'Blood from Stones': Censorship and the Reading Practices of South African Political Prisoners, 1960–1990

Abstract

This article shows how political prisoners undermined censorship in the apartheid jails of South Africa. The jail diaries, authorized biographies, autobiographies, prison memoirs, interviews, and prison letters of more than fifty political prisoners and two prison censors are analyzed to describe the reading practices of South African political prisoners. The article, demonstrating the ways in which readers regulate their own reading space, concludes that the books that ended up fortuitously or filtered by censors in prison libraries in South Africa and in the possession of political prisoners, profoundly affected their thinking. From information fragments the prisoners reconstructed news and life experiences denied to them by prison authorities. Reading in a way that subverted the intentions of the censors in effect allowed the prisoners to continue their political struggle.