The Right2Know campaign has been working against the bill since its introduction in 2010, and has vowed to continue fighting against the bill, which now must be signed by Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president, in order to go into effect. Although the bill was amended last year to include a clause on public interest, the campaign says that the modified bill still “only has narrow protection for whistleblowers and public advocates”. Right2Know also criticised the bill’s vague language — which they say could possibly endanger whistleblowers and journalists.

Writing for Index on Censorship last year, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer said that the bill “must be discarded in its entirety.”

More on this story:

Nadine Gordminer: Let the truth be told

South Africa’s Secrecy Bill: A threat to press freedom or an awakening?

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In February 1663, the London printer John Twyn waited in Newgate prison for his execution, the unique horror of being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the place known today as Marble Arch. This medieval agony was the recently restored monarch King Charles II’s terrifying lesson to his subjects: do not write, or print, treason against the state.

Even more cruel, Twyn’s offence was merely to have printed an anonymous pamphlet justifying the people’s right to rebellion, “mettlesome stuff” according to the state censor (the King’s Surveyor of the Press). No one suggested that Twyn had written this treason, only that he had transformed it from manuscript to print. Perhaps he hadn’t even read it. Never mind: he was sentenced to death.

Pressed both to admit his offence and reveal the name of the pamphlet’s anonymous author (and thereby save his own life), Twyn refused. In words of breathtaking courage that echo down the centuries, he told the prison chaplain that “it was not his principle to betray the Author”. Shortly afterwards, Twyn went to his doom. His head was placed on a spike over Ludgate, and his dismembered body distributed round other city gates.

Words can be weapons, and the pen challenges the sword. Writers, and printers, “the troublers of the poor world’s peace”, in Shakespeare’s phrase, have always seemed a danger to the state. Across Europe, for the first three centuries of the printing press, questions of religion and politics were usually settled by the authorities of the day with rare and explicit savagery. As John Mullan has shown in his excellent monograph Anonymity, the safest course for the dissident writer was a pseudonymous or anonymous cloak of identity.

Eventually, the Romantic assertion of the heroic individual’s place in the world at the beginning of the 19th century ended this prudent convention, but slowly. The scandalous first two Cantos of Don Juan were printed without naming either Lord Byron or his publisher, John Murray. Despite the risks, the poet soon found fame irresistible. “Own that I am the author,” he instructed Murray, “I will never shrink.” By the reign of the fourth George, Britain’s liberal democracy was never likely to eviscerate, hang or decapitate a transgressive writer, though some terrible penalties did remain on the statute book for decades to come.

Abroad in Europe, as repressive states, notably Tsarist Russia, grew harsher, the fate of writers worsened, but hardly varied. The essential predicament was unchanged from John Twyn’s day. Putting black on white, words on the page, as accurately and truthfully as one could, would never fail to make trouble with vested interests, arterio-sclerotic authorities and evil despotisms. Dostoevsky was marched before a firing squad, but reprieved. The distinguished list of writers, before the Cold War, who died for their art includes Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, possibly the greatest loss of all.

Writers and despotic regimes

By the middle of the 20th century there was, in the words of Graham Greene, a fairly general recognition that “it had always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to encourage cat-calls, to restrict human sympathy. It makes government easier when people shout Gallilean, Papist, Fascist, Communist.” In the same essay, on “the virtues of disloyalty”, Greene expressed the writer’s credo in an age of growing state control. “The writer is driven by his own vocation,” he said, “to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state.” Greene concludes this celebration of opposition by quoting Tom Paine: “We must guard even our enemies against injustice.”

Confronted by the intractable collision of the creative individual of fiery conscience with the frozen monolith of the powers that be, there is one essential question: What Is to Be Done? In 1968, the poet Stephen Spender, sickened and dismayed by reports of literary repression in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa (as well as several recently decolonised African states), responded to the spirit of a revolutionary year. He decided to organise a fight-back, setting the pen against the sword, based in London.

George Orwell had already pointed out, in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, that “literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian”. In fact, it was the totalitarian regime of the USSR, and its trial of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, that proved the tipping-point for Spender. He was joined by Pavel Litvinov, the Soviet scientist, dissident and human rights activist, who wrote an open letter asking if it might not be possible to form in England an organisation of intellectuals who would make it their business to publish information about what was happening to their censored, suppressed and imprisoned colleagues abroad. Litvinov was inspired by the fates of fellow Russians, but he insisted that such an organisation should operate internationally and not just concern itself with victims of Soviet oppression, though their plight was possibly the worst in those dark days of the Cold War.

Spender, who was exceedingly well-connected, organised a telegram of support in response to Litvinov’s appeal, signed by an awesome roll-call of the great: Cecil Day-Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, WH Auden, Henry Moore, AJ Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, JB Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, Paul Scofield, Igor Stravinsky, Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra and George Orwell’s widow, Sonia. These, and subsequently many others, declared they would “help in any way possible”.

This initiative led, in turn, to the formation of the Council of WSI (Writers and Scholars International), whose founding members included David Astor, editor of the Observer, Elizabeth Longford, Roland Penrose, Louis Blom-Cooper and Spender himself. Index on Censorship was born when Michael Scammell, an expert on Russia, came up with the idea of founding a magazine. Thus was the ongoing battle for ‘intellectual freedom’ moved onto new terrain best suited to writers and scholars — the printed word published in a little magazine. Soon, the advantages and benefits of fighting oppression from a dedicated bastion of free expression became obvious to both sides, free and unfree alike.

A clarion voice in the fight for free speech

Index, whose first issue appeared in 1972, declared that its aim was to “record and analyse all forms of inroads into freedom of expression”. Further, it would “examine the censorship
situation in individual countries” and would publish “censored material in the journal”. In the long and bloody history of the fight for intellectual freedom there had been many impassioned statements of principle about the writer’s role as a piece of grit in the engine of the state. No one, however, had ever thought to jam a whole toolbox into the machinery of power, and place a fully-funded institution (such as WSI) in direct opposition to the repressive intentions of despotic regimes. This was the unique and historic importance of Index. But its success was not a foregone conclusion. Spender, its founder, was fully alert to the potential for windbaggery and failure inherent in such a venture. There was, he wrote, “the risk that the magazine will become simply a bulletin of frustration”.

Actually, the opposite came to pass. Index became a clarion voice in the cause of free expression. The abuses of freedom worldwide in the 1970s were so appalling and so widespread that the magazine rapidly found itself in the frontline of campaigns against repression and censorship in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and South Africa. Alongside Amnesty International and the PEN Club, Index gave vivid expression to the truth that “censorship” today takes many cruel forms: writers who are sent to labour camps, or blackmailed by threats to their families, or harassed into silence and isolation.

Perhaps the most important thing Index did, from the beginning, was to universalise an issue that was in peril of becoming a special interest: freedom was not “a luxury enjoyed by bourgeois individualists”. Along with self-expression, it was a human right, and an instrument of human consciousness that should be fought for worldwide.

Historically, the classic polemical statement against censorship, John Milton’s Areopagitica, a pamphlet against the Licensing Order of 1643, had focused on the English Parliament’s threat to a free press. Milton, writing in the midst of Civil War, was less worried about blood than ink: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” he writes, “but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Three centuries later, Index would concern itself with both the breath of the oppressed writer but also the lifeblood of liberty, namely, free expression.

In an astonishingly short time, barely a generation, from 1972 to 1989, the magazine established itself as a force to be reckoned with. At first, it took up the issue that had inspired its beginnings: Soviet oppression. In defence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Index published part of a long, autobiographical poem, “God Keep Me from Going Mad”, composed in 1950-53 while Solzhenitsyn was serving a sentence in a labour camp in North Kazakhstan, the setting for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was followed by a scoop in 1973, the unexpurgated text of an interview Solzhenitsyn had given to AP and Le Monde in which the writer revealed that “preparations are being made to have me killed in a motor accident”.

Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the Iron Curtain

The importance of this document, one of the writer’s very rare accounts of his predicament, is that it described in horrifying and particular detail the true nature of the Soviet regime’s campaign against him, especially the constant surveillance and the unrelenting menace of the state’s agents. Solzhenitsyn was also able to draw attention to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. In the bleakest depths of the Cold War, taking up the cause of Russia’s dissident community made the difference between international recognition and utter oblivion.

As the magazine grew in confidence, it began to focus on other, related injustices behind the Iron Curtain, notably in Czechoslovakia (as it was). It was among the first to publish the banned playwright Václav Havel in English. In 1976, a retrospective on Czechoslovakia eight years after the Soviet invasion of Prague described how Havel was being “constantly harassed and persecuted by the authorities”, the beginning (as it turned out) of a long assault on Havel’s liberty.

When Charter 77 was formed the following year, Index became a vital link in the chain of communication between the samizdat literary community in Prague and the wider world. The exiled Czech journalist George Theiner, who succeeded Michael Scammell as editor, strengthened this link. Context and continuity, the steady accumulation of a body of work and opinion, are vital ingredients in any effective campaign on behalf of oppressed writers. Index now provided both a sober and authoritative framework for its protest and also, through the office in London, a team of journalists dedicated to monitoring the devious and sinister machinations of oppressive regimes worldwide.

In the 1980s, the magazine spread its wings. There were exposés of repression in Latin America and persecution in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria). Roa Bastos, who had suffered so badly in Paraguay, found a new champion. Nadine Gordimer, who had supported Index from the beginning, published a story about the romantic dilemmas of a secret policeman in South Africa. In Europe, Samuel Beckett became so engaged with the plight of Václav Havel that he dedicated a short play, “Catastrophe”, to his fellow playwright and allowed Index to publish it in its pages, another notable scoop. By the end of the 1980s, the idea of standing up for the abstract idea of ‘intellectual freedom’ by reporting censorship and publishing banned writing had become a recognised part of the common discourse within the libertarian community.

The influence of Index on the literary world has been at once subtle and impossible to overstate. In my mind, there is no doubt that its example became an inspiration to those British publishers, like Faber, Penguin and Picador, who (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) published banned or oppressed writers such as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Josef Skvorecky. The literature that came from behind the Iron Curtain added a new dimension to the reading of the West. Translations of novels like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were so exceptional that the book would briefly become, ex officio, as it were, almost a part of the Anglo-American literary tradition.

The institutional importance of Index is hard to overstate because, in the words of André Gide, good sentiments do not usually generate good literature. Just because a writer is committed to fighting injustice in his or her society, there’s no guarantee that his or her work will have artistic value. But once the role of literature as “witness” is established in the minds of the public, it makes it more difficult to dissociate literary merit and the social or political value of the text. Index provided a forum for banned writers to demonstrate the role of literature, both good and less good, as unsubmissive, contrarian, transcendent and instinctively transgressive.

Perhaps it was as well that the Index model was so firmly set by Spender and its founders. After 1989, the strength and security of WSI (notwithstanding a constant search for sponsors) was crucial. The fall of the Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave every indication that the raison d’être of Index — opposing Soviet oppression — had been trumped by History.

New frontiers for free expression — and censorship

In fact, the reverse was the case. Writers and free expression continued to be persecuted worldwide. Russia did not cease to be despotic with the disbanding of the KGB. In some ways, the condition of everyday life for Russian writers grew significantly worse, and certainly far more dangerous. The war in Chechnya gave the authorities a new pretext to crush free journalism. Anna Politovskaya became just one of many who turned to Index to make her plight better understood in the West.

With the millennium, meanwhile, the rise of the internet and the IT revolution inherent in the development of digital communications offered a new challenge. The old barriers to state control were coming down. Frontiers that had once been impenetrable were suddenly porous. Secret policemen could continue to terrorise writers, printers and publishers, but it was much harder to stop the free flow of information on the worldwide web. What place would Index have in the new world order of “free” content shaped by Google, Wikipedia and Amazon? The answer, of course, is as a research institution, a memory bank and a continuing moral example, along with publishing online as well as in print.

Index in the new century has made the fight for “intellectual freedom” normative as well as liberating. WSI remains the tool of one very simple, good idea. Its historical board members are unchanged: Milton, Paine, Wilkes, Zola and, possibly, Orwell. Index knows that such an achievement is not lightly won. The history of state repression shows that the individual writer and artist and scholar is vulnerable on his own. He, or she, needs the committed support of independent organisations that cannot be crushed by state terror. Furthermore, the plight of writers especially should not be at the mercy of intellectual fashion or the caprice of a Twitter feed. Free expression needs its gatekeepers: publishers, editors, booksellers, and independent columnists. And this community needs a place to meet, a forum for ideas and debate. This is what Index provides. More serious than Twitter; better organised than Facebook, it’s a forum that can exploit the social media, but not become its prisoner.

In the 21st century, this can be virtual, articulated through Google or Wikipedia. But it also needs to be orchestrated by people, standing apart from fashionable trends, who understand the nuances of the fight for intellectual freedom and who know what they are talking about. This, in a sentence, is the unique Index proposition: ideas honestly and freely expressed and writers worldwide uninhibited by the censorship of the mind or tyrannical restrictions on the printed word.

This article appears in 40 years of Index on Censorship which marks the organisation’s 40th anniversary with a star line-up of the most outstanding activists, journalists and authors. Click here for subscription options and more

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He has been a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship since 1983

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Under Apartheid

The regime of racism was maintained not alone by brutality — guns, violence, restrictive laws. It was upheld by elaborately extensive silencing of freedom of expression. The Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, had definitions of Communism which were vast. What was forbidden included promotion of industrial, political, economic and social change. Every aspect of communal, cultural and intellectual life.

In 1982 the Act became the Internal Security Act, which banned the African National Congress and Pan African Congress along with the South African Communist Party and retained almost all these other definitions of what was forbidden.

The Publications and Entertainments Act banned thousands of newspapers and books in South Africa from 1950 to 1990 — 40 years. The works of world writers, DH Lawrence, Richard Wright, Henry Miller, Nabokov were banned along with the novels and non-fiction works of South African writers, Todd Matshikiza, William “Bloke” Modisane, Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, André Brink, Can Themba, and three of my own novels. A taboo subject of everyday life was sexual love relations between white and black. In the 1970s films Jesus Christ Superstar, A Clockwork Orange, and Canterbury Tales were prohibited.

Freed of Apartheid

In the new South Africa reborn, freedom hard-won from Apartheid, we now have the imminent threat of updated versions of the suppression of freedom of expression that gagged us under apartheid. The right to know comes with the right to vote that black, white, any colour of our South African population took together, for the first time ever, in 1994. But since 2010 there have been two parliamentary bills introduced which seek to deny that right. The Protection of State Information Bill and the Media Tribunal.

The Media Tribunal issue applies to the Press, both journalists and newspaper ownership, questioning the intentions of the powers of the Press’s ombudsman and the Press Code. If established the Tribunal will require journalists to submit to the Tribunal subjects they intend to investigate or which have been investigated and will write about, for approval, on grounds that these are seen by the Tribunal to be a threat to State security. These are not confined to the obvious such as defence matters, already secured by the Constitution. Any government official, whatever rank, may charge that accessing information pertaining to his or her activity should be an offence.

What holds the gag at hand ready to shut any citizen’s mouth, as well as that of the press within the wide and detailed definition of security, is the overwhelming Protection of State Information Bill, passed in the National Assembly in November 2011 after stifling an 18-month public protest by journalists and civil society.

The Secrecy Bill, as it is known, closes with provision of prison sentences any function for whistle blowers to expose the rampant corruption in the careers of individuals in government, industry and finance. Recent losses to the State through corruption are more that R30 billion a year.

The right to know

The ad hoc committee of the National Council of the Provinces of South Africa which, is “processing the Protection of State Information Bill”, with certain ameliorations intended to placate protest has extended its 8 April deadline to report back and set a new deadline for decision, 17 May.

The protest against the new Bill will rise, telling it on the mountain, this year 2012, when the Right to Know Campaign (a coalition of nearly 400 civil society organisations) the media fraternity, the National Editors Forum, and significantly the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), jointly convene a summit against it. I am among these South Africans who believe, and will continue to pursue, that it must be discarded in its entirety.

I sign off with a quotation from Justice William O Douglas  examining a test of the First Amendment to to exercise free speech.

The airing of ideas releases pressures which might otherwise become destructive… Full and free discussion keep a society from becoming stagnant and unprepared for the stresses and strains that work to tear civilisation apart.

This article is taken from a talk given by Nadine Gordimer at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank, London on 14 March. It was the first in a series of events celebrating Index’s 40^th birthday. The next event, with Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans and Isabel Hilton will take place on 24 April. Click here for more information.

From Index’s archive

Standing in the queue

In 1994 Nadine Gordimer witnessed the end of apartheid in South Africa when the black population voted for the first time

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There has been justified anger against the law in South Africa and among busybodies who care for such old-fashioned liberal causes as freedom of expression. But South Africa has always been special — when the largely black (but, it must be said, multi-ethnic) African National Congress (ANC) took on the National Party during the apartheid years, the question of which side to back was a no-brainer.

As far as morally stark choices go, the ANC’s struggle against the apartheid was perhaps the easiest cause to support for a generation of activists. The systematic discrimination against non-whites in South Africa was wrong on all counts — for its brazenness, its inhumanity, its unfairness, and its illegality. The Pass Law, the Group Areas Act, the use of armoured personnel carriers in townships, the torture of political prisoners, were despicable; the excellent apartheid museum in Johannesburg constantly reminds visitors what it was like a mere two decades ago.

Those who led the struggle against apartheid were justly celebrated as champions of human freedom. True, they weren’t all non-violent; and true, many believed in ideologies which undermined individual freedom – but those were details at that time. The main task was to change the system, get rid of the system that deprived the large majority of South Africans a say in how they were governed, where they could live, what jobs they could hold, who they could marry, and what they could think and speak.

When Nelson Mandela came out of imprisonment in 1990, the mood was euphoric — as a reporter from India (and later from Singapore) it was thrilling for me to see the largely peaceful changes in action. Politicians who had lived in exile, who had been guerrillas, who had been in jail, came out, introduced themselves to one another, and tried their best to make real their virtual, umbrella movement — the African National Congress.

There were many potential mines in the field ahead: some radicals carried the dreams of Pan-Africanism; some saw black supremacy as a necessary goal; some viewed Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) as the legitimate response to the violence from the right wing white groups. The ANC’s charter called for ownership of means of production, and other Soviet-era phrases that would scare capital which South Africa would need in the days after apartheid was lifted. And in its early years, the Mandela administration made a series of deft moves not to scare global capital, to slow the feared exodus of the white community, and made sincere attempts towards giving genuine representation to the various ethnic groups that make up the rainbow nation. It also adopted a constitution that was, in its letters and spirit, a beacon of freedom and inclusiveness. The forgiveness and compassion that Mandela showed when he took over the presidency elevated him on the moral plane, his past support of violence notwithstanding.

But what was being glossed over was the fact that many ANC politicians had grown up in a struggle in which the party was more important than the individual, the party was the state, and opposing the party meant opposing the state. The individual had to serve the state and the party, and deviating from that norm meant an anti-national act. In the conflict-driven narrative of the ANC hardliners, that was tantamount to treason.

But like with politicians elsewhere, once in power, the ANC’s leaders, too, showed the sort of tendencies politicians show in other countries. There were corruption charges against some, and others had shown their authoritarian tendencies. Andrew Feinstein, who exposed some of the murkiness surrounding large deals, was hounded out. Politicians, whose presence could be problematic in the top-heavy organization with many stalwarts, were given space to become entrepreneurs and businessmen. Many acquired wealth surprisingly quickly. Their emergence as the financial power elite altered the seating arrangements at the high tables of Sandton’s and Johannesburg’s posh restaurants and clubs, but did not make much difference to the millions who lived in townships. And when journalists and activists began challenging the party, the party leaders saw that as challenging the state, the idea of nationhood.

That’s at the heart of this new Bill. Many have rightly pointed out that this piece of legislation is more in tune with the thinking of the apartheid regime, and goes against the ideals of a pluralistic, participative, open democracy, which was the promise of 1990 and 1994. But this ANC, Zuma’s ANC, is no longer that ANC, Mandela’s ANC.

When Bishop Tutu, Nadine Gordimer, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, South African media and civil society are against the law, and when more than 30 ANC MPs find the spine to vote against the Bill, the moral choice is similarly, blindingly obvious. The ANC has ceased being an idealistic organisation, (which it perhaps never was, only some of its leaders were) and it has become like any other party, in charge of governing any other country.

Cry, the beloved country.

Plus Thembi Mutch: South Africans protest on “Black Tuesday” for press freedom

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Malema had sung sections of “Ayesaba Amagwala” (“The Cowards Are Scared”), a Zulu-language song that contains the words “Shoot the Boer” on many public occasions, including at a student rally in March 2010.

On 12 September 2011 at Johannesburg High Court, Judge Colin Lamont described the song as “derogatory, dehumanising and hurtful” to Afrikaans speakers living in South Africa. He ordered Malema to pay costs for the case, which was brought by AfriForum, an Afrikaaner civil rights group, and the Transvaal Agricultural Union. “People must develop new customs in an open society by giving up old practices,” said Lamont. “The enemy has become the friend, the brother.” Judge Lamont’s verdict upholds earlier rulings made last year made by high courts in both South Gauteng and Pretoria. It is presently unclear whether Malema, a young politician whose firebrand populism is viewed with alarm in many quarters, will appeal.

“Ayesaba Amagwala” is a historic song that Malema and some sections of the ANC have claimed as an important artefact of the epic struggles-era heritage. “Boer”, which translates as farmer in Afrikaans, has been to denote South Africa’s Afrikaner settlers since the 1880s. However, since the end of apartheid and the accession of South Africa’s Rainbow nation, the song has had an uneasy tenor as democracy has been established.

A precedent for Malema’s espousal of “Shoot the boer” can be seen in the chants employed by an earlier populist politician, Peter Mokaba, whose chants of “kill the boer” were censored in the 1990s. In the Johannesburg court, AfriForum expert witness, retired music academic Anne-Marie Gray, spoke of the “trance-like atmosphere” created by the repetition of “dubul’ ibhunu” (“shoot the Boer”). Accompanied by gestures and dancing, “it becomes much more aggressive and threatening… It almost sweeps you off your feet. It makes you want to do something.”

ANC watchers will see in Malema’s high court defeat a decline in the young populist politician’s fortunes. Once tipped as a successor to President Jacob Zuma as the head of the ANC, it is now likely that Malema will have to reconsider his future. In addition to the “shoot the boer” case, Malema is facing expulsion form the ANC for challenging Zuma and is under investigation for alleged bribe-taking. If found guilty, Malema could be expelled from the ANC. Outside a disciplinary hearing convened by the ANC in Johannesburg on 30 August 2011 to consider these issues, Malema’s supporters are reported to have held placards reading “South Africa for blacks only” and hurled rocks and burned t-shirts bearing Zuma’s likeness. Police fought back with tear gas and water cannon.

Just as Malema’s fierce and ambitious populism has found favour with some disadvantaged black South Africans, many of whom have seen few of the benefits of black majority rule, it has alarmed white South Africans. Since 1994 and the end of apartheid, over 3,000 farmers — the majority of them white — have been murdered in the Rainbow Nation, and in April 2010 white supremacist leader Eugène Terreblanche was murdered.

Malema has long been a thorn in the side for the ANC’s hierarchy. In contravention of official polices, he has commended Robert Mugabe’s land-grabbing exercises in neighbouring Zimbabwe and called for the nationalisation of mines. In 2009, he was fined 50,000 rand by the Equality Court for suggesting that the women who accused Zuma of raping them had actually enjoyed their sexual encounters with the president. (Zuma had been acquitted of all charges of rape three years earlier.)

While the South African judges have given an unequivocal statement on the the status of hate songs such “Ayesaba Amagwala”, it remains to be seen if Malema can be reined in.

Louise Gray writes for the Wire and New Internationalist. Her No-Nonsense Guide to World Music was published in 2009 by New Internationalist

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