Ideas Under Arrest: Censorship in South Africa

Abstract

Any curtailment or total denial of an individual's freedom to utter his or her ideas either orally or in writing, for any audience, whether actua~ or potential, may be defined as censorship. Bruce Lannes Smith, a political scientist, in describing what he labels "Authoritarian Control of Propaganda," highlights another facet of censorship. "In a highly authoritarian polity," he says, "the regime tries to monopol.ize for itsel.f al.l. opportunities to engage in propaganda, and often it wil.l. stop at nothing to crush any kind of counterpropaganda."!. Since it woul.d be inconceivable that any human being would wil.lingly submit to the surveil.l.ance of his thinking and his utterances, regimes that seek to exercise this kind of control. depend on a formidabl.e armory of restrictive legislation by which they proceed to decl.are all ideas that challenge or expose their dogma illegal.. "How l.ong and how completel.y such a pol.icy can be impl.emented," says Smith, "depends, among other things, on the amount of force that the regime can muster, (and) on the thoroughness of its pollee work. "2 As part of the "other things" mentioned by Smith, we might add that the success of such a policy also depends on a judiciary that is willing to compromise its integrity by sitting in judgement over cases invol.ving l.aws whose morality is questionable, to say the very least. The independence of the courts is thus undermined, as the regime appoints judges who are sympathetic to its dogma. Censorship can thus be further defined as a monopoly of propaganda enjoyed by a regime and upheld by force.

Academics with Clay Feet? Anthropological Perspectives on Academic Freedom in Twenty-First Century African Universities

“…In spite of the fact that universities thrive on multiplicity of voices, including the voices of intellectual dissenters who help sharpen ideas; regardless of the fact that ideas are sharpened by a well-balanced education (Habib et al, 2009;Kunene, 2014), and despite the Constitutional protection of academic freedom, academics in South Africa continue to suffer repression, including censorship-postapartheid universities are noted as suppressing academic freedom. Just like the apartheid regime banned African books which they considered subversive, universities are noted as victimising academics who exercise academic freedom in ways that question the universities' unbecoming modus operandi (Kunene, 2014). The repressive practices of the universities are noted by Habib et al (2009, pp.…”