Not a question of censorship

Chris Warnes

completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2003. He teaches in the English department at the University of Stellenbosch, and his current research project compares Cuban and South African literary responses to the Angolan war.

The rubric within which this debate is taking place - that of "freedom of speech versus censorship" - is an unfortunate one since it tends to distort specific issues by abstracting them from their contexts. The invocation of "kernbeginsels" about the role and nature of an academic institution and the importance of exchanging opinions may constitute noble rhetoric, but it is founded on a shaky and incomplete ethical consideration of the actual situation that confronts us. If a university in Germany invited David Irving (the Holocaust denier) to speak, what would the public reaction be? What would his reception be like in Israel? Are we as Stellenbosch academics really supposed to nod our heads sagely and congratulate ourselves for our tolerance and open-mindedness in INVITING Dan Roodt to address us on his "lewensfilosofie"?

Roodt has publicly stated that the ideas behind apartheid were basically good. In a recent interview he claims that overseas resistance to apartheid resulted from a false stereotype of Afrikaners dreamt up by communists. From his upmarket home in Johannesburg (he is an expert in financial markets) he issues proclamations about the "genocide" that is being perpetrated against white South Africans. His recent rant, "Adapt and Die", comes very close to being racist hate speech. It is astonishing to me that the organisers of Woordfees seem to consider his odious politics less relevant than his status as a minor figure in Afrikaans letters, and seem also to feel that his modest literary achievements qualify him to expound publicly on matters of such importance. By inviting Roodt in his capacity as "aktivis vir Afrikaner-regte" they lend credibility and authority to a partisan and reactionary posturing that can only harm the future of Afrikaans. However innocently, they have also caused Stellenbosch University to be associated, again, with bigotry and the vicious peddling of racist stereotypes. The university can ill afford these associations so soon after the fiasco in which a few ageing cowboys staged their equivalent of the last stand at the Alamo by trying to bar Bram Fischer's posthumous honorary doctorate.

The call that came from some of us who were astounded that he had been invited in the first place, was for uninviting Roodt from the Woordfees. That is a very different thing from censorship. At the end of "Adapt and Die" Roodt notes that he has unsuccessfully tried to get the piece printed in a number of publications, including The Spectator (when The Spectator turns you down as too right-wing, then you really have made it as a reactionary). Are those publications that rejected his piece guilty of censorship? Of course not. They, unlike the organisers of Woordfees, simply declined to associate themselves with the highly offensive claptrap that Dan Roodt offers to us as cultural or political analysis. Roodt can and will continue to propagate in the public sphere his anachronistic ideas about race, gender, culture and language. Immediately after he admits (boasts about?) his failure to get "Adapt and Die" published, he makes a plea that the piece be as widely circulated as possible in cyberspace. How very nice, then, that where The Spectator and others turned him down, the Woordfees organisers, without consultation or negotiation, have seen fit to grant him a public platform for the dissemination of his repugnant ideas.

"Let him speak, come and debate with him," comes the reply. I have no opinion on the literary merits of Roodt's novels, nor am I objecting to a literary-historical consideration of the role of the "little magazines" in Afrikaans writing. But is it productive or prudent to offer Roodt an entire slot in which to talk about his role as an "aktivis vir Afrikaner-regte" and his "lewensfilosofie" (a word that, coincidentally, has a long history of association with fascism in German)? What kind of message does this send out about Stellenbosch University? However adversarial the interview, however unsympathetic the audience, the point remains that granting Roodt an opportunity to talk about language and culture at the Woordfees graces his points of view with a legitimacy that they most certainly do not deserve.



LitNet: 21 Februarie 2005

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