bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Tango :A poem of exile and the porteño's nostalgia for Buenos Aires
Authors: Costantini Humberto
Published: October 2007

Humberto Costantini was born in Buenos Aires in 1924. He has published six volumes of short stories and three of poetry, and until his exile from Argentina in 1977 was a regular contributor to the Buenos Aire's newspaper Clarin and most of the country's literary magazines. In 1967 and 1970 collections of his stories won the Buenos Aires Municipal Literary Prize, one of the country's most prestigious awards, while a more recent story won the 1979 Casa de las Americas award (given by an international jury in Havana, Cuba). Several of his stories have been dramatised for theatre and cinema.

A leading member of the Argentinian Writers' Association, which was well known for its opposition to the military government which took power in March 1976, Costantini received frequent death-threats after the coup. Close friends, also members of the Writers' Association, such as Rodolfo Walsh (see Index on Censorship 5/1977) and Haroldo Conti (Index on Censorship (6/1981), disappeared after abduction by para-military squads. In early 1977, believing that his own arrest was imminent, Humberto Costantini left Buenos Aires for exile in Mexico. He now presents a daily television programme on Mexican television about Latin American writers.

The poem we publish here (slightly shortened, with the author's permission) is about exile. It is also about the attitudes and prejudices of that very particular South American character, the porteño male, the cocky but melancholic native of Buenos Aires. Many of the self-mocking references, among them plays on porteño and Mexican slang and ironic quotations from Argentinian tangos, will sadly be lost to the English-language reader. But some explanations can be given. Above all, tango is much more than a dance rhythm or a kind of song. It is an attitude and an ambience which this poem both draws on and mocks. A gringa is a North American woman (a female gringo) and gringuita its diminutive, while che is the characteristic Argentinian interpolation meaning ‘man’. Ahorita is a particularly northern Latin American usage which literally means ‘now’, but in fact is used when the speaker has no intention of acting immediately. Yerba is mate tea, the Argentinian national drink, while a corridor is a Mexican ballad. There are several renderings of Spanish spoken with a Northern American accent: ‘Vamose a comer oonos taquitos’ (vamos a comer unos taquitos) = let's go and eat some tacos; ‘musayo de Antropolgeea’ (museo de antropologia) = museum of anthropology; ‘floores para el bulin’ (flores para el bulin) = flowers for the room (a bulin is literally a ‘love-nest’). Tu tienes que saber means ‘you must know’, no es verdad means ‘is not true’, and El alma que canta (‘The songful soul’) is an Argentinian magazine which publishes lyrics of tangos and other popular songs. There are also many places referred to in the poem, both in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.
Ruth First
Authors: Segal Ronald
Published: October 2007

Ruth First, Director of the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, Mozambique, was killed by a letter bomb in her office on 17 August 1982: the final act of censorship on a lifetime of active opposition to apartheid and other forms of social injustice in South Africa.

Born in Johannesburg in 1925, she was a student of social science at Witwatersrand University when she joined the Communist Party and founded a multi-racial students' group. During the great African mine strike of 1946 she was among a handful of whites who assisted the strikers. In 1947, despite risk of police harassment, she helped to expose farm labour conditions on the Bethal potato farms, writing investigative articles which led directly to a month-long boycott of potatoes organised by the Congress Alliance, headed by the African National Congress. Soon afterwards she was appointed Johannesburg editor of three radical South African investigative papers: the Guardian, the Clarion, and New Age, each in turn banned by the government. With her husband Joe Slovo, an Advocate, and with Fatima Meer (see outside back cover), she was one of the 156 people accused but acquitted in the Treason Trial of 1956. In the early 1960s she visited South West Africa (Namibia) and wrote a searing expose of apartheid in that territory which was, and remains, under United Nations mandate but is run by South Africa. The book resulted in tighter government restrictions on her activities, prohibiting any publication of her work and forbidding her from even entering newspaper offices. In 1963 she was detained and held for 117 days, much of it in solitary confinement. Shortly after her release from prison, when it was obvious that she would be rearrested, she left South Africa.

During her years of exile in England, she wrote The Barrel of a Gun, a study of African coups, and a portrait of Libya entitled The Elusive Revolution. She lectured in sociology for several years at Durham University. In 1978 she returned to Africa, to take up the post in Mozambique which she held at the time of her death. As head of an international research team, she was helping to initiate plans for the new Mozambique: economic and socio-political development projects which promised to make Mozambique economically independent of South Africa. It seems she became a target in South Africa's apparent programme of destabilising its black neighbours.

Ruth First's book, 117 days, an account of her confinement and interrogation under the South African 90-day detention law, was first published in 1965. It was republished by Penguin Books in November 1982, with a new preface by Ronald Segal, which we reprint below:
When Ponchos are Subversive
Authors: Màrquez Andrés
Published: October 2007

An interview with a member of ‘Illapu’, an exiled Chilean folk group
Playing for the People
Authors: Estrella Miguel Angel
Published: October 2007

An interview with Argentina's outstanding pianist who played Chopin and Beethoven to the poor and was imprisoned and tortured for ‘choosing the filthy Indians’
Banned in Bohemia
Authors: Brabenec Vratislav , Jirous Ivan
Published: October 2007

The story of The Plastic People, a rock band which is seen as a threat by the Czech authorities
The difficulty of ‘Walking on two Legs’
Authors: Holm David
Published: October 2007

Music censorship in China
Polish dreams and delusions
Authors: Konwicki Tadeusz
Published: October 2007

Excerpt from the Polish novelist's latest book, Moonrises, Moonsets
Unofficial publishing lives on
Authors: Mianowicz Tomasz
Published: October 2007

Samizdat before and after the Solidarity period
Out of the Twilight
Authors: Mattera Don
Published: October 2007

Banned 1973-1982, Don Mattera describes his life in an interview with Essop Patel
How free is Egypt Today?
Authors: Hetata Sherif
Published: October 2007

An Egyptian writer describes the insecurity and fear in his country
The Islamic Attack on Iranian Culture
Authors: Taheri Amir
Published: October 2007

A survey of the effect on the intelligentsia of the Islamic revolution
Keeping your Head
Authors: Setiawan Hersri
Published: October 2007

Memoir of detention in Indonesia
Media and government in Sri Lanka
Authors: Gunewardena Victor
Published: October 2007

Emergency rule, state ownership, and partial application of the law threaten to destroy public debate
Culture of fear and silence
Authors: Various
Published: October 2007

This selection of examples of cultural suppression was compiled from various sources.
Mnazi: The Struggle for the Coconut Tree
Authors: Abdalla Abdilatif
Published: October 2007

Among the Kiswahili-speaking peoples of the coast of Kenya and other East African countries, written literature is a many centuries-long tradition, and poetry the most popular form. Abdilatif Abdalla was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1946; his grandfather and elder brother were poets, and he himself won a reputation as a poet when he was 16, with Utenzi wa Maisha ya Nabii Adam na Hawa (‘Epic poem on the life of Adam and Eve’). Three years' imprisonment in solitary confinement in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison (see ‘Culture of Fear and Silence’), resulted in a second book, Sauti ya Dhiki (‘Voice of Agony’): a chronicle of 40 poems, written on small pieces of toilet paper — he was allowed neither books nor notebooks — and secretly smuggled out by sympathetic guards. On its publication in 1974, Abdilatif was hailed as the ‘youngest major poet-politician in East Africa’, who might ‘well be on his way to becoming the greatest Swahili poet of the independence era’, and the book was awarded the Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Since his release from prison in 1972, Abdilatif has not risked working in Kenya again. For several years he headed the Literature and Publications Section of the Institute of Swahili Research at the University of Dar es Salaam, edited Mulika (a literary journal) and co-edited the Kiswahili journal. Since 1979 he has lived and worked in London.

The poems of Sauti ya Dhiki are, like all Kiswahili poetry, written in stanzas of strict rhythmic and rhyming patterns. They meet demands of Swahili poetics recommended both by tradition and by contemporary experts. No English translation can mirror the highly crafted form, nor match the rich cultural references of the words. It seems more important to attempt to reproduce the liveliness and colloquial quality than to attempt an equivalent of the form and language. In content too the poems of Sauti ya Dhiki continue the tradition of Kiswahili poetry, much of which has been progressive, nationalist and anti-colonialist: urging struggle against Portuguese forces in the 17th century, Omani forces in the 18th century, the British colonialists in the early 19th century, and the ruling élite of post-independence Kenya. The dialogue between two brothers in ‘Mnazi: The Struggle for the Coconut Tree’ articulates the betrayal felt by many Kenyans of the uhuru (freedom, i.e. post-independence) generation: while their largely self-elected rulers prosper, the majority of people seem poorer and less free than under colonialism.
Interview with Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga
Authors: Rocha Jan
Published: October 2007

Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga is a tiny, slightly-built man with a husky voice and a sense of humour; a fervently religious man who burns with indignation when he talks about injustice, and shines with compassion when he talks about the sufferings of his people. He is also a poet, whose verses on liberation, the poor and the guerrilla struggles of Latin America have been translated into many languages.

Now 55, Casaldaliga was born into an ultra-right wing Catholic family in Catalonia. In 1952 he became a priest in the Claretian order, inspired to a great extent by an uncle — also a priest - who was murdered by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. In 1968, following Vatican II and the Church's new ‘option for the poor’, Casaldaliga came to Brazil to take charge of a vast abandoned region on the edge of the Amazon, the Prelacy of São Felix do Araguaia. He found a land where ‘money and a .38 pistol were the rule of law’. Huge cattle farms, many owned by transnational companies, drove peasant farmers off their land, and employed labourers in slave conditions. There were no schools or hospitals, and Casaldaliga and the priest who arrived– with him soon discovered ‘the multiple, devastating presence of illness and death’. He recalls that, ‘In our first week in São Felix four children died and were carried past our house down to the cemetery in cardboard boxes which looked like shoeboxes. We were to bury so many children there – each family loses three or four dead infants – and so many adults, dead or killed, many without even a coffin, and some without even a name’.

But in these people, exploited and cheated by the rich and powerful, and ‘swept backwards and forwards by the tide of poverty’ Casaldaliga saw the people of God. In 1970 he published a pastoral letter denouncing feudalism and slavery. Immediately banned by the authorities, this was the first warcry in a battle which continues today. Men have been hired to kill him, and attempts have been made to expel him from the country (see Index/Index 2/1981). The Prelacy has been invaded by the military, and priests and lay-workers have been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. Another priest was shot dead beside him when they tried to stop police torturing two women. A systematic campaign of lies and distortion is waged against him on the official radio and TV. He is hated by the landowners and by the military. For years he has expected assassination.

One cannot help being reminded of the life of Jesus Christ.
Solidarity and aid
Authors: Gelber George
Published: October 2007

Relations between the Catholic Church and its best-known human rights agencies in Latin America have not always been smooth
Divine law and human rights
Authors: Taheri Amir
Published: October 2007

In applying their interpretation of ‘religious law’ the Iranian authorities reject all notions of the rights of man
Three poems
Authors: Ke Mang
Published: October 2007

Mang Ke, born in 1950, was a Young Pioneer (the Chinese Communist Party youth organisation) when he was fifteen. He started to write poetry when he was twenty. During the Peking Spring of 1978-9 when there was some liberalisation in the arts and literature, he and Bei Da founded Jintian (‘Today’), a literary magazine. It carried many poems by unknown young Chinese writers, especially the collection entitled A New Poetry.

By mid 1979, most of the leaders of the Peking Spring had been arrested and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’. Jintian was banned at the end of 1980 and members of the group dispersed and went ‘underground’. The following are some of Mang Ke's poems from a collection called Jiumeng (‘Old Dream’), written in 1980.
A cruel deception
Authors: Lent John A
Published: October 2007

Government and mass media in the Philippines after martial law
Slit lips and other poems
Authors: al-Qasim Samih
Published: October 2007

The work and experience of a Palestinian poet living in Israel

Samih al-Qasim is a poet who lives and works in Haifa. Born in 1939, his first collection of poems appeared in 1958. His second book, Songs of the Alleys (1965), was ‘full of empty pages. The censors cut whole poems, parts of poems, or individual lines’ (see the interview with him and Emile Habibi in Index 4/1982). In 1967 while in prison during the Six Day War he joined the Israeli Communist Party. He decided not to submit his next work Waiting for the Thunderbird (1968) to the censor and he was arrested.

The poems which follow are from an anthology Three Arab Poets ( Samih al-Qasim, Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish) to be published in 1984 by Saqi Books. They are preceded by a short interview. This was given on 18 June 1983 when Samih al-Qasim was one of several writers who took part in a series of readings entitled ‘Voices at Curfew’. The interviewer is the Yemeni writer Abdullah al-Udhari.
The Khmer Rouge: beyond 1984?
Authors: Tan Lek Hor
Published: October 2007

Lek Hor Tan is a Cambodian-born British citizen. He was actively involved with the National United Front between 1970–75; this was a coalition of Sihanoukist, Socialist and Khmer Rouge forces fighting against the American-backed Lon Nol regime. Unlike hundreds of Cambodian exiles who returned to Cambodia after the victory of the United Front, and who were later murdered by the Khmer Rouge, he remained in the West. He has an intimate knowledge of the people involved in the Cambodian revolution and their thinking behind it. He has been with Index since 1977. For other articles on the Khmer Rouge see Lek Hor Tan, ‘Total Revolution in Cambodia’ (Index 1/1979), and Soth Polin, ‘Pol Pot's diabolical sweetness’ (Index 5/1980).
Iran under the Party of God
Authors: Sa'edi Gholam Hoseyn
Published: October 2007

A personal account of the first years of the revolution and its attack on culture, by one of Iran's leading writers

Gholam Hoseyn Sa'edi, born in 1935, is one of the best-known contemporary Iranian writers. Trained as a psychiatrist, he later devoted most of his time to writing. His novels, short stories, plays and filmscripts were often censored by the authorities under the Shah. He was arrested and badly beaten up many times by Savak, the Shah's secret police. His latest detention was in 1974 when he was held for over a year and badly tortured (see Index 1/1978).

After the fall of the Shah in 1979, Gholam Hoseyn Sa'edi, like many of his fellow intellectuals, gave enthusiastic support to the revolution. He later became disillusioned with it and went into hiding for nearly a year before he was able to go abroad in May 1982. The following is his personal account of cultural and intellectual life in Tehran during the early days of the ‘Islamic Revolution’ under the Party of God and Ministry of Guidance. The article first appeared in Alef-Bâ, a Persian-language magazine founded by Sa'edi and his friends in Paris.
Rumours, threats and sackings in the press
Authors: Rajab Ahmed
Published: October 2007

In Kenya's ‘half-way’ society, the press remains a convenient whipping-boy
René Philombe
Authors: Beti Mongo
Published: October 2007

Profile of a dissident Cameroonian writer
Return from sleeplessness
Authors: Soriano Osvaldo
Published: October 2007

After seven years in exile, an Argentinian writer flies back and records his feelings as he discovers the strangeness and familiarity of Buenos Aires

In October 1983, Argentina held presidential and parliamentary elections after more than seven years of military dictatorship. Since 1976, many thousands of Argentinians have been forced into exile by the repressive policies of the military ‘Process of National Re-organisation’. Among these was the novelist Osvaldo Soriano, whose two books Triste, Solitario y Final and No Habrá más Penas ni Olvido were first published in France (in 1978 and 1980). The military regime in Argentina began to crumble after the disastrous 1982 Malvinas/Falklands adventure and the blatant failure of their economic management. As the democratic forces regrouped for the elections, Soriano, like many other exiles, returned to discover a familiar but strange Argentina, struggling to overcome the nightmares of the previous seven years.
Keeping the university alive
Authors: Parada Miguel Angel
Published: October 2007

The campus was shut down with the loss of 22 lives. The death squads are murdering students or teachers at the rate of one a week; yet 17,000 students are still being taught

Miguel Angel Parada, the rector of El Salvador's national university, visited London at the end of 1983 as part of an international tour to increase awareness of the plight of his university and of education at all levels in El Salvador. The university campus was occupied by the army on 26 June 1980, when 22 people were killed. They are still there, even after a government decree stipulating that it should be returned to the university authorities. Despite the occupation, Dr Parada and his colleagues offer courses to 17,000 students in rented premises throughout the city of El Salvador. Dr Parada's own position is particularly hazardous. His predecessor, Félix Ulloa Martínez, was murdered. He himself was arrested in 1981 when troops burst into a university administrative meeting and detained 20 members of the council. The kidnapping and murder of students and university teachers has continued unabated through 1983 (see box), the latest victim being Dr Enelson Escobar, a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, whose tortured body was found on 8 December 1983. His name, like that of Dr Parada, was on a list published by the Ejercito Secreto Anticomunista (ESA, the ‘Secret Anti-Communist Army’) of people with ‘subversive connections’. In spite of the dangers, likely to increase still further as the March 1984 elections approach, Dr Parada remains outspoken in his defence of the university as the promoter of education in its widest sense, and the ‘defender of rational, critical thought in a country turned over to barbarism’.
Journalists in Chile
Authors: Portales Pablo
Published: October 2007

Interview with the president of the Santiago branch of the Chilean Journalists Association

A brutal disregard for freedom of expression has been one of the characteristics of the decade of military rule in Chile. By the end of 1983, discontent with General Augusto Pinochet's regime was increasingly widespread, with democratic opposition political forces regrouping and large numbers of people joining in monthly days of protest.

In this interview, Pablo Portales, a journalist and secretary general of the Santiago branch of the Chilean Journalists' Association, details the restrictions and pressures that journalists have had to contend with over the past decade.
I Dreamt the Snow was Burning
Authors: Skármeta Antonio
Published: October 2007

Extract from a novel by a Chilean exile

Antonio Skármeta was born in the northern Chilean city of Antofagasta in 1940. He studied Philosophy, Literature, and Theatrical Direction at the University of Chile in Santiago and at Columbia University in New York. He left Chile for exile in West Germany in 1975, and now lives in Berlin.

Skármeta is one of Chile's most successful novelists and short story and screenplay writers. His first collection of stories, El entusiasmo ( Enthusiasm') was published in Chile in 1967, while the second, Desnudo en el tejado ( ‘Naked on the Tiled Roof’) won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize two years later. He has written four novels apart from Soñé que la nieve ardia (‘I Dreamt the Snow was Burning’). One of them, Chileno!, is for young people and deals with the life of a teenage Chilean exile in Berlin.

Among his film credits are three films made with the German director, Peter Lilienthal. In 1983, Skármeta himself won a series of prizes, among them awards at the Festivals of Biarritz and Huelva, as director of Ardiente Paciencia (‘Burning Patience’), a film based on his own play about an imaginary incident in the life of Pablo Neruda.

I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning was published in 1981. Described by one critic as a ‘ballad’, it deals with the fortunes of a group of residents of a Santiago boarding house in the last months of the Popular Unity government which was overthrown by General Pinochet's coup in September 1973. Among these characters are Arturo, an aspiring footballer, and Señor Lecaros, the ‘Small Gent’, a circusperformer who spends his time in a dreamworld. In the opening sequence of the novel the two meet while travelling to the capital, Santiago, from the south.

With highly colloquial language (the Spanish-language original of the novel contains a lengthy glossary of ‘Chileanisms’ to aid the reader), the story traces the aspirations, illusions and fates of the residents, and their conscious or inadvertent involvement in the events of the time.

(Two words of explanation. Momios or ‘mummies’ — of the Egyptian kind — means ‘reactionaries’, while ‘turks’ refers to the considerable Syrian-Lebanese community which owns shops and factories throughout Chile.)

An English version of I Dreamt the Snow was Burning will be published in the USA, UK and Canada by Readers International, 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3.
They should have killed me
Authors: Tatarka Dominik
Published: October 2007

Excerpts from the banned writer's diary
Buried alive
Authors: Stanica George
Published: October 2007

Teachers, writers and artists in Ceausescu's Rumania
A conversation with Graham Greene
Authors: Kyncl Karel
Published: October 2007

‘No, it's not true,’ he said.

He was sitting in a red chair by the window and raised his right hand in an energetic gesture to emphasise his reply. Looking at his hands, you wouldn't think they had produced literary works. They seem rather to be the hands of an old sculptor, damaged by life-long handling of stone, hands which contrast strangely with the features of his face, held on the Continent to be the typical face of a British intellectual. But maybe there is no contradiction here: a life spent forming ideas and literary characters possibly finds its expression in a soulful face and damaged hands.

In Czechoslovakia, where I come from, his latest books circulate like samizdat publications — they depend on somebody returning ‘from abroad who manages to smuggle them through the border controls. For 15 years, his works have not been translated and his older books, already translated into Czech, have not been republished, although it would have been very lucrative for the publishing houses. An edition of 100,000 copies would vanish from the bookshops on the day of publication. So why isn't he published?
Barbed wire fox
Authors: Orłoś Kazimierz
Published: October 2007

Short story by a Polish writer whose work can appear only in unofficial publications

Born in 1935 in Warsaw, Kazimierz Orlos graduated in Law and worked for a time as a legal adviser before becoming an editor of Polish Radio. He lost his job when his first novel was published by the Instytut Literacky in Paris in 1973. He had already brought out three collections of short stories, having made his literary debut in 1961, and another novel followed in 1980. None of his work has appeared in Poland since the early seventies, but he has published in the unofficial quarterly Zapis, of which he was one of the editors. Our story is taken from Pustynia Gobi (‘The Gobi Desert’), a collection of his short stories published by Puls Publications in London in 1983.
Poems
Authors: Foppa Alaide
Published: October 2007

A poet and critic, Alaide Foppa ‘disappeared’ in 1980 and nothing has been heard of her since
Errata List
Authors: Scorza Manuel
Published: October 2007

One of the last texts by a leading Peruvian writer

Manuel Scorza, one of several Latin American writers to die in the tragic air crash at Madrid airport on 7 December 1983, was born in Lima in 1928. He was imprisoned and forced into exile during the 1950s for his political activity in favour of the Peruvian Indian population. In 1961 he again had to leave Peru after heading protests at the massacres of peasants in the Pasco region. His experiences led him to write a cycle of five novels which explore the epic struggle of the Indians of his country, of which the best known are Redoble por Rancas (‘Drums for Rancas,’ 1977, Secker & Warburg) and Historia de Garabombo el Invisible (‘The Story of Garabombo the Invisible’). Errata List was written three days before his death.
Three poems
Authors: Darwish Mahmoud
Published: October 2007

Poems by the most prominent Palestinian writer of ‘literature of resistance’
Turkish writers on trial
Authors: Can Hasan
Published: October 2007

The outcome of the trial is uncertain, but it could mean putting Turkey's leading intellectuals behind bars for 15 years.

The Writers Union of Turkey (WUT) was set up in 1974. Its members are among the best writers, poets, critics and journalists of the country. When the military junta took over on 12 September 1980 there was a blanket ban on the activities of all trade unions and professional associations (Index, 1/82, 6/83). Two years later, the president of WUT, the 68 year old satirist Aziz Nesin, and all the WUT executive members were charged with forming an ‘illegal organisation’ and ‘defaming the security forces’. The military authorities started proceedings on 4 January 1983. The trial still continues.

All of them were sitting next to each other. It was like a hall of fame of contemporary Turkish literature. In the corner was the 68-year-old prominent satirist Aziz Nesin. Next to him some of Turkey's best-known writers, poets, critics, journalists, and columnists: Bekir Yildiz, Adnan Ozyalciner, Sukran Kurdakul, Demirtas Ceyhun, and others…

This might have been a literary symposium or a seminar. But it was not. Aziz Nesin and his colleagues were attending the trial brought against their trade union. They were seated in the dock, and on the badges they were wearing was the word ‘defendant’.

According to the military prosecutor, they had turned the Writers Union of Turkey (WUT) into an ‘illegal society’. He called for a ban on the organisation and prison sentences of eight to fifteen years for the accused.
Poems
Authors: Arango Jorge Valls
Published: October 2007

Jorge Valls Arango was released from prison in Cuba in June 1984 after more than 20 years in jail there. He visited Europe to receive the Rotterdam Poetry Festival prize which had been awarded to him in 1983. He also came briefly to London, where the English Centre of International PEN has recently published a bilingual edition of some of his poetry, Where I am there is no light and it is barred. Jorge Valls gave many interviews, including one to Index, from which the following account was taken.
‘Blacks treated more severely’: What does it mean to live under the Publications Act and the Internal Security Act? For Blacks it means that as well as being denied a vote, they also lose their voice whenever they find it
Authors: Marcus Gilbert
Published: October 2007

A recent report on the way censorship operates in South Africa reveals that the Black community ‘is treated more severely than other groups in the realm of freedom of expression’.

Compiled by Gilbert Marcus of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the 10,000-word report shows how the authorities use existing legislation (the Publications Act and the Internal Security Act) to stifle expression and conduct they disapprove of. ‘One is driven to the conclusion,’ writes Gilbert Marcus, ‘that both statutes are utilised as devices to preserve the status quo and to suppress opposition. Newspapers and other publications which serve the Black community are only allowed to operate within narrowly circumscribed limits. When opposition is pitched at the level that it may become effective, it is suppressed. The effective articulation of opposition is often branded as the irresponsible abuse of freedom of expression.’

The author warns that the real danger of suppressing free speech is to be found in the ‘possibility that other means of expression will be resorted to’. The stifling of peaceful channels of protest makes it much more likely that more violent means will be resorted to.

The report was written in August 1984 and has been slightly abbreviated.
The trial of Yurii Shikhanovich: A Chronicle of Current Events, samizdat journal of the human rights movement in the USSR, suffered a severe blow in September when one of its editors was sentenced
Authors: Wishnevsky Julia
Published: October 2007

A Chronicle of Current Events was initially produced in 1968 as a bi-monthly journal. In the spring of that year members of the Soviet Civil Rights Movement created the journal with the stated intention of publicising issues and events related to Soviet citizens' efforts to exercise fundamental human liberties. On the title page of every issue there appears the text of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which calls for universal freedom of opinion and expression. The authors are guided by the principle that such universal guarantees of human rights (and similar guarantees in their domestic law) should be firmly adhered to in their own country and elsewhere. They feel that ‘it is essential that truthful information about violations of basic human rights in the Soviet Union should be available to all who are interested in it’. The Chronicles consist mostly of accounts of such violations.

In an early issue it was stated that ‘the Chronicle does, and will do, its utmost to ensure that its strictly factual style is maintained to the greatest degree possible.…’ The Chronicle has consistently maintained a high standard of accuracy. As a regular practice the editors openly acknowledge when a piece of information has not been thoroughly verified. When mistakes in reporting occur, these mistakes are retrospectively drawn to the attention of readers.

In February 1971, starting with number 16, Amnesty International began publishing English translations of the Chronicles as they appeared. It has now reached its 64th issue and is also available from Routledge Journals.

In 1981 Dr Andrei Sakharov wrote: ‘I consider the Chronicles' thirteen years of publication a genuine miracle, and I consider it as well an expression of the spirit and moral strength of the human rights movement in the USSR. The authorities' hatred of the Chronicle, manifested in innumerable acts of persecution, only confirms that evaluation.’

The following report was prepared by Radio Liberty Research (RL 339/84).
Gagging the press: Journalists who took President Duvalier at his word that the press was free to write as it wished, have been silenced.
Authors: Chamberlain Greg
Published: October 2007

Greg Chamberlain is a Paris-based journalist who writes on the Caribbean for the (London) Guardian and other publications.
Salt for the zombies: Interview with an exiled film-maker who had to leave Haiti after coming into conflict with the Duvalier dictatorship.
Authors: Médard Yves
Published: October 2007

The number of films made in Haiti by Haitians can be counted on the fingers of one hand. According to a recent essay, the first of these dates from as recently as 1962: the second, with a screenplay by Yves Médard, from 1972. With Anita ( 1979-80) Médard was the first to use film to criticise the social situation under the Duvaliers. The film, and his cultural activities in general, have led him to fall foul of the authorities on several occasions, and in 1983 he was held in prison for a month and then expelled to France. Annick Bapst interviewed him in Paris for Index on Censorship.
Threats to British broadcasting
Authors: Forman Denis
Published: October 2007

The following is a shortened version of the James MacTaggart lecture delivered by Sir Denis Forman in Edinburgh on 26 August 1984. The full text appeared in The Listener of 30 August.
Guards
Authors: Glowacki Janusz
Published: October 2007

Born in 1938, Janusz Glowacki is a novelist; dramaturge, script-writer and essayist as well as being a playwright. He has a degree in philology from Warsaw University and has published five collections of short stories, two novels and also two volumes of essays. He has written the scripts of a number of films, among them one by Andrzej Wajda. Four of his plays have been staged in Poland and abroad. In December 1981 the Royal Court theatre in London put on his play Kopcíuch.

The following is a fragment from the play Fortinbras Got Drunk; the title Guards was given to the extract by the editors of PULS (London), where it was first published. (See also box on p. 14.)

Night. In this play the night is continuous. Everything should take place in semi-darkness, broken only by the glow of torches, or dim light, possibly moonlight. The audience should have the feeling that the events are taking place during a single night. Maybe it is really so; our knowledge about the duration of Norwegian nights, and especially of that night, is limited. On the stage stands a large tree covered in snow. At the back of the stage, which ought to be deep, there are the outlines of something like a huge ornamental tent. One can hear the wind blowing. Maybe snow is falling lightly. Long shrill screams are heard. Then the first Guard, till now unseen, slowly moves out from under the tree. He is about 20 years old, has a cuirass, sword, and is wrapped up in rags of some sort to keep out the cold. He shakes off the snow, moves about to keep warm, takes out a leather flask from under his rags and starts to struggle with its top which has got stuck. He tries every way he knows: his teeth, banging the bottom of the flask, hitting the bottle over his knee, against the tree, stamping his feet on the flask … Finally, when he has nearly given up, the top eases off. He raises the flask, trying to drink, but as he swallows the first sip, the piercing painful screams start again. He begins to choke, shudders and spits. In comes the second Guard, about 40 years old. On his shoulders he carries two swords, well wrapped in rags.
My Theatre is My Freedom
Authors: Bisikisi Tandundu E. A.
Published: October 2007

A Zairean playwright, who was a national success at the age of 20, describes the consequences of criticising the National University in one of his plays
The Other Face
Authors: Steadman Ian
Published: October 2007

Why is it that established theatres can get away with political theatre, whereas in the townships plays by people like Maishe Maponya are stifled?
Five Playwrights
Authors: Hollyer Beatrice , Luther Carola
Published: October 2007

‘In town the play is an education for the audience, not something that will make them want to take up an issue and challenge the system. You don't expect a white audience to have reflection that leads to action, but with the township audience you do’. Matsemala Manaka

In a series of recent interviews, five leading playwrights describe their experiences and attitudes: Gibson Kente, Matsemela Manaka, Maishe Maponya, Barney Simon, Pieter-Dirk Uys.
One Time Brother
Authors: Mattera Don
Published: October 2007

‘Our actors were called in by the security police and questioned about their involvement in the Community Awareness Theatre and their participation in the play’. In August 1984 distribution of the poster-play was banned.
A Censored Life
Authors: Kyncl Karel
Published: October 2007

The story of Vlasta Chramostová and her Living Room Theatre in Prague
Algerian Theatre
Authors: Joffé George
Published: October 2007

Official theatre lacks popular appeal, while amateur groups have to contend with disapproval and harassment

George Joffe is a writer on North African affairs based in London. For much of what follows, he has drawn on an account of Algerian theatre written by Youssef Selmane, a lecturer in drama at the University of Algiers.
A Tribute to Vladimír Holan
Authors: Seifert Jaroslav
Published: October 2007

The poem which follows, ‘A Tribute to Vladimir Holan’, appeared as a samizdat book in Prague in 1980. It is an obituary tribute — Vladimir Holan died in 1980—and it is also a look back at twentieth century Czech cultural history, as personified by eight of Seifert's deceased friends.

Each of these friends were poets who made a contribution to the treasure chest of European literature, yet most are unknown outside Czechoslovakia. (Czech is spoken by only ten million people, and an author writing in a minority language experiences a sort of censorship from the outset; for poetry is difficult to translate.) To introduce the eight poets, we reprint an article by Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist now living in France, which first appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur.

Three of the six pages of the samizdat book are reproduced below and on page 6. The photographer, and the maker, of the samizdat book, was Ivan Kyncl. Over 50 of Ivan Kyncl's photos have appeared in Index since 1978, when he was still in Prague and was pseudonymously credited as ‘Ivan Bárta’. His story is also symptomatic of present day Czechoslovakia. He was 15 when the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. His parents refused to regard this invasion as ‘fraternal international assistance’ and so he was debarred from entering university and instead trained as a commercial photographer. He became the unofficial photographer of Charter 77. Many of his documentary photos and films found their way to the West, but during a house search his entire archive of negatives was confiscated. Following an international outcry, part of the archive was returned — each and every negative destroyed by a chemical. Ivan Kyncl left the country in 1980 and now works as a freelance photographer in London.

In the same year Vladimir Holan died. The Czech authorities allowed public recital by an actor of Seifert's tribute on one condition: instead of the line ‘In the wretched aviary that is Bohemia’ he had to say ‘In the wretched aviary that is the world’.
Poets and Power
Authors: Vladislav Jan
Published: October 2007

Following his 1984 Nobel Prize, the communist authorities in Prague now claim poet Jaroslav Seifert as one of their own; only a year earlier, possession of his books was deemed a crime
Politics & Punk
Authors: Krokovay Zsolt
Published: October 2007

Members of the Coitus Punk Group were sentenced to two years in jail when their songs and behaviour — which included tearing apart a live chicken — were held to be ‘incitement to disaffection’. A Hungarian dissident considers the grounds for this charge and concludes that in an ideal world he would ban the glorification of brutality.
Keeping the Lid on
Authors: Anonymous
Published: October 2007

The writer, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a Saudi studying abroad for his doctorate degree.
Deterring Dissent in Education
Authors: Lodhi Maleeha
Published: October 2007

‘Real scholars have been silenced and pseudo-scholars and sycophants have been promoted. It seems that the forces of darkness and obscurantism have succeeded in arresting the processes of scientific research.’

Pakistan under General Zia-ul Haq has had a regime of Martial Law since July 1977. According to a 1984 report on a mission to Pakistan published by the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, a climate of insecurity and arbitrariness has existed in the country since that date. It is characterised by the facility with which the Martial Law authorities may arrest whomever they wish, whenever they wish, and hold them for indefinite periods, as often as they choose; the absence of any scope for appeal against such decisions; and the absence of judicial surveillance of any kind whatsoever.

In the following three articles, Pakistani writers describe the effects which Martial Law and the Islamic Law (Sharia) have had on higher education, the press and cultural life. Maleeha Lodhi teaches Politics at the London School of Economics and also works as a journalist with South magazine. The writer on Pakistan's press is a senior journalist who wishes to remain anonymous. And Farhad is the pseudonym of a Pakistani writer and journalist.

For other articles on Pakistan see John Melville Williams ‘The Press in Pakistan’ (Index 5/1978), Shahid Nadeem ‘Imprisoned In Pakistan’ (Index 5/1979), Feroz Ahmed ‘Pakistan Curbs the Press’ (Index 4/1980), and Behroze Gandhy ‘Jamil Dehlavi Interviewed (Index 4/1981); and, of course, the Index Index section generally.
What Price Press Freedom?
Authors: Anyadike Nnamdi
Published: October 2007

‘Decree Four’ makes it an offence for any person to report or publish information that is false in any material particular, or that brings the government or officials into ridicule or disrepute. The onus of proof rests on the person accused.
The Rebellion and the Song
Authors: Ita Yolocamba
Published: October 2007

An interview with a musical group from the other El Salvador — the people in armed revolt

Yolocamba I'ta are a group of young musicians from the other El Salvador: that part of the people in armed revolt against the government of President José Napoleon Duarte, just as they have been against his predecessors. The forces of these FDR-FMLN guerrillas claim to have established control over one-third of El Salvadorean territory, where they have established ‘Guazapa’, ‘liberated zones’ in which they attempt to put into practice their ideas for a new society. Yolocamba's music, as they explain in this interview, carried out in December 1984, is dedicated to bringing the message of this struggle to audiences throughout the world.
Inventing a Political Movement
Authors: Verkijk Dick
Published: October 2007

Yugoslav press accounts of the trial of the six intellectuals ranged from the Stalinist style of most papers to objective reports in Slovenia
To Return as a Chilean Citizen
Authors: Santibañez Alberto
Published: October 2007

‘At least I will be back where I should be, with my people, with my culture, with my language, with my family, feeling that I belong.’ An interview with a Chilean poet who is returning to his home country after more than a decade in exile.
No Criticism Possible
Authors: Lionarons Wilfred
Published: October 2007

‘What we have now are newspapers writing on “safe” subjects. A lot of foreign news from the wires of UPI and AP. The remaining pages are filled with pictures, puzzles and fictional stories.’
If It Makes the President Happy…
Authors: Amin Mustafa
Published: October 2007

‘The present system of press ownership in Egypt is hopeless…’ One of Egypt's most controversial journalist-publishers takes a critical look at the last fifty years of press freedom in his country
Lawyers under Siege
Authors: Orentlicher Diane F.
Published: October 2007

In its efforts to stem the tide of growing judicial independence, the Philippine government has grown increasingly brazen in flouting the authority of the nation's courts
Making up for Lost Time
Authors: Ratushinskaya Irina
Published: October 2007

Six poems by a young Russian poet serving 12 years for writing ‘anti-Soviet’ articles and disseminating her poetry
Freely and Without Fear
Authors: Aguirre Luis Pérez
Published: October 2007

The president of SERPAJ describes the work of his organisation now that democracy has returned to his country
Audacity in the Cinema
Authors: Teixeira Ana Carolina
Published: October 2007

Interview with a Brazilian film maker who experienced long years of censorship in her own country — and who unexpectedly encountered it in Britain.
Scientific Information Suppressed
Authors: Bertell Rosalie
Published: October 2007

US judge subordinates public health and safety to the interests of government nuclear programmes.
Doctored History Books
Authors: Gömöri George
Published: October 2007

Official Soviet and Rumanian histories published in the last 20 years continue to misrepresent the past, especially the cooperation with Nazi Germany
Curriculum Vitae of Józef Śreniowski
Authors: Slodowski Wojciech
Published: October 2007

Biographical sketch of a Polish intellectual who is now in jail
Angels and Demons
Authors: Ciria Alberto
Published: October 2007

Perón and Evita have usually been canonised, satanised or banned. Is a more balanced history now possible?
Death of a Historian
Authors: Heuman Gad
Published: October 2007

Walter Rodney's thoughts on Black Power, his expulsion from Jamaica, and his violent end
Cape Times
Authors: Duodu Cameron
Published: October 2007

Editor faces imprisonment after breaking censorship rule
Ballot Box for the Gullible?
Authors: Avebury Lord
Published: October 2007

Why bother to elect people who cannot control the military?
The Broadcaster's Greatest Hazard is Fear
Authors: Protheroe Alan
Published: October 2007

The BBC's Assistant Director-General on the coming conflict between the broadcasters and those who wish to manipulate society: ‘Over the next two years we can expect sustained and mounting pressure and criticism of what we do as broadcasters and how we do it’
Coup D'état
Authors: Ikoku Sam
Published: October 2007

Sam Ikoku, a Nigerian maverick, was one of President Shagari's advisers when suddenly the December 1983 coup landed him in Kirikiri prison. Here is his genial account (now banned) of that moment
Censorship/Self Censorship
Authors: Kis Danilo
Published: October 2007

‘The fight against censorship is open and dangerous, therefore heroic, while the battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed, and it makes its subject feel humiliated’
Ex-prophets and Storysellers
Authors: Gruša Jiří
Published: October 2007

‘We who must offer our words like wares cast envious glances in the direction of our brothers in the East’
Calling a Spade a Spade
Authors: Oz Amos
Published: October 2007

‘Tyranny, oppression, moral degeneration, persecution and mass killing have always and everywhere started with the pollution of the language’
Unacceptable Reality
Authors: Csurka István
Published: October 2007

‘There is no victim of AIDS yet in Hungary, but many are victims of the reality virus’
The Writer's Role?
Authors: Mikes George
Published: October 2007

The writer's role in society is one of the non-problems. (1) The problem does not exist and could not exist even if it tried; (2) it is a pompous, conceited notion of writers and no one else cares a hoot about it; and (3) it is a dangerous notion