Twenty-one years later

Abstract

Re-reading the article I wrote in 1980 makes me take a huge breath--release it from the depth of my being rather than my lungs! I quote myself from that period: shall not be rid of censorship until we are rid of We are rid of both. This is a triumph of human tenacity, endurance, endeavour that cannot be over-estimated; and cannot ever be sufficiently acknowledged. Let us not forget what we have come through. But there are differences in the two concepts I have juxtaposed now as I did in the grim '80s. They were actually conflated, yes, then. Censorship was contained in the philosophy and practice of apartheid, an integral part of it. And the mealy-mouthed changes to make censorship more acceptable at the time of my writing, then--indeed, the subject of it--were signs that the surface of apartheid was eroding while the terrible methods it was using to maintain its powers were more brutal than ever before. We are still living and dealing with these. The murderers confess their version of the truth and ask for reconciliation with the truth of those they killed. The torturers meet their victims as they present themselves for amnesty and forgiveness. These are the consequences of apartheid, inherited unavoidably from an unforgettable past. The murderers, their victims' families, are among us; we pass them in any street. In 1980, no one could be fooled by the slackening of the censorship gags; the Act was still on the Statute book, they could be tightened any time. But once abolished, there are no consequences of censorship coming from that past. Here the conflation, the juxtaposition, ends. Apartheid haunts; censorship has gone to hell. It is not part of the aftermath of apartheid. You can write whatever moves you, say what you think and if it is hate text, hate speech, in whatever form (racism is not the only one) you may be justly prosecuted and defend yourself in open court. Freedom of expression is entrenched in our new Constitution. We should glory in this freedom. And accept that freedom brings responsibilities. We are confronted with the fact, blurred in our extremity during apartheid, that censorship as a concept, thought and action control, has two distinct purposes, both or either one of which a society may use for what it regards as its needs. The one purpose is political control; the other is to safeguard the public from the offence of pornography, sexual or violent--while not introducing Mother Grundy prudery. Since 1980 other media have taken over from the printed word as the most powerful means of free expression. I remain as totally opposed to censorship as ever, but I am in a quandary when I touch the wrong button on a television set and find I'm confronted with a couple making Shakespeare's `beast with two backs' in a truly beastly and violent sexual display that certainly could frighten any of the many children left to amuse themselves playing the channel keyboard of television. I'm more concerned with the shock, the debasing of an intimate act, than with the likely corruption at a tender age. In addition to television's ugly bedtime stories, photographs and films of child pornography can be ordered through the Internet--and are. What is the responsibility of our freedom of expression, here? The return of censorship is unthinkable. What is surely feasible and needed is a voluntary code of conduct between those agencies who commission and compose programmes on the television channels available, the material available on the Internet, to follow the limits of human privacy and dignity--which are what pornography violates and degrades. …