By September 1964, I was married (for a second time) and living the life of a writer in Onrus in the Western Cape.
When the Lion Feeds had been published ten months before in the US and the UK, but was yet to be published in South Africa.
I had come down to Johannesburg in April 1964 to launch the book. I was jubilant at its success. US bookshops had ordered another 1,500 copies, Heinemann in the UK had sold another 20,000 around the world, I’d just signed translation rights for nine countries, the BBC was serializing it and Reader’s Digest was condensing it—but South Africa’s Publications Control Board was banning it, although not before a brisk 10,000 copies were sold.
The problem seemed to be about 1,000 words of the 160,000 total word count. Booksellers themselves were puzzled and even the reviewer of The Star, South Africa’s daily newspaper, noted: “There is one minor sex incident near the beginning and even that, in modern literature, cannot be termed offensive except by a prude.”
The Board had catholic taste and so When the Lion Feeds had company. At the same time the Board banned all editions of Fanny Hill, all future issues of Playboy magazine, Brian Bunting’s The Rise of The South African Reich and Patrick Duncan’s Volume 2.
Brian Bunting was a lifelong communist. A former journalist on the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, he edited no fewer than six political newspapers in South Africa, all subsequently banned, before going into exile in Britain and becoming a correspondent for Tass, the Soviet Union’s news agency. Patrick Duncan was the son of a former governor-general of South Africa, a former national organizer of the soon to be banned Liberal Party and the first white member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a South African political party campaigning against apartheid. Fanny Hill was an erotic novel by English novelist John Cleland, first published in London in 1748 and widely regarded as the first of its kind in the world, while Playboy was paradoxically acclaimed not for its nudes but the quality of its journalism.
It was typical of South Africa at the time though, as an increasingly confident National Party government had weathered the storm of the PAC–organized pass law boycott—the pass laws were an internal passport system designed to control the movement of Africans under apartheid—which had led to the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 when police opened fire on protesters at a peaceful anti-pass campaign. The government had then begun clamping down on the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid political party, and the PAC with every tool at its disposal, legal and otherwise. In June 1964, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC’s new uMkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation liberation army, the military wing of the ANC, had already started serving what would be a twenty-seven-year sentence on the notorious Robben Island, on his way to becoming the most famous political prisoner in the world.
Heinemann took the case on appeal to the Cape Division of South Africa’s Supreme Court in Cape Town. It was a test case, the first of its kind to examine just what constituted “indecent, objectionable or obscene” grounds.
The Publications Board said in its papers to court that When the Lion Feeds had the “tendency to deprave or corrupt the minds of persons who are likely to be exposed to the effect or influence thereof. It is offensive and harmful to public morals. It is likely to be outrageous or disgusting to persons who are likely to read it. It dealt in an improper manner with promiscuity, passionate love scenes, lust, sexual intercourse, obscene language, blasphemous language, sadism and cruelty.”
The case had to be heard twice. At the first attempt the two-judge bench of Mr. Justice Van Zijl and Mr. Justice Diemont couldn’t agree, so the whole process had to be repeated, this time with the division’s Judge President, Mr. Justice Beyers, sitting in. After the second hearing, the decision went our way 2:1 with Judge Diemont still dissenting.
There were moments of levity and humor, as there always are in court cases of high tension. Advocate G. Duncan QC, appearing for the Board, had a battle on his hands with Judge Beyers grilling him on the issue of morals. “Times change,” he put it to Duncan. “There was a time when table legs were covered with all sorts of drapes, because they gave people all sorts of ideas. I live at Clifton [a well-known Cape Town beach] and I see a lot more than table legs.” To which Duncan replied that there were two extreme points of view: from the one that claimed table legs should be covered, all the way through to total nudity. The judge retorted: “It is very difficult for me, I am a Bachelor’s Cove man. You see what I mean? It depends entirely on the judge you get.” Duncan diplomatically responded that perhaps the solution would be to take a middle course. He objected to statements that the frank treatment of sex was customary in contemporary society. Judge Beyers, on hearing this, turned to his fellow judges and said, “I don’t know why he says ‘contemporary.’ Has it not been discussed ever since literature was born?”
Delivering the majority judgment Judge Van Zijl found that no part could be singled out from a book and given extra weight because it suited the complainant: “The impact of the part—its effect or influence—on people must in a large measure depend upon the impact of the whole, the part’s relationship to the whole and its relationship to the other parts making up the whole. It is the weight of this impact upon certain specified matters that determines whether the book should or should not be declared to be an undesirable publication.”
Apart from taking a dig at me for the “poor literary quality” of When the Lion Feeds, and for “the falseness of ascribing to two children the sophisticated love passage, that is described at pages 71–72 as taking place between them,” Judge Van Zijl found that these were not grounds for either the Board or the court to find the book undesirable.
“The first passage concerns an incident in which Anna, a girl of about 17, seduces the hero of the book, Sean, a boy of about the same age. The tale tells of how Anna forces her company upon Sean who is going fishing; of how when they get to the fishing spot, she became bored, dives naked into the pool and entices Sean into the pool and now, after a brief physical encounter in the water, she goes out onto the bank, and of how they sit naked next to each other and she asks him to have intercourse with her.”
Sean and Anna then chat about what has just happened and Sean confides to his brother Garrick when he gets home. Judge Van Zijl found there was nothing in these four pages that would tend to corrupt or deprave the minds of those likely to read it. There was nothing, he said, that the elder teenager could not have thought of for him or herself. The passage, the judge found, had been written with restraint and could not be said to advocate immorality.
The second passage covered a page and a half, but the piece that had riled the Board was barely ten lines long. This piece, said the judge, described sexual behavior which in all probability deviated from the normal. But the knowledge imparted in the passage could be gained from any standard work on sex or sexual behavior and Judge Van Zijl could not see any ground on which it could be contended that the passage could in anyway be held to “corrupt or deprave the mind of an adult.”
We had won, but it was a pyrrhic victory because Judge Van Zijl granted the Board leave to appeal to the apex court (the supreme court) at the time, the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein, and banned any sale of copies of When the Lion Feeds until the appeal was heard. It was a double blow because I had funded the legal suit not wanting to burden my publishers with the case. Charles Pick had said Heinemann would foot the bill, but I was adamant. It was a small price to pay to reinforce the deep mutual respect Charles and I already had for one another.
My second novel, The Dark of the Sun, published in January 1965, was also banned. A year later, the Board would ban The Train from Katanga, which was the American version of The Dark of the Sun. The good news though was that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had already paid £26,250 to buy the film rights when the book was published in the UK. Ironically the book wasn’t banned in Rhodesia, where it clearly hadn’t offended anyone.
The Appellate Division announced its finding on When the Lion Feeds on August 26, 1965. The country’s most senior judges weren’t as sanguine as their brothers in Cape Town. A full bench consisting of five judges, led by Chief Justice L.C. Steyn, heard the appeal.
The chief justice lashed my writing style. When the Lion Feeds, he said, was not “a publication for any select circle of mature literary connoisseurs.” He continued witheringly: “Making due allowances for the trends of our time, there are passages which I consider calculated to incite lustful thoughts and to stimulate sexual desire in at least a substantial number of persons: ordinary men and women, of normal mind and reactions, including some of the younger generation, who will be the probable readers of this book.
“However much fashionable sophistries obscure the simple truth, the plain fact remains that the sexual urge is much too powerful to be so dulled and blunted by exposure to the more indirect daily stimulants of our times that there is no longer a substantial number of ordinary men and women who are liable to be appreciably stirred by descriptions such as these of matters so directly, closely and intimately associated with actual consummation.”
Two of the judges, F. Rumpff and A. Faure Williamson, dissented. In his dissenting judgment, Judge Rumpff managed to pull back a small victory for common sense. As far as he was concerned, the book taken as a whole could not possibly be said to have the tendency to corrupt or deprave. In fact, if the average modern reader with a healthy mind, said the learned judge, wanted to read about sex in a manner which left little to the imagination, it was not for the court to say that he should not do so.
The decision had been political. Charles had no doubt of the outcome before the court had even reconvened. “Of the five judges, two came out in our favor and the other three served their judgment for the recess. I was told by a South African ex-judge living in England that this was going to be a political decision and that there was little chance of the three judges coming down on our side.
“By chance, I met the South African ambassador at a private cocktail party in London and couldn’t resist mentioning the subject to him,” wrote Charles in his unpublished memoirs. “I was immediately up against a brick wall. He went on about how he wouldn’t allow his daughter to walk through the streets of London because the bookshops were so full of filth and pornography and that the South Africans had the right idea in banning books. I came away from that party very despondent.
“Sure enough, the three judges voted against us and there was no appeal against this decision until a further ten years had elapsed.
“By then the relaxation of the Censorship Board was such that the book was allowed. After these years, the number of copies in South Africa of When the Lion Feeds was considerable, as everybody who traveled came back with one or more copies. This shows the folly of censorship; the moment you draw attention to something, rightly or wrongly, it only enhances its popularity and people will move heaven and earth to get copies.”
Charles was right. I had my own personal epiphany a little later. I was incensed when I read a review of When the Lion Feeds in the Los Angeles Times. It was a full two pages and it was savage, along the lines of “this guy should be locked up, and prevented from writing about all his racist crap.”
At the time, I had become friends with Stuart Cloete, the blockbuster South African novelist of his time, who was living in Hermanus, a seaside town south east of Cape Town. He lived just down the road from me and he liked hot curry, which his wife, Tiny, used to cook, and I would be invited to eat with him.
His first novel, Turning Wheels, about the Great Trek which was published in 1937—a year after the centenary celebrations of the Afrikaners leaving their farms in the Cape and traveling by ox wagon into the hinterland to escape British colonial rule—sold more than two million copies. It too was banned. Stuart was born in Paris to an Afrikaner father and a French mother, went to a British public school, became a second lieutenant at the age of seventeen, during the First World War, before returning as a very young husband to farm in South Africa. He divorced, found the love of his life and started writing. He would write fourteen novels in all, several volumes of short stories, three biographies, and even poetry, between 1937 and his death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight. I liked him a lot, he was an amiable gentleman, but it went further than that. When I signed the contract with Heinemann for When the Lion Feeds, their Johannesburg representative described me to journalists as “the Stuart Cloete of Rhodesia.”
I went down to Stuart brandishing the offending review and said: “Look what they’ve done to me!” And he replied: “That’s wonderful, Wilbur, that’s one of the best reviews I’ve ever seen for a first-time author.” Puzzled, I said: “But you haven’t read it.” He said, “Wilbur, you don’t read the stuff, you weigh it. If you’re important enough for people to want to write two full pages about your novel in a big-selling publication like that, then it’s worthwhile.”
Stuart was, like Charles Pick, one of my first mentors. His rough-hewn, unpretentious wisdom was a great source of inspiration. Both Stuart and I had the dubious honor of being banned authors in South Africa. It reflected the uncertainty of the times and how progress is invariably a many-sided thing. Stuart’s novels would remain banished until 1974, while the first work of mine that pleased the gimlet eye of the censors was Gold Mine in 1970.
The courts finally unbanned When the Lion Feeds in South Africa eleven years after it had been published, following this up with the unbanning of my second novel, The Dark of the Sun ten months later, but it wouldn’t be the last time my books were banned in South Africa, or elsewhere.
In 1977, I published A Sparrow Falls, the final installment in the trilogy that had begun with When the Lion Feeds. It starred Sean Courtney, returning as a general from the First World War to build up his country, put down the Rand Revolt of 1922 and then die because of the perfidy of his awful and evil son, Dirk. In perfect symmetry, the Directorate of Publications, the successor to the Publications Board, promptly banned it—for being indecent and obscene.
Heinemann South Africa’s managing director Andrew Stewart went out to bat for me, telling the Directorate’s appeals board that the average person was unlikely to buy a 650-page book just to read three pages of sex. Andrew told the court the sex scenes were no more graphic than in any of my previous books, for which there had been no complaints. A Sparrow Falls was my eleventh novel.
“People will buy the book because it is an adventure story and because Wilbur Smith is a well-known novelist. They will not buy it for the sex scenes,” said Andrew.
Bizarrely, the Directorate briefed counsel to appeal its own committee’s decision—only the third time in history that this had happened. Quintus Pelser, who was appearing for the Directorate, told the court that the book had “great literary merit” and “that the sex scenes were functional.”
“They form an integral part of the plot and help the reader to a better understanding of the characters. The book would not have the same impact if the sex scenes were left out.”
The appeals board reserved its judgment in the same week as A Sparrow Falls and Cry Wolf, my novel published the year before, achieved the unique double of topping the British hardback and paperback bestseller lists respectively. By now I was getting sacks of fan mail from international readers, particularly in America following the breakthrough of Eagle in the Sky (1974), thanking me for writing about South Africa, clarifying the country’s complex and tumultuous history, highlighting the issues and dramatizing the nation in an entertaining and accessible way.
The decision of the South African board underscored that they had exiled me just as the rest of the western world was welcoming me. The people I felt sorriest for were the local booksellers. They were already buckling under the pressure of the new nationwide television service introduced in South Africa the year before, in 1976. But I didn’t regret a word I’d written—and nor did the readers. A Sparrow Falls was one of my most successful novels.
A South African returning to his country felt the full force of the ban. He was on his way home from London and had bought a copy of A Sparrow Falls to pass the time during the flight. With nothing to declare on arrival at Jan Smuts Airport (today Oliver Tambo International Airport) he casually went down the green aisle only to be stopped by a zealous customs official and told the book was banned.
“Some twenty minutes later,” he wrote to the Star newspaper, “I was still filling in forms, having my name and address taken, my passport examined and being rather officiously lectured to about my contravention of the Act.”
The paper took up his case in the editorial column the next day:
“You have arrived at Jan Smuts Airport,” as the old joke would have it. “Would passengers please put their watches back 25 years.” The experience, which a reader described in a letter to the Star, made the apocryphal story ring uncomfortably true . . . The undesirability of the novel A Sparrow Falls is highly arguable to say the least. Last year a committee of the Publications Directorate found it indecent and obscene. However, the Directorate itself joined the publishers in a successful appeal against the ban. Then the Publications Appeal Board re-banned it citing eleven passages where sexual description was too explicit. Certainly it is no Kama Sutra or Das Kapital. It is a typical modern adventure tale in which an occasional dash of sex is almost an obligatory part of the formula and very much subsidiary to the main action. Are such books really worth making such a fuss over? Doesn’t banning them simply serve as a needless irritant to unknowing South Africans and make the country look petty rather than prim in the eyes of the outside world?
The Publication Appeal Board lifted the ban on A Sparrow Falls in 1981. As always, they couldn’t resist taking a swipe at me. The descriptions it found were not “blatantly shameless and not so crude to taint the whole book with undesirability.” That was the good part. The book had no literary merit, the good burghers harrumphed, “but it will have a wide probable readership—it can be described as escapist fiction.”
It was necessary to adopt a realistic approach in this respect, the Board said, because “escapist fiction has a place in the South African community and forms an integral part of many South Africans’ relaxation.” It would be absurd therefore to expect such fiction to be without sexual descriptions.
Just why its committee could not have come to the same conclusion four years earlier and before the expenditure of tens of thousands of rands in legal fees, only it would know, but we would have the last laugh. A Sparrow Falls was to win me my first golden Pan award in 1982. Pan Books, the publishers who I had moved to after Heinemann, had created the award to recognize authors in their stable who had sold more than a million copies of any particular title. Standing 25 cm high, it was a golden statuette of an original bronze Pan figurine dating from between 1 BC and 1 AD held by the British Museum.
There was one final twist in this strange saga of censorship. In 1980, I started writing what would become the four-part Ballantyne series. The novels chronicled the lives of the Ballantyne family from the 1860s to the 1980s against the background of the bitter struggle between black and white in Rhodesia’s (now Zimbabwe) brief history. The series ended with The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (1984) which the Zimbabwean government promptly banned.