This week’s Sunday New York Times Week in Review section has a fascinating article on censorship in repressive states. At the heart of the article are the experiences of Nobel Prize laureate JM Coetzee during his native South Africa’s apartheid era when “The censors were part of a much broader, more sinister system — the quasi-benevolent pole of a spectrum whose other extremities brought violence, assassination and almost casual brutality to apartheid’s adversaries.” The author, Alan Cowell, goes on:
South Africa, of course, was never just cops and robbers, good and bad, black and white.
The apartheid rulers yearned to be seen as spiritually and juridically part of a remote, Western society rather than of a continent they depicted as cruel and barbaric. If a censor noted that a work would be read only by “intellectuals,” the assumption seemed to be that such people would not choose to bring down the state.
The clear contrast is with regimes such as Nazi Germany or, in the East Germany that succeeded it in the Soviet sphere. When I try to explain the nature of Apartheid this idea of the government seeing itself as part of the larger western world, as being a nation of laws is central to the understanding even if on the surface it seems implausible. Yet it is true: as draconian as apartheid could be, and let there be no doubt that it was draconian, it would have been even worse if the state and its judicial system had not imagined itself as a legitimate inheritor of a Western legal tradition.
