SOUTH AFRICA: Hot Literature

All over the Union of South Africa last week, housewives and bookworms were combing their dusty shelves for copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Hopalong Cassidy Comics. Reason: the lady and the cowboy, together with a rapidly mounting list of other books considered offensive by the government, were suddenly hotter than a chunk of radioactive cobalt. By a neat change of phrase in the law that formerly merely prohibited the sale of such books (penalty: $600), Interior Minister Theophilus Dönges had made it a crime even to possess them. Standing dusty and unused on a forgotten bookshelf, a copy of Stuart Cloete’s The Turning Wheels, UNESCO’s The Roots of Prejudice, or any of the works of Novelist Mickey Spillane can cost its owner a fine of $3,000, or five years in jail. As with cobalt, there was even a disposal problem, for it is against the law in South Africa to burn wastepaper, and—until the government makes a ruling on their status—most South African trash collectors are refusing to pick up the hot books. The only thoroughly safe bestseller in South Africa these days is Malan’s own Government Gazette, which each month publishes a list of as many as 50 newly banned books.