Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Censorship in Twentieth-Century Literature - Nadine Gordimer (essay date fall 1973)


Censorship in Twentieth-Century Literature - Nadine Gordimer (essay date fall 1973)

Nadine Gordimer (essay date fall 1973)

SOURCE: Gordimer, Nadine. “98 Kinds of Censorship.” The American PEN: An International Quarterly of Writing 5, no. 4 (fall 1973): 16-21.

[In the following polemical essay, Gordimer argues that South African censorship laws conspire with the apartheid government to both limit and silence writers' life experiences.]

South Africa has a Censorship Act that lists no less than 97 definitions of what it considers undesirable in literature. Two of my own novels have been banned under this Act. It contains no clause providing that the author of a banned book shall be told which of the 97 offenses his work has committed, so I cannot tell you why my books, or those of any other writer who has fallen foul of the Censors, were banned.

I have said elsewhere that writers in our country are a persecuted professional group. This is not an opinion but a statement of fact. Under legislation other than the...

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