware of was that one of the guests there was a librarian who, angered at the censorship practiced by the publishers, emailed her colleagues, telling them what had happened and to contact the publishers to demand that Mr Moore’s book be released. The upshot of this was that thousands of librarians across the country contacted his publishers, the book was released with no media fanfare and became a best-seller almost immediately. Mr Moore’s wry comment in that book was that “librarians are one terrorist group that you don’t want to mess with.” I’d like to thank Mr Moore for allowing me to include part of his book in this paper.
_____________________________________________

I’d like to dedicate this paper to a friend of mine who is sadly no longer with me ~ her name was Jeanette Burger and she was basically a few good things to me: a good person, a good teacher and a good librarian: she was my mentor in all things related to libraries and librarians, I miss her a lot and think of her often.

________________________________________________

In his keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 2007 IFLA conference in Durban, the Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr Z Pallo Jordan, touched on the subject of literary censorship in South Africa and mentioned that the “august” body known as the Censor Board made a serious error of judgement when they banned a supposedly offensive book with a supposedly offensive title. The author: Anna Sewell. The title: Black Beauty. You can laugh, but it was and is sadly true: the Censor Board had banned it on the title alone.

The South African Censor board (later to become known and feared as the Publications Control Board) was established in 1933 and continued its’ reign of terror until the Government of National Unity was formed when democracy and sanity came to South Africa in 1994. In the years preceding the advent of democracy, thousands of films were either banned or cut, millions of books, magazines and newspapers were banned, people were thrown into prison for possession of so-called undesirable material and one of South Africa’s foremost poets, Professor T T Cloete, became a censor in 1963.

Hang on, I hear you saying: A writer being a censor? Could this be true? Yes, unfortunately. Having a writer as a censor is like having a child molestor look after your children: it is wrong and just does not work. The Publications Control Board and its’ big brother, the Publications Appeal Board had frightening powers and ruled with an iron fist ~ what is worse is that they had no public faces and could have shop-owners, newsagents, etc. arrested on the spot for selling “indecent” or “offensive” material. No South African was allowed to possess material that the Censors found objectionable, and free thoughts were not encouraged, unless they were free thoughts sponsored by the National Party.

Having said that, the rise of the South African Censor Boards was not due in any way to the ugly policies of Apartheid ~ if one says that it was so, how can it be that liberal and politically progressive countries outside of South Africa also banned and censored publications and films? No, the censorship policy of South Africa can be ascribed to the blinkered mentality of the Censors and those in government: anything that they did not recognize, know about or understand is of the Devil himself, i.e. horrible things like television, (yes, TV was banned) having a drink in a bar on a Sunday, and Lord forbid that one should actually want to go shopping on that day. For many years, South Africans were told what they may or may not read, listen to, see and virtually what they may do. The true horror of this state of affairs is that the Censor Boards did their work with little or no opposition from the public, who boneheadedly let the then government make decisions for them. Thankfully, this rotten status quo of the government deciding for its’ people what is fit for them no longer applies.

Even worse, film screenings were not permitted on Sundays (according to the edicts of the ‘Sunday Observance Act’ of 1898) and this policy continued until 1993, video stores being exempt from this policy. Films were heavily censored and restricted: a sad example is the Lou Adler film “Up In Smoke” starring Richard “Cheech” Marin and a famous son of Canada, Tommy Chong. The Censor Board banned this film, stating that “it will encourage the use of marijuana by the impressionable youth of South Africa”. So as a result, I didn’t see this film until the censorship laws were relaxed. When I finally did see it on DVD, I was shocked. Shocked because the Censor Board were in a sense right as it did encourage me to do something. But not, to their dismay, I suppose, to smoke marijuana: It encouraged me to laugh. I could go on for hours concerning the films that were banned by the Censor Boards and for which reasons, but I would need a few days to do this correctly.

Just as an example of how ridiculous the Censor Boards’ rulings were as regards films; they banned and/or restricted films that contained, in their opinion, so-called “undesirable” material or contained views or thoughts that “would be offensive to a certain section of the South African public” ~ an example of this can be found in the Academy Award winning motion picture In The Heat Of The Night (1967), directed by Norman Jewison and starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. This film was banned solely for the scene in which the detective Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) is slapped across the face by Eric Endicott (Larry Gates) a racist white land-owner: Virgil’s reaction is to slap the racist right back. Result: the film remained banned for ten years.

Even popular music was not exempt from these idiots and their ability to turn gold into turds: after John Lennon’s infamous comment about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus was aired, their music was banned from airplay. I am sure that David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd would be amused to know that their album The Wall was denounced as offensive and banned. When asked about the banning later, the Minister of the Interior, Mr Marais Steyn, was quoted as saying that he had never heard of the group Pink Floyd at all.  Artists such as Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel also had their works banned in South Africa, as did Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, whose song “Mrs Robinson” and the offensive line Jesus loves you more than you will know….. caused both the song and the Mike Nichols film The Graduate that it was used in to be banned.

The Censor Board under the chairmanship of the 80 year old Professor Gerrit Dekker underwent a major change in 1963 and was re-named the Publications Control Board, but no matter: it was still a faceless, bureaucratic, shadowy, organization who found everything from women’s naked shoulders in films, to so-called adult magazines to television “offensive to the population of South Africa” and banned them. As regards television, the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Dr Albert Hertzog, condemned it as “the Devil’s box” and banned it forthwith. A major irony: once TV came to South Africa in 1975, the first telecommunications tower in Johannesburg was named after him.

The most feared of all the South African censors was an individual named Judge Johannes H. Snyman, a person who rejoiced in the nickname of “Lammie” [lamb] and was the most influential of all the Censor Board heads before or since. Under Snyman’s benevolent rule of terror, thousands of books, films, newspapers, magazines and journals were banned, mostly with no reasons given other than the general excuse that “it is offensive…” I am not ever one to make fun of health issues, but after less than a month in the post as Chief Censor / Big Brother, Snyman suffered a serious coronary and was put on leave for quite a few months. Comedians of the time risked censorship themselves by commenting that Snyman’s coronary was a direct result of him seeing what the South African public was not permitted to see.

Many famous authors’ works were banned ~ I am sure that Stephen King would be delighted to hear that Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, It, The Dead Zone and ‘Salem’s Lot were denounced as offensive and banned for many years. Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” was also banned as “undesirable” although the Steven Spielberg film was not. Jackie Collins’ novels were all banned, as were the novels by Jacqueline Susann, James Herbert, Peter Straub, Clive Barker and Robert Ruark.

The renowned South African authors Andre P. Brink, Wilbur Smith, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Breyten Breytenbach, Richard Rive, Ezekiel Maphalele, Stuart Cloete and Etienne Leroux also went through the PCB gauntlet: there were cries of horror when Leroux’s “Seven Days With The Silbersteins” was awarded a major SA literary prize and calls were made in Parliament for it to be banned, even though none of those people had actually read the book. Even if you were a Nobel Peace Prize Literature winner and an Oscar winner, your work was not immune from banning: Nadine Gordimer and Ronald Harwood respectively found this out to their disgust. Even humour was considered offensive back in the day: the first two Second World War autobiographies of Spike Milligan, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall and Rommel? Gunner Who? were banned. After hearing all this, you must be wondering what the PCB wanted South Africans to read exactly? Other authors who had their works banned included the following authors:

William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
Dean Koontz
Harold Robbins
Henry Miller
Judith Krantz
Grace Metalious
Anthony Burgess
John Farris
Gore Vidal
Calder Willingham
Don Pendleton
Charles Bukowski
Donald Woods
Steve Biko
Jack Kerouac
William L Burroughs
Robin Moore
Eric Von Lustbader
Irving Wallace
Ernest Tidyman
Nelson Mandela
John Jakes
Joan Collins
Norman Mailer (The Naked & The Dead banned for its’ title alone)
Norman Spinrad
James Blish
Dennis Wheatley
Mickey Spillane
James Baldwin
Mario Puzo (The Godfather)
J G Ballard
Kingsley Amis
Larry MacMurtry
John D. MacDonald
James Hadley Chase
Ken Follett
Paul Theroux
Sidney Sheldon
Brendan Behan
Kurt Vonnegut
Joseph Heller
Lawrence Sanders
James A Michener
Joseph Wambaugh
Dick Francis
Germaine Greer
James Jones
Mario Puzo
Thomas Pynchon
Morris West
Vladimir Nabokov
Boris Pasternak
Frederick Forsyth
Irwin Shaw
Nicholas Monsarratt
Georges Simenon……………..etc, ad nauseaum.

Hundreds, if not thousands of books, magazines, journals, pamphlets, posters, films, videos, sound recordings and even magic lantern shows were all banned and being in possession of these and being caught so doing left the person with two options, one worse than the other: a stiff jail sentence, a heavy fine or both. One of my weekly tasks at the NFVSA was to put new lists of banned articles into an ominous sounding file called Jacobsens Book Of Objectionable Literature. I have our copy here with me and I had to pay extra baggage handling fees for it as it is so heavy. This file has over 600 pages of so-called “offensive” and “objectionable” material listed in it, much of it being of a political and sexual nature, but ultimately, all of it was declared to be against the wishes of the government of the day and “offensive” to a certain section of the public.  Thus the censor boards were playing out George Orwell’s nightmarish world of Big Brother and all that accompanied it.

The Censor Board, in its’ infinite wisdom also sought to have the Holy Koran banned, an idiotic move which angered many South African Muslims, to the extent that the PCB were asked that if the Holy Koran was considered to be offensive, then surely the Bible should be banned too. The PCB nearly swallowed its’ collective teeth in anger at this affront to their dignity and the very idea of it, until the Muslim community reminded them of the erotic passages in the “Song of Solomon” Bible chapter.

It is very interesting to note that while all so-called “Communist” books and pamphlets such as the works of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Nikita Khruschev and Joseph Stalin were banned, works such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were not. Idiocy also ran rampant when two books published in Zimbabwe in the 1980’s were banned for “having possible communistic influences” ~ these books were entitled Thoughts Of Chairman Jesus and Quotations From Comrade Jesus ~ books containing quotes from the Bible. This ban everything communistic in sight but leave the rest alone jag could be put down to the fact that the Prime Minister of South Africa from 1966 to 1977 (when South African censorship was at its’ most claustrophobic) was one Balthazar Johannes Vorster, a man who was interned during World War 11 for his pro-Nazi stance.

If, after a certain period, books and other items were found to be non-offensive anymore, the PCB and PAB still issued orders regarding the sale and displaying of such items. These books were not allowed to be in public view and if they were, they had to be in a sealed wrapper, possibly for fear that the thoughts contained therein could infiltrate the minds of the easily convinced by some weird sort of osmosis. Previously undesirable publications were held in libraries and if the publication was of a sexual nature, these books were kept locked away until someone plucked up the courage to ask for them. Even by appearing like benevolent uncles and saying that “we trust you, you’re adults now, you can read / see / hear this” the Censor Boards still put restrictions on what could be seen, heard, read and done by the public that paid their salaries.

Thus an entire generation grew up secure in the knowledge that because the then government and their lackeys said so, anything related to sex and politics was taboo and that their government knew what was best for them. No shops open on Sundays, no cinemas open on Sundays, no doing what we tell you that you may not, no watching of films that we consider offensive, no listening to music that has hidden Satanic, Communistic meanings, as well as lyrics that may corrupt you, no watching of television as those satanic images may cause you to ditch our racist propaganda and lead you to develop a more worldly point of view: do as we say and the volk will be free. But oh yes, when you turn 16, by all means go off to war in Angola and die for a cause, our cause. The then government’s mantra (in the words of Al Pacino in Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit) was “Our cause is just: our enemies: everywhere, they’re all around us. Some scary stuff out there.” Their cause was not just: their rise and power over the people may not have had anything to do with apartheid but their ironfisted rule did nothing less than propagate the disgusting policies of apartheid and all that went with it.

I am greatly thankful that we in South Africa now have freedom of thought, word and deed thanks to the advent of democracy and sanity in our troubled, turbulent but beautiful country of South Africa. Censorship formed a large part of what South Africa was under apartheid, not only censorship of thought, word and deed, but also censorship of people, all of which add up to nothing less than crimes against humanity, our humanity, Africa’s humanity and the world’s humanity.
_____________________________________________

I would like to conclude my paper with an excerpt from a novel which was denounced as “evil” and “offensive” by the Censors in the early 1980’s ~ Stephen King’s “It” containing the following paragraph which allegedly offended the censors greatly.

“So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away…………from memory but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes, even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.”

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

I hope this helps you.

[Sister Grace]

How about a history of book banning or discussion of fun, readable banned books like LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER or CATCHER IN THE RYE or TROPIC OF CANCER? 

FARENHEIT 451, though not banned anywhere that I know of, might be used illustratively...

yeah, i actually started out my paper with a quote from Farenheit 451, which is actually where i got the idea for my research paper after having re-read it recently.

Thanks everyone, you've been a great help!!

[Sister Grace]

Hi SisterGrace.

You can use the following paper for yours, either wholly or in part with my pleasure.

“What Did You Tell The Librarians?” ~ Or the horrors of South African literary censorship

Trevor T. Moses
Film Archivist / Client Services Practitioner
National Film, Video and Sound Archives
Pretoria
South Africa

Tel: (002712) 343 97 67
Fax: (002712) 344 51 43
Email: trevormoses@hotmail.com or trevor.moses@dac.gov.za.

__________________________________________

Before I commence my presentation, I would like to ask how many of the people present were at the IFLA conference in Durban in 2007? It was South Africa’s sincere pleasure and privilege to host all of you there and I trust that you all enjoyed yourselves very much: I bring you warm greetings from South Africa.

The title of my paper comes from a rather rude telephone call that the filmmaker Michael Moore received from his publisher regarding his book “Stupid White Men”. The publisher demanded to know what was going on because “we’re getting hate mail from librarians”. What had happened was Mr Moore had told his guests at a lecture in New York that, due to the tragic events of September 11, 2001 (my birthday, unfortunately) his book would not be released and the stored 50 000 copies awaiting distribution and sale would most likely be pulped. What Mr Moore was unaware of was that one of the guests there was a librarian who, angered at the censorship practiced by the publishers, emailed her colleagues, telling them what had happened and to contact the publishers to demand that Mr Moore’s book be released. The upshot of this was that thousands of librarians across the country contacted his publishers, the book was released with no media fanfare and became a best-seller almost immediately. Mr Moore’s wry comment in that book was that “librarians are one terrorist group that you don’t want to mess with.” I’d like to thank Mr Moore for allowing me to include part of his book in this paper.
_____________________________________________

I’d like to dedicate this paper to a friend of mine who is sadly no longer with me ~ her name was Jeanette Burger and she was basically a few good things to me: a good person, a good teacher and a good librarian: she was my mentor in all things related to libraries and librarians, I miss her a lot and think of her often.

________________________________________________

In his keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 2007 IFLA conference in Durban, the Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr Z Pallo Jordan, touched on the subject of literary censorship in South Africa and mentioned that the “august” body known as the Censor Board made a serious error of judgement when they banned a supposedly offensive book with a supposedly offensive title. The author: Anna Sewell. The title: Black Beauty. You can laugh, but it was and is sadly true: the Censor Board had banned it on the title alone.

The South African Censor board (later to become known and feared as the Publications Control Board) was established in 1933 and continued its’ reign of terror until the Government of National Unity was formed when democracy and sanity came to South Africa in 1994. In the years preceding the advent of democracy, thousands of films were either banned or cut, millions of books, magazines and newspapers were banned, people were thrown into prison for possession of so-called undesirable material and one of South Africa’s foremost poets, Professor T T Cloete, became a censor in 1963.

Hang on, I hear you saying: A writer being a censor? Could this be true? Yes, unfortunately. Having a writer as a censor is like having a child molestor look after your children: it is wrong and just does not work. The Publications Control Board and its’ big brother, the Publications Appeal Board had frightening powers and ruled with an iron fist ~ what is worse is that they had no public faces and could have shop-owners, newsagents, etc. arrested on the spot for selling “indecent” or “offensive” material. No South African was allowed to possess material that the Censors found objectionable, and free thoughts were not encouraged, unless they were free thoughts sponsored by the National Party.

Having said that, the rise of the South African Censor Boards was not due in any way to the ugly policies of Apartheid ~ if one says that it was so, how can it be that liberal and politically progressive countries outside of South Africa also banned and censored publications and films? No, the censorship policy of South Africa can be ascribed to the blinkered mentality of the Censors and those in government: anything that they did not recognize, know about or understand is of the Devil himself, i.e. horrible things like television, (yes, TV was banned) having a drink in a bar on a Sunday, and Lord forbid that one should actually want to go shopping on that day. For many years, South Africans were told what they may or may not read, listen to, see and virtually what they may do. The true horror of this state of affairs is that the Censor Boards did their work with little or no opposition from the public, who boneheadedly let the then government make decisions for them. Thankfully, this rotten status quo of the government deciding for its’ people what is fit for them no longer applies.

Even worse, film screenings were not permitted on Sundays (according to the edicts of the ‘Sunday Observance Act’ of 1898) and this policy continued until 1993, video stores being exempt from this policy. Films were heavily censored and restricted: a sad example is the Lou Adler film “Up In Smoke” starring Richard “Cheech” Marin and a famous son of Canada, Tommy Chong. The Censor Board banned this film, stating that “it will encourage the use of marijuana by the impressionable youth of South Africa”. So as a result, I didn’t see this film until the censorship laws were relaxed. When I finally did see it on DVD, I was shocked. Shocked because the Censor Board were in a sense right as it did encourage me to do something. But not, to their dismay, I suppose, to smoke marijuana: It encouraged me to laugh. I could go on for hours concerning the films that were banned by the Censor Boards and for which reasons, but I would need a few days to do this correctly.

Just as an example of how ridiculous the Censor Boards’ rulings were as regards films; they banned and/or restricted films that contained, in their opinion, so-called “undesirable” material or contained views or thoughts that “would be offensive to a certain section of the South African public” ~ an example of this can be found in the Academy Award winning motion picture In The Heat Of The Night (1967), directed by Norman Jewison and starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. This film was banned solely for the scene in which the detective Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) is slapped across the face by Eric Endicott (Larry Gates) a racist white land-owner: Virgil’s reaction is to slap the racist right back. Result: the film remained banned for ten years.

Even popular music was not exempt from these idiots and their ability to turn gold into turds: after John Lennon’s infamous comment about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus was aired, their music was banned from airplay. I am sure that David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd would be amused to know that their album The Wall was denounced as offensive and banned. When asked about the banning later, the Minister of the Interior, Mr Marais Steyn, was quoted as saying that he had never heard of the group Pink Floyd at all.  Artists such as Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel also had their works banned in South Africa, as did Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, whose song “Mrs Robinson” and the offensive line Jesus loves you more than you will know….. caused both the song and the Mike Nichols film The Graduate that it was used in to be banned.

The Censor Board under the chairmanship of the 80 year old Professor Gerrit Dekker underwent a major change in 1963 and was re-named the Publications Control Board, but no matter: it was still a faceless, bureaucratic, shadowy, organization who found everything from women’s naked shoulders in films, to so-called adult magazines to television “offensive to the population of South Africa” and banned them. As regards television, the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Dr Albert Hertzog, condemned it as “the Devil’s box” and banned it forthwith. A major irony: once TV came to South Africa in 1975, the first telecommunications tower in Johannesburg was named after him.

The most feared of all the South African censors was an individual named Judge Johannes H. Snyman, a person who rejoiced in the nickname of “Lammie” [lamb] and was the most influential of all the Censor Board heads before or since. Under Snyman’s benevolent rule of terror, thousands of books, films, newspapers, magazines and journals were banned, mostly with no reasons given other than the general excuse that “it is offensive…” I am not ever one to make fun of health issues, but after less than a month in the post as Chief Censor / Big Brother, Snyman suffered a serious coronary and was put on leave for quite a few months. Comedians of the time risked censorship themselves by commenting that Snyman’s coronary was a direct result of him seeing what the South African public was not permitted to see.

Many famous authors’ works were banned ~ I am sure that Stephen King would be delighted to hear that Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, It, The Dead Zone and ‘Salem’s Lot were denounced as offensive and banned for many years. Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” was also banned as “undesirable” although the Steven Spielberg film was not. Jackie Collins’ novels were all banned, as were the novels by Jacqueline Susann, James Herbert, Peter Straub, Clive Barker and Robert Ruark.

The renowned South African authors Andre P. Brink, Wilbur Smith, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Breyten Breytenbach, Richard Rive, Ezekiel Maphalele, Stuart Cloete and Etienne Leroux also went through the PCB gauntlet: there were cries of horror when Leroux’s “Seven Days With The Silbersteins” was awarded a major SA literary prize and calls were made in Parliament for it to be banned, even though none of those people had actually read the book. Even if you were a Nobel Peace Prize Literature winner and an Oscar winner, your work was not immune from banning: Nadine Gordimer and Ronald Harwood respectively found this out to their disgust. Even humour was considered offensive back in the day: the first two Second World War autobiographies of Spike Milligan, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall and Rommel? Gunner Who? were banned. After hearing all this, you must be wondering what the PCB wanted South Africans to read exactly? Other authors who had their works banned included the following authors:

William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
Dean Koontz
Harold Robbins
Henry Miller
Judith Krantz
Grace Metalious
Anthony Burgess
John Farris
Gore Vidal
Calder Willingham
Don Pendleton
Charles Bukowski
Donald Woods
Steve Biko
Jack Kerouac
William L Burroughs
Robin Moore
Eric Von Lustbader
Irving Wallace
Ernest Tidyman
Nelson Mandela
John Jakes
Joan Collins
Norman Mailer (The Naked & The Dead banned for its’ title alone)
Norman Spinrad
James Blish
Dennis Wheatley
Mickey Spillane
James Baldwin
Mario Puzo (The Godfather)
J G Ballard
Kingsley Amis
Larry MacMurtry
John D. MacDonald
James Hadley Chase
Ken Follett
Paul Theroux
Sidney Sheldon
Brendan Behan
Kurt Vonnegut
Joseph Heller
Lawrence Sanders
James A Michener
Joseph Wambaugh
Dick Francis
Germaine Greer
James Jones
Mario Puzo
Thomas Pynchon
Morris West
Vladimir Nabokov
Boris Pasternak
Frederick Forsyth
Irwin Shaw
Nicholas Monsarratt
Georges Simenon……………..etc, ad nauseaum.

Hundreds, if not thousands of books, magazines, journals, pamphlets, posters, films, videos, sound recordings and even magic lantern shows were all banned and being in possession of these and being caught so doing left the person with two options, one worse than the other: a stiff jail sentence, a heavy fine or both. One of my weekly tasks at the NFVSA was to put new lists of banned articles into an ominous sounding file called Jacobsens Book Of Objectionable Literature. I have our copy here with me and I had to pay extra baggage handling fees for it as it is so heavy. This file has over 600 pages of so-called “offensive” and “objectionable” material listed in it, much of it being of a political and sexual nature, but ultimately, all of it was declared to be against the wishes of the government of the day and “offensive” to a certain section of the public.  Thus the censor boards were playing out George Orwell’s nightmarish world of Big Brother and all that accompanied it.

The Censor Board, in its’ infinite wisdom also sought to have the Holy Koran banned, an idiotic move which angered many South African Muslims, to the extent that the PCB were asked that if the Holy Koran was considered to be offensive, then surely the Bible should be banned too. The PCB nearly swallowed its’ collective teeth in anger at this affront to their dignity and the very idea of it, until the Muslim community reminded them of the erotic passages in the “Song of Solomon” Bible chapter.

It is very interesting to note that while all so-called “Communist” books and pamphlets such as the works of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Nikita Khruschev and Joseph Stalin were banned, works such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were not. Idiocy also ran rampant when two books published in Zimbabwe in the 1980’s were banned for “having possible communistic influences” ~ these books were entitled Thoughts Of Chairman Jesus and Quotations From Comrade Jesus ~ books containing quotes from the Bible. This ban everything communistic in sight but leave the rest alone jag could be put down to the fact that the Prime Minister of South Africa from 1966 to 1977 (when South African censorship was at its’ most claustrophobic) was one Balthazar Johannes Vorster, a man who was interned during World War 11 for his pro-Nazi stance.

If, after a certain period, books and other items were found to be non-offensive anymore, the PCB and PAB still issued orders regarding the sale and displaying of such items. These books were not allowed to be in public view and if they were, they had to be in a sealed wrapper, possibly for fear that the thoughts contained therein could infiltrate the minds of the easily convinced by some weird sort of osmosis. Previously undesirable publications were held in libraries and if the publication was of a sexual nature, these books were kept locked away until someone plucked up the courage to ask for them. Even by appearing like benevolent uncles and saying that “we trust you, you’re adults now, you can read / see / hear this” the Censor Boards still put restrictions on what could be seen, heard, read and done by the public that paid their salaries.

Thus an entire generation grew up secure in the knowledge that because the then government and their lackeys said so, anything related to sex and politics was taboo and that their government knew what was best for them. No shops open on Sundays, no cinemas open on Sundays, no doing what we tell you that you may not, no watching of films that we consider offensive, no listening to music that has hidden Satanic, Communistic meanings, as well as lyrics that may corrupt you, no watching of television as those satanic images may cause you to ditch our racist propaganda and lead you to develop a more worldly point of view: do as we say and the volk will be free. But oh yes, when you turn 16, by all means go off to war in Angola and die for a cause, our cause. The then government’s mantra (in the words of Al Pacino in Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit) was “Our cause is just: our enemies: everywhere, they’re all around us. Some scary stuff out there.” Their cause was not just: their rise and power over the people may not have had anything to do with apartheid but their ironfisted rule did nothing less than propagate the disgusting policies of apartheid and all that went with it.

I am greatly thankful that we in South Africa now have freedom of thought, word and deed thanks to the advent of democracy and sanity in our troubled, turbulent but beautiful country of South Africa. Censorship formed a large part of what South Africa was under apartheid, not only censorship of thought, word and deed, but also censorship of people, all of which add up to nothing less than crimes against humanity, our humanity, Africa’s humanity and the world’s humanity.
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I would like to conclude my paper with an excerpt from a novel which was denounced as “evil” and “offensive” by the Censors in the early 1980’s ~ Stephen King’s “It” containing the following paragraph which allegedly offended the censors greatly.

“So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away…………from memory but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes, even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.”

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

I hope this helps you.

wow trevor, you're awesome, definite karma to you!!

[Trevor]

 

Thanks, SisterGrace.

As I said, you can use it, but if you can, I'd appreciate it if you credited me for the work in your paper, that is if you have to make source details available.