Items

• Change from below

  The determination of many autocratic rulers of independent African countries to limit freedom of expression has stunted intellectual development within their countries, degraded the quality of debate on national issues and forced many of Africa's most gifted writers into exile. In some cases, exile has nurtured creativity, giving writers the political space to reveal the disparity between official rhetoric and reality. But to many it has not been kind... Okot P'Bitek, the Ugandan poet, is not the only one who, lacking a connection to the society he longed to write about, drank himself to death... In some instances, though, the elaborate repressive apparatus of the state has stimulated creativity by compelling writers to develop subtle and imaginative ways of bypassing censorship. Jack Mapanje, Malwai's best-known poet, who was released in May last year after three-and-a-half years' detention without charge or trial, believes that the draconian measures taken by the Malawi Censorship Board may have inadvertently caused him to write better poems. However, another Malawian poet, Frank Chipasula, found that fear of informants took a heavy toll on his work...
• Catalogue of the ridiculous

  [Excerpt] "I have just spent a strange morning in a library. It was the reference section of the Johannesburg Municipal Library: I had entered, handed over my straw bag in exchange for for a disc, made my request to a solicitously attentive woman at the inquiry counter, followed her to a glass fronted case, waited while she unlocked it and removed a large, loose-leafed volume for me. Now I sat down among the other users of the library... My book was Jacobsen's Index of Objectionable Literature, a publication launched a few years ago by an enterprising man who realized that there was money to be made by collating and publishing in book-form the weekly list of South African censors' bannings... Most titles my finger was running down, page after page, were banned by the old Publications Control board, before April. They constitute virtually the entire oeuvre of black South African fiction writers, essayists and some poets, including Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Denis Brutus, and such individual works by myself, Dan Jacobson, Jack Cope, Mary Benson, C. J. Driver, Andre Brink, and other white South Africans..."
• Among the Magazines: Index

  "Other articles in the June issue, which is devoted to Africa and Argentina, include... 'Sculptor in prison', an interview with Pitika Ntuli, the black South African poet and artist, who describes how he coped with the ordeal of solitary confinement in Swaziland.
• 'Gory' Gatsby Is Too Violent for US Students

  "It gave an example of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a celebrated Nigerian author"
• Triumph of a one-man truth commission

  "He is a prophet without honour in his own land."
• Speaking of the loss of voice