South Africans are stampeding to join the censor board, reports Mungo Soggot. And our new censorship law may be as restrictive as the old one
SOUTH AFRICANS are stamping to become censors, with more than 850 nominees competing for a place on the new censor board which is due to start work in September.
In the next two months a panel including sociologist Fatima Meer and Bophuthatswana TV head Cawe Mahlati will select 36 censors and four full-time administrators.
The nominations they will be vetting include Professor Kobus van Rooyen, chief of the former government’s Publications Appeal Board and a key adviser on the new censorship regime.
The new censors have been set up by the Film and Publications Act, passed last October. The new Act -which has been slated by anti-censorship purists – allows adults access to a wide range of pornography, but criminalises hate speech.
“The new Act concentrates on the protection of children and the dignity of persons, especially women,” says Van Rooyen.
Several media lawyers have criticised it for being excessively draconian. The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) says: “While the new Act certainly does not hark back to the bad old days of apartheid censorship, it also doesn’t represent a massive break with the past. The Film and Publications Act has the potential to infringe on people’s freedom-of-expression rights in many ways.”
The selection panel’s chairman, Abram Nkabinde, professor of African languages at the University of Zululand, said this week his team would start narrowing down the hundreds of applicants next week, with a view to starting public hearings by the end of next month.
Twenty-eight examiners will be available for the Film and Publications Board. The review board, which will hear appeals, will have a staff of eight. There will be four full-time administrators.
Other members of the selection panel include Vivien Smith, of the African National Congress’s parliamentary research department, the Institute of Race Relations’s Colin Douglas and film producer Anant Singh.
It is understood that Singh is unlikely to participate in the selection as he has been unavailable for most of its meetings so far.
Ironically, Singh’s company, Videovision Entertainment, owned the South African rights to Kids – the first movie to be banned since April 1994. The film, banned last year under the old legislation, includes graphic sex scenes between teenagers under the influence of drugs. In one scene, HIV-positive Jenny, in an Ecstasy-induced stupor, is raped by a teenage boy.
The Film and Publications Bill was revamped at the 11th hour last August in a secret session of the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs, in what many believe was a collaboration between the National Party and the ANC.
Several media lawyers say the new Act is as at least as restrictive as the 1974 Publications Act it replaces. It can slap an XX label on films with scenes containing “a person who is, or is depicted as being, under the age of 18 years participating in, engaging in or assisting another person to engage in sexual conduct or a lewd display of nudity; explicit violent sexual conduct; or bestiality”.
One media lawyer says many of the definitions in the Act are “appallingly wide”.
The FXI says terms such as “pornography” and “sexually explicit” are subjective and the XX label will be an effective ban as such material cannot be shown, distributed or advertised. It adds that one of the more peculiar features is the definition of “degrades a person” as “a particular form of hatred based on gender”.
The FXI also slates the Act for criminalising hate speech, especially since freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution.
“In its attempt to regulate films and publications, the Act oversteps the mark and enters the terrain of control, where the government becomes a moral policeman,” says the FXI.