Recently, distinguished British writers had mixed fortunes in Gauteng. On the one extreme, there was John Le Carre scoring a major goal, in a quiet, backroom sort of way against the monstrously powerful pharmaceutical multinationals he targets in his latest thriller, The Constant Gardener. The multinationals were forced to withdraw their lawsuit against the South African government, which was trying to do the honourable thing and make Third World-produced generic drugs available to Third World sufferers at Third World prices.
Not that the South African government did not play the major part by deciding to take on the bad guys. And not that Le Carré knew that it was going to come to fisticuffs in the Pretoria Supreme Court when he set out to write his novel.
But I don’t think it is stretching the point too far to say that a best-selling author lending his name to a popular cause through the medium of fiction can have a considerable impact on the debate. And the fact that Le Carre was able to draw the attention of a First World readership to the horrifying way in which Third World countries are used as dumping grounds for drugs that have gone past their sell-by dates, and their citizens as guinea pigs for new cures aimed at improving the lives of the wealthy in the First World, might well have had some bearing on the decision of those giants to back off. Sometimes the pen can, indeed, be mightier than the sword.
On the other end of the scale, there was that even more notable Englishman of letters, William Shakespeare. While Le Carre was being allowed to savour victory with the masses, the Bard of Stratford, according to some reports in the local and international press, was about to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of Gauteng on a donkey, facing backwards.
According to these reports, the Gauteng Department of Education had decided that Shakespeare’s plays are too backward-looking for the politically correct times in which we live – especially with regard to issues of racism and sexism.
Thus (according to these reports) Julius Caesar, a play about perceptions of democracy, was deemed unsuitable because it ‘elevates men’; Antony and Cleopatra and The Taming of the Shrew were ‘undemocratic and racist’ (I didn’t hear anybody mention ‘sexist’ in there, but surely it should have been included, if the same criteria were to be followed); Hamlet was unsuitable for the training of susceptible young minds because it was ‘not optimistic or uplifting’; and King Lear hit the dust because it was too violent and despondent, and its ‘plot is rather unlikely and ridiculous’.
This all gave the impression that, while the new South Africa was steering a course towards justice and human rights on the one hand, with its victory over the drug monopolies, it was striding resolutely towards intellectual philistinism on the other.
This impression was underlined when we were told that even South Africa’s own Nadine Gordimer was also to become a writer non grata. ‘The Gauteng education department,’ the article I was reading announced, ‘is ready to ban Mrs Gordimer’s July’s People, which has been set reading in schools for seven years, because it is ‘deeply racist, superior and patronising’.’
In response to this extraordinary attack on our intellectual heritage, the article went on: ‘Some of South Africa’s most prominent writers and artists plan to send a letter of protest to the ruling African National Congress accusing it of ‘political correctness gone mad’.’
I don’t know how prominent you have to be before you can be invited to join this noble but unnamed collective of writers and artists, but if I hadn’t been out of the country at the time, I would probably have asked to be allowed to join in their protest action, in the name of freedom of expression, if nothing else. Quite apart from the fact that I am a die-hard apostle of the complete works (well, almost) of William Shakespeare, as well as being a friend of Nadine Gordimer.
Well, it’s just as well I didn’t. The whole thing turned out to be something of a red herring – perhaps an April Fool’s joke for a Western audience hungry for bad news out of Africa, perhaps something more base.
I would not have found this out if I had not visited the website of The Teacher, the Mail&Guardian‘s sister publication, and discovered that there was another side to the story.
Yes, those philistine comments about Shakespeare and Gordimer had been made – but they had been made by an evaluation committee appointed by the Gauteng Department of Education, not adopted as policy by the (ANC-led) department itself.
As Kader Asmal, the Minister of Education and a leading ANC member, said in response to the findings of this panel, their views were ‘ill-informed, pedagogically unsound and smacked of anti-intellectualism’. He also pointed out that the Gauteng department, far from adopting the committee’s loony recommendations, had clearly distanced itself from them.
The minister, the report in The Teacher website added, was pretty cheesed off at the ‘irresponsible manner in which this matter was covered in some international media reports’, which misleadingly implied that Gauteng had either banned the books or decided to exclude them from the list of new setworks.
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