A new structure will replace the archaic Publications Control Board, writes Jacquie Golding-Duffy
South Africa’s apartheid-era censor board is grinding along on taxpayers’ money to the annual tune of R2,5-million, although censorship is in direct conflict with the government’s interim Constitution.
The Directorate of Publications, commonly known as the Publications Control Board, will, however, be given the boot at the end of the year, according to the committee set up to scrutinise the new Films and Publications Bill.
Committee chairman Desmond Lockey says he was informed by the Department of Home Affairs director-general that the board would be dismantled and replaced by a new structure following the passing of the Bill.
Lockey says the board’s activities, which include censoring and banning items its members find undesirable, “are in in direct conflict” with the constitution’s right to privacy.
Lockey said although the board was abiding by the Publications Act of 1974, its powers were by default. The Act is still on the statute books and neither Parliament nor the committee can do anything until the new Bill is promulgated.
The Bill is to be rubber stamped by President Nelson Mandela at the end of June and will replace the current Act which provides the board with overwhelming and unaccountable power, such as being able to prohibit the production of undesirable publications.
Director of the board Dr Braam Coetzee argues that he is merely doing his job in accordance with the Act and the issue of being in conflict with the constitution is “old hat”.
The Bill will in effect get rid of the board, which is the administrative body, and the committee, which is the decision-making body. Coetzee, director of the board for 15 years, will lose his job and nominations will be made for positions in the new structure.
The lastest item to suffer a blow from the board is a compact disc which a foreigner declared at Durban International Airport. The CD’s lyrics were deemed “unsuitable” and its cover, featuring a naked woman covered in blood with the title Blood and Pussy, was found to be “upsetting”.
Coetzee said the CD was confiscated together with a pack of playing cards featuring “pictures of erect genitals, sexual penetration and so forth”.
The directorate then slapped a ban on the CD and cards. The CD was smacked with “prohibition on possession” and is now at the Publications Appeal Board, a body which ratifies the board’s decisions. Coetzee said it was a mere formality and the ban would become legally binding.
However Lockey says the directorate’s activities should be more pragmatic in the light of the new Bill being scrutinised. “The 1974 Publications Act which [the directorate] is working with is unconstitutional. The banning of CDs is ridiculous. How do you enforce it? Does it mean police will demand to look at peoples’ CD racks?”
According to Lockey, the new Bill will enforce a distribution ban on child pornography, and a ban on the possesion of child pornography. The other categories not for distribution are bestiality, a crude mixture of sex and violence, extreme violence during sex, and a possible ban on material inciting the degradation of women.
“The directorate should concentrate on pursuing items featuring child pornography and bestiality, rather than banning CDs.
The directorate has, in the last eight months, banned one CD (Blood and Pussy), one film (Erotique) and heavily censored a second film (The Doom Generation). The film Erotique was deemed explicit, while The Doom Generation was found to border on blasphemy.
If the new Films and Publications Act is passed, explicit sexual material between two consenting adults will be permissible, but Lockey said the issue of pornography was being studied by various parties including the ANC’s Womens League.