8/12/2019 Art & the State In South Africa

1/6

24 1983 657

State

two-part essay was delivered at aOctober 1981.

all over worldby

henature of art in SouthAfrica is determinedprimarily by theconflict of materlal nterests nSouth African society. Make no mistake abouti t ,when SouthAfrican writers an d artistsgather,

they do so rent by that conflict.Equ al economic oppo rtunity, alon g with civil and parlla-

mentary rights for all 32 million So uth Africans , is rightlyand inevitably the basis for any consideration of the futureof the arts there. M an has no cont rol over the measure inwhich talent 1s given to this one andwithheld from that one,but man, through the state, controls the circumstances nwhich the artist develops. Innate creativity can be falsified,trivialized,deflected, tifled,deformed and even destroyedby the stat e and the Conditionof society it decrees.

Courage in his life and talent in his work1s the artiststext, according to o ne of the greatest, Albert Camus. Cer-

tainly, every artist, wherever he lives, however circum-stances use him in any society, has to struggle through whatPablo Neruda calls the labyrinths of his chosen mediumof expression. That is a condition of the artists being.

As to th e artists place in the outer w orld,I doubt if anyartist ever finds himself in the ideal condi tion of Hegelsindividualconsciousness in wholly harmoniou s relation-ship o heexternal power of society. Thats autopiawhere we should simply run to fat. But there can havebeenfew if any examples in human history of the degree, varietyand intensity of conflict that exists between theSouth

-frican artist and the exter nal pow erof society. That ex-ternal power is at i ts most obvious in the censorship laws,

running amok through literature and every now and thenlunging out at the other arts.

Yet it is at thewidest level of the form ationof ou r society

i

s

ofBurger s Daughter Julys Peopleessay will appea r The Writer and Human Rights, edrtedby wrllbe by 27Proceeds be to

983

itself, and not at anyspecific profession al level, tha t the external p ower of ociety enters thebreast and brainof the artist and determines the n ature and stateof art. It .is from thdally life of South Africa that have come the conditions profou nd alienation that prevail amon g South African arists. would go so far as to ay the sum of various states of

alienation the nature of art in Sou th Afr ica at present.am not invoking the concept of alienation in the pureMarxist sense, as the consequence o f man s relationto themeans of production, although that undoubtedly s apposto the industrialization of millionsof blacks under apartheiand therefore apposite to our society as a whole. The re amany other ways in which man becomes divided fro m othand distanced fro m him self. Alienation as such is a condtion of rejecting and/or being rejected. Theblack artist liveina society tha t hasrejected his culture for hund reds oyears. H e has turned his alienation in the face of those whrejected him, and has ma deof his false consciousness the inevitable point of departure tow ard true selfhood. Th e whiartist belongs to the white culture that reJected black cuture, and is now itself relected by black cultu re. The whiborn in and nurtured by South Africa is thewhose society nevertheless refused to acknowledge and taroot with an indigenous culture. He1s also hewhom blacks see as set apart fro m indigenous culture. Anthe question that lowers over him is whether this positiona dead end or can be made a new beginning.

Any homogeneity in the natu re of the work produced these artists, black and white, 1s broughtabout by whashackles hem ogether ather tha n by what they sharSouth African artistsbelong to theDlonyslac disintegrate

8/12/2019 Art & the State In South Africa

2/6

8/12/2019 Art & the State In South Africa

3/6

24 659

speaking here not of artistic modes and forms but of thesubstance of living from which the artist draws his vision.Exploltation by whites, which blacksrealrry somelhlng the whlte artlst repudlates, refuses to ethe agent of. It outside hlmself; he experlences It as sur-rogate vlctlm through a moral attltude or rational.empathy.Thus, the black creation of new selfhood is based on a realityt -t he, a s a white, cannot claim and that could not serve

if he dld, since it is not his order of experience.the white is to find his true consciousness, express in hiswork the realltles of his place and time, if he is to reach theslage where commltment rises within him to a new set ofvalues based on those realities, he has to admit openly thatthe order of his experience asawhite differs completelyfrom the order of black experience. He has to see the con-comitant necesslty of flndlng a different way from that opento the black arti st, to econnect his art through his life to thetotal reality of the disintegrating present and to attempt, byrethinking his own attitudes and conceptions, the same posi-tion the black artist alms for: to be seen as relevant by andbecome comm~tted o commonly understood, commonly re-

ated cultural entlties corresponding to a common reality-whlch is to say, an indigenous culture.

11

once wrote that the best way to wrlte was to do so as I fone were already dead: afraid of no nes reactions, answer-able to no one for ones views. I still think that the way towrite. Insofar as no one forces a writer to visualize an au-dience unless he has one eye on the bank), to maglne whoit is who golng to be moved, shocked, delighted, incensedor perhaps illuminated by the plece of work in hand, it ispossible to keep to thls ]deal of a writers freedom. But inthe circumstances of political and social pressure applicable

to writers under consideratlon at our conference, this basisof the writers basic freedom is beleaguered from withoutand psychologlcally threatened from withln.

In the soclety in which llve and work-apartheid SouthAfrica-the legal framework of censorship affects the work

even of dead writers, so theres no freedom o be gainedthere, in my dictum of writing as if from beyond the grave.Abanned work remains banned, even I f the wrlter is nolonger Bving, just as it does In the case of the exiled writer,who is alive but clvically dead I n h1s own country.

Censorship of literature procured chiefly by two stat -utes, the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the PublicationsAct No. 42 of 1974. Together those statutes aim to insure

that the South Afrlcan eader deprived not only of sexual-ly titillating magazines, books and films but also of seriousworks that question, radically, the institutions and practicesof a society based on racial discrimination. Together thosestatutes are designed to preserve political orthodoxy accord-ing to the ruling color and class by isolating the publlc fromradical political thought and contempora ry literary trends,

The Inte rnal Security is almed at suppressing overtlypolitical writing, but its legislative tentacles have alsostrangled a substantial body of creative writing, since in thewords of Thomas Mann, in some eras and some countries,pol it ss is fate , and imaginative writing has always beenoccupied, in one interpretation or another, with human fate.

The Internal Security Act functions as a censor y providingfor the banning of both publications writers. In the firstinstance, the act authorizes the banning of any publicationthat expresses views calculated to further the achievementof any of the objects of communism. That any meansthat the precepts of human rights common to the spectrumof progressive thought, from llberalism to communism, arelumped together, along with the actual advocacy of violentoverthrow of the tate,under hegeneralheading ofsubversion.

It was under this act that the moderate, wide-circulationblack daily newspaper the was banned in 1977. Therelevant clause invoked stated that the newspaper had servedas a means for expressing views or conveying informationthe publlcatlon of whlch calculated to endanger the ecu-rityof he State or the maintenance of publlc order.Wha t the had indeed been publishing was an accu-rate account of the actlons and state of mind of the black

8/12/2019 Art & the State In South Africa

4/6

8/12/2019 Art & the State In South Africa

5/6

24 1983 6 6 1

exist the claims of traditional African, Moslem, Hindu andJewish religious an d secular moralities. Moreover, for thepurpose of determiningundesirability, the motive of theauth or is irrelevant. A work may be foun d undesirableif

of is undesirab le-a principle that reached itsapogee when a Go re Vidal novel was banned on the gro undbot one passage compared the Holy Trinity to m ale genitalia.> T h e roduc t ion and di st r ibu t ionof works declared unde-

sirable is a criminal offense. Sexual- can dor aside, the mostdangerou s ground the writer treads is in the area of openorimplied criticism of the institutionsof state (in particular thepolice an d defense), the administration of Justice and thepolitico-legal app aratu s of so-called separate developmentfor people of different colors; in the sympathetic treatmentof black liberation movements and radical opponents of thestatus qu o; and in explicit accounts o f interracial sexual rela-tions. M ore and more in the last five years, sympatheticoreven simply honest treatmentof black llberatlon movementsand the activities ofall other radical oppo nents,of all colors,of theunion between capitalism and racial oppression inSou th Africa have increasingly become the areasto whichcensorship reacts most strongly.

Und er the strictures of these repressive acts, how d oes awriter work?

In he twenty years since cen sor sh ~pwas introduced inSouth Africa, writers attitudes have changed to meeti t indifferent w ays, and in relation to the different contexts oftheir lives in a grossly u nequal society.

At the beginning, black writers were little nterested incensorship. White writers w ere concerned with the on e areawhere apartheid limited the lives of black and w h ~ te like,but black writers saw the suppression of freedom of expres-sion the least tanglble and therefo re he leastof the differ-

ent aspects of oppression experienced in their dally livesWithout reedom to sell their labo r, without reedom ofmovement, without freedom of association-in a phrase,with the passboo k in their pockets-th e risk of having abook banned seemed trivial. At the beginning of the1960sit was difficult to get black intellectuals o sign protestsagainst censorship. But after the banningf the black massmovements with their populist appeal, the renaissance f theblack spirit of liberation was cupped in the hands of youngblacks who aw, in a police state ituation where overtwlitical consciousness-ralsing was impossible, the imporLance of cultural consciencization. They lookedto writers toimbue the new generation with a sense of iden thy and pride

in that identity hrough song and story rather than tabo opolitical doctr~ne.They saw thosewriters, as have al-ready said, as the cultural fistof liberation. It w as then thatcensorship no longer seemed irrelevant.This oincided,roughly, with ahardening in theattitud e of progressivewhite writers, who changed heir tactic of , in a sense, co -operating with the hated censorship by appealing w henabook was banned to the tactic of noncoo peratlon with anyfunctions of censorship. Th e prmciple of publish and bedamned ran up its flag.

Th at principle has been implemented, to a surprising ex-tent, by the form atio n of small publishing houses, namly by

people who are themselves writers. These publishers, unlikthe rich British publishers operating a fossilized coloniaoutpost in SouthAfrica, were prepared to lose the littlmoney they had if a book should be bann ed fromsale, in thhope tha t a teast some copieswould be circulated before thax fell. Th at is the way m any book s reach readers in SoutA f r ~ c aoday , and the way in which writers tread the dangeous ground of subjects 1 have referred to.

Conscious a nd unconscious self-censorship and stylistdefenses are questions with which I havealreadydealt.There emains to be sald that as the ituation in SoutAfricahas become mor eandmore crisis-ridden,painfuland dangerou s, the fear that prompted self-censorship hasbeen cast out. And so somethingof he writer s innatefreedomas been regained

=

J O H N

1ter space is again in the limelight. Th e movie

whlch celebrates the N ASA heroesof the merely the most visible evidencein October, upon the twenty-fifth anniversaryof

NASA, cover stories in 83 andheralded the new eraofspace actoriesand

labs. Entrepreneurs speak of mining on the moon , produing microchips and blendingdrugs in weightless orbita

aeries. The mo re intrepid am on g them are launching theown space vehicles.Th e frontiers of science and technology ar e always quick

popu lated by Pen tagon pione ers, and space is no excetion. The Reagan Administration has emb arked on a spacweapons program that could drive he arm s raceinto a nextraterrestrial arena and revolutionizeU.S. defense policyAntisatelliteweapons (AS AT s) bou t o be tested anultimately deployed could lead to a ballistic mlssile defen( B M D ) system in space. Such a system is years from deploment,but the oncept is so provocative that a majoresearch and development effo rt could upset he strategicbalance and bury all hopes for arms control.

Space has been considered a sanctuary ro m weapons evsince 1955, when PresidentEisenhowernnounced hiop en skies doctrine. Subsequ ently, international treatiesprohibited the deployment of nuclear armsn space and prtected satellites used for reatyverification. Neverthelessthe militarization of space h as proceeded apace. Th e UnitStates and the Soviet Unio n each have about 100 orbitingsatellites that serve military purposes. The United States hsatellites for communications,avigation,meteorology,

edltor

8/12/2019 Art & the State In South Africa

6/6