Librarians in a police state: South African academic libraries and the problem of censorship

Abstract

Censorship is considered in the South African political context and the relevant statutes and regulations are described in terms of their impact on libraries. It is seen as extremely damaging to the academic process and a dilemma for the librarian. Two models derived from this situation portray the librarian as victim and as collaborator. They show that librarians have been unimaginative and have ignored international standards. Both universities and the profession have failed to take significant corporate action while censorship has tightened under successive states of emergency. For human rights librarians, it is concluded, the only effective way forward is a new professional body in the democratic tradition.

Organised forgetting in South Africa: Peter d McDonald'sthe literature police: Apartheid censorship and its cultural consequences

“…Peter McDonald's magisterial study of the censorship system those PCB officials represented makes no mention of libraries, however (see Dick 2004 and2006;Merrett 1985Merrett , 1988Merrett and 1990. His work is essentially a selective literary history of South Africa interwoven with the baleful effect of censorship, concentrating on the period of its greatest effectiveness from 1963 to the late 1980s.…”

“…It was even an offence for others to quote such individuals. This system consigned writers to an increasingly remote limbo and invested their names with an aura of contagion that stripped them of their public identity and presence, a "form of civic death" (Merrett 1990: 3). But it had its loopholes.…”