The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repre…