bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
No place for the African: South Africa's education system, meant to bolster apartheid, may destroy it
Authors: Vizikhungo Mzamane Mbulelo 
Published: October 2007

I was only in my third year at school when the Bantu Education Act came into effect in 1956. By the time I went to university in 1967, segregated universities, which had been established in terms of the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, were already a fact of life. In this article I have set out to examine the relevant acts and their application, to show how the system affected me and my contemporaries and how reaction against the system set in among us. The Bantu Education Act was passed in 1953, a year before the Supreme Court of the USA decided against segregation in American schools. ‘My department's policy is that education should stand with both feet in the Reserves and have its roots in the spirit and being of Bantu society,’ Dr Verwoerd, as Minister of Native Affairs (which took over the control of African education), told the all-White Senate in 1954. There is no place for him (meaning the African) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.
Against silence
Authors: Timerman Jacobo 
Published: October 2007

Jacobo Timerman was until recently one of Argentina's most distinguished newspaper editors. Born in Russia in 1923, he emigrated as a child with his family to Argentina, where he was later found the Buenos Aires daily La Opinion. He became a fierce opponent of the human rights abuses under the military regime which took power in 1976. In April 1977 Timerman was abducted and held prisoner for 30 months by agents of the Argentinian army. He was not found guilty of any of the accusations laid against him. The torture and savage anti-Semitism he was subjected to are described in his recent book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Exiled from Argentina in September 1979 following his release, he has spoken out on behalf of those who have been silenced or who continue to suffer from human rights violations in Argentina. Jacobo Timerman now lives in Israel; in November 1981 he was the guest of honour at the annual lunch of the Writers & Scholars Educational Trust in London, on which occasion he delivered the following address.
Polish publishing 1980-81
Authors: Pszenicki Chris 
Published: October 2007

In the years before the birth of Solidarity bridges were being built by courageous people in Poland to remove the artificial divisions in their culture. Those divisions flowed from the split of Polish culture into the approved ‘official’, the censored ‘unofficial’ and the taboo foreign — i.e. works produced by Poles in exile. In August 1980 everything changed. Here Chris Pszenicki, a leading Polish specialist in London, summarises the effects of the Gdansk agreements on the ‘three strands of Polish culture’ and explains the struggle over the recent new censorship Act.
Poems smuggled from Vietnam: An appeal, and 377 poems, from one who has spent 20 years in detention
Authors: Thien Nguyen Chi , Tan Lek Hor 
Published: October 2007

A poignant cry for help from a Vietnamese writer who vanished shortly after he smuggled a collection of his poems out of the country According to an Amnesty International report published last year, the Vietnamese government admitted that up to 40,000 people had been detained in re-education camps in South Vietnam following the communist take-over in April 1975. Emigré groups, however, put the number of detainees much higher. None of the detainees is known to have been tried in a court of law and only a few are reported to have been released in recent years. In a reply to an Amnesty International Memorandum dated September 1980 on the legal procedure of detention, the Vietnamese government's explanation was that ‘re-education without judiciary condemnation is an extremely humanitarian system which is very advantageous to them [the prisoners], compared with the usual system of trials before a court’. Another explanation given by the authorities was that ‘in Vietnamese psychology the absence of judiciary condemnation spares the person concerned a tarnished judiciary record (casier judiciaire) which may adversely influence his whole life and that of his children, especially in matters related with his professional activities: for instance, an imprisoned curate cannot deliver sermons after his release. The regime in re-education camps differs from that in prisons, and the duration of his loss of freedom is also shorter’. As for North Vietnam, the number of political prisoners either in re-education camps or in prisons has never been made public. There are reports of many who have been detained since the fifties and the sixties. Nguyen Chi Thien is one of them. He is a poet and was first detained in 1959 for speaking against the authorities. He is reported to have spent the past twenty years of his life in various prison camps. In 1979 a collection of 377 of his poems (more than 4000 verses) was smuggled out of North Vietnam. In a covering letter, reproduced here, he implored the world outside to publicise the conditions in the prison camps that he experienced himself and described in his poems. Nguyen Chi Thien's present fate or whereabouts are unknown. The poems were first published in Tien Vong Tu Day Vuc, edited by Nguyen Huu∗∗∗ Hieu (7706 Random Run Lane, 102, Falls Church, VA.22042, USA). We would like to thank Mr Nguyen Huu Hieu for providing the English translation of some of the poems. We also publish here the text of Nguyen Chi Thien's letter and an official report on the Vietnamese government's policy of ‘cultural purification’ — see ‘Wiping out decadent culture’ by Tran Tho.
Wiping out decadent culture: A cultural commissar's official report on the progress of ‘purification’ in South Vietnam.
Authors: THO TRAN 
Published: October 2007

A Vietnamese ‘cultural commissar’ reports on the success achieved in destroying undesirable publications, films, and other ‘decadent cultural products’ One of the major tasks facing the Communist authorities after their victory in April 1975 over South Vietnam was how to deal with culture and the arts, which they classified as ‘neo-colonialist, decadent, pornographic and counter-revolutionary’. A programme of ‘purification of culture’ (thanh loc) was soon adopted. This included the classification of books and other publications in public and university libraries (see Index 4/1978). A significant number of publications and authors (Vietnamese and foreign alike) were confiscated and banned. Private cinemas and theatres were closed down. This was also true of private newspapers and publishing houses. And many writers were put in prison or re-education camps (see Index 6/1978). The programme of ‘purification of culture’ was later extended to private bookshops, teahouses, discos and private households. The following is the progress report of the programme by Tran Tho, a cultural commissar, published in Tap Chi Con San (communist magazine), the ideological organ of the Vietnamese Communist Party, in October 1981.
UNESCO and press freedom: The Acapulco conference
Authors: Bullen Dana 
Published: October 2007

Report on the latest meeting to discuss the ‘new world information order’ written by the Director of the World Press Freedom Committee In the preceding article, Rosemary Righter brought the story of UNESCO's attempts to bring about a ‘New World Information Order’ up to the Acapulco conference in January this year. Dana Bullen, former Foreign Editor of the Washington Star newspaper, now Executive Director of the World Press Freedom Committee, attended the conference and here he describes what took place.
Czech interlude: The rise and fall of censorship 1953-68
Authors: Havliĉek Duŝan 
Published: October 2007

For a very short time in the spring of 1968, the Czechoslovak press and other media enjoyed a considerable measure of freedom hitherto unthinkable in a Soviet-style Communist dictatorship. With the ‘normalisation that followed the Soviet intervention in August of that year, the media returned safely into the hands of the Party, the supervision of the printed word as well as of radio and television being as rigorous today as it was in the Stalinist fifties. In a recently completed 164-page study. The Experience of Prague Spring 1968, the author — himself a Czech journalist now living in exile in Switzerland — analyses the role of the mass media in Czechoslovakia, showing how the ruling Communist Party controls them, and at the same time how that control was weakened and finally almost abolished during the period of liberalisation. This is an edited extract from his study. Dusan Havlicek was born in 1923 and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1942, during the Nazi occupation. Imprisoned for his underground work two years later, he took up journalism after the war and worked in the Institute of Theory and History of the Mass Media at Prague's Charles University. In 1968 he was appointed head of the press, radio and television department of the CP Central Committee. In 1969 he was sent as a CTK (Czechoslovak News Agency) correspondent to Geneva, where he asked for political asylum. He is the author of a number of works on the mass media.
A Czech Winston Smith
Authors: Šimečka Milan 
Published: October 2007

A dissident writer on his country's real-life experience of 1984 George Orwell's famous novel about the horrendous future in store for all of us appeared just too late to achieve publication in Czechoslovakia: that country was being converted to a one-party totalitarian state when 1984 came out in England, and not surprisingly it has remained on ‘the index’ or black list of Prague's rulers ever since. Very appropriately it is to make its belated appearance in Prague this year, in a samizdat typescript translation. This is accompanied by a long introductory essay by one of Czechoslovakia's best-known and most interesting dissident writers, Milan Šimečka, who explains how he discovered staggering similarities between George Orwell's fiction and his own life experience. 1984 thus finds quite a different resonance among Czech readers than it could ever hope to do in its author's own country. For in Prague, many of Orwell's fantastic-sounding flights of the imagination have been everyday reality for the past 35 years. Here is a brief extract from the first part of Šimečka's graphic account of ‘Czechoslovakia, 1984’.
Mistake
Authors: Havel Václav 
Published: October 2007

A sketch by Czechoslovakia's top banned playwright Václav Havel, the well-known Czech playwright, was released from prison in March 1983, after he had served almost four years on charges of ‘subversive activities against the Socialist state’ of Czechoslovakia. The ‘subversive activities’ were his signature on the Charter 77 manifesto (he was one of the three original spokesmen of Charter 77), his membership of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) and his numerous plays and essays which, in his own country, appear only in samizdat editions. (Some of his works, including his play ‘Audience’, have been published in Index on Censorship. Our previous issue, Index 6/1983, contained the first interview given by Havel to a foreign journalist after his release from imprisonment. The following sketch is Havel's first literary work written since leaving prison. Its world première took place at the end of November 1983 in Stockholm and is published here by permission of Rowohlt Theater-Verlag, Reinbek. The Stockholm performance was introduced by Václav Havel himself, the tape-recorded message he sent from Prague being played to the audience. The message appears on page 15.
Mister Taylor
Authors: Monterroso Augusto 
Published: October 2007

Short story by a Guatemalan author living in Mexico Guatemala's last authentically democratic government under Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a US-backed coup in 1954. Since then there has been a succession of brutal military regimes and unrepresentative civilian governments. Violence against opponents, and against the indigenous peoples who make up 60% of Guatemala's population (for whom integration into national life has often meant extermination), is reported to have cost more than 150,000 lives in the past 30 years; it reached a paroxysm in the 1980s under the regimes of Generals Lucas Garcia and born-again Christian Ríos Montt. The latter ruled for 17 months in 1982–3, during which time Amnesty International reported many thousands of people killed by either the army or army-controlled ‘death squads’. In August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by his defence minister Mejía Víctores. Despite promises of reforms and elections, the large-scale killings and ‘disappearances’ have continued. In recent months the targets have been those considered a threat in the towns – labour leaders, university staff, and journalists. Augusto Monterroso, like Alaide Foppa who is also featured in this issue, is a Guatemalan intellectual who has found it impossible to live and publish his writing in Guatemala. He has lived in Mexico for many years, where his work is published by the Editorial Joaquin Mortiz, which was established by someone who was himself a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, and who has adopted a courageous policy of publishing work by many Central American exiles. This story is taken from the collection Obras Completas (y otros cuentos) Complete Works (and Other Stories).
Inside: Poems from prison and an interview
Authors: Cronin Jeremy 
Published: October 2007

Jeremy Cronin, then a 27-year-old lecturer in the philosophy and politics department of the University of Cape Town, was arrested in July 1976 and sentenced the following September to seven years' imprisonment (Index 1/1977). He was charged under the Terrorism Act and the Internal Security Act for having carried out African National Congress (ANC) underground work for several years. In sentencing him the judge said: ‘So far as you are concerned, Cronin, I get the impression from the political statement you made from the dock yesterday that you are quite unrepentant. I do not suppose that the prison sentence I am going to give you is going to reform you.’ Cronin was released a few months early in May 1983, bringing with him a large number of poems written in prison: some had been jotted down and escaped the prison authorities, others were memorised and written and worked on after his release. A collection of these, entitled Inside, was published in February 1984 by Ravan Press in Johannesburg (distributed in Britain by Third World Publishers). On the publication of Inside Stephen Gray, Professor of Literature at the University of Witwatersrand, asked Jeremy Cronin about conditions for writing poetry in prison in South Africa, about opportunities for his poetry reaching an audience, and what he sees as the main challenge for white poets in South Africa. We print his interview below, together with a selection of poems from Inside.
Chinese contradictions: Intellectual liberalisation in 1983 was almost reversed when the leftists sprang their short-lived but powerful ‘anti-pollution’ campaign
Authors: Heng Liang , Shapiro Judith 
Published: October 2007

The excerpt that follows is taken from Intellectual Freedom in China After Mao, With a Focus on 1983, a report by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, with a foreword by Arthur Miller. Liang Heng, who came to the US in 1981 and took an MA degree at Columbia University, and American Sinologist Judith' Shapiro married in China in 1980, when Shapiro was teaching at Hunan Teachers' College. They are the authors of Son of the Revolution ( Chatto & Windus, London), the story of Liang's growing up during the Cultural Revolution. He is now Editor-in-Chief of Zhishi Fenzi ( ‘The Chinese Intellectual’), a new magazine published in Chinese in the USA for visiting scholars and students from China. The 214-page report concentrates on the climate for independent thinking in China during 1983 and on the nature of official constraints on intellectual freedom. The report was published in July 1984 by the Fund for Free Expression. The Fund set up the Helsinki Watch and the Americas Watch and is the US sponsor of Index on Censorship. Intellectual Freedom in China After Mao is available (price $10) from the Fund at 36 West 44th Street, New York NY 10036.
Teatro Vivo
Authors: Vivo Teatro 
Published: October 2007

The four members of Teatro Vivo formed their theatre group in Guatemala in 1977, but were forced to leave the country in 1980. The popular theatre movement of which they are part worked closely with local communities to explore and find artistic expression for their basic problems. Such a concept of art was seen as politically subversive. According to autumn 1984 figures published by the Guatemalan Human Rights Committee, over 35,000 people, the vast majority of them indigenous peasants, have been killed in the past 17 years of military repression. The following article was written by the members of Teatro Vivo and first appeared in the Third World Popular Theatre Newsletter No 1 (January 1982). It describes one particular example of the kind of work they were involved in prior to their exile from Guatemala. Since then, they have toured North America and Europe, putting on plays such as El Mundo de los burros ( The World of Donkeys') which convey to an international audience the daily struggle for existence in Latin America and the need for change.
The Blue Angel
Authors: Uhde Milan 
Published: October 2007

Milan Uhde, born in 1936, is a Czech essayist, poet and playwright. He has also written extensively for radio, film and television, and fringe theatres in Brno, where he still lives. Since 1969 his work has appeared only in samizdat or abroad. His ‘monodrama’ The Blue Angel was purposely written in the most simple theatrical form to allow performance without a stage — for instance in private flats. (Printed in Czech in Listy, Rome.)
Flying Through the Fear Barrier
Authors: Bartoszewski Wladyslaw 
Published: October 2007

The story of the TKN — the Society for Academic Courses, known as the ‘Flying University’ — which was set up to counter the omissions and distortions in state education. ‘Our greatest achievement was breaking the barrier of fear, bringing people together for the purpose of self-education, and simply sustaining the will to carry on.’ Two distinguished representatives of the thriving ‘alternative culture’ in Poland visited the USA and Britain respectively last year. One spoke about the activities of the ‘Society for Academic Courses’ which is responsible for university lectures in private apartments, trying in particular to set the record straight as regards Polish history; and the other spoke about the successes of the leading Catholic publishing house which has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Professor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, while visiting the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, gave an interview to Marek Nowak, the full text of which appeared in Studium Papers (Ann Arbor) 3/1984; a condensed version is printed below. During a visit to London, Jacek Wozniakowski described the work of the Znak publishing house, of which he is the Director. (See box ‘Znak: Making people's voices heard.’)
Curbing Free Thought
Authors: Farhad  
Published: October 2007

Martial Law regulation number 33 punishes indulgence ‘in any political activity by words, signs or visible representation’ with 7 years jail and 20 lashes. There are plans to ban women from driving, voting and holding most jobs. ∗ A television playwright, fairly popular in official circles, wrote a line in his TV play: ‘It is human nature. Man wants change.’ The line was expunged from the play without the knowledge of the writer or the script editor. ∗ Four television cameramen of Rawalpindi-Islamabad television centre were sacked for irresponsibly commenting on the ‘referendum’ speech of General Zia-ul-Haq in December 1984. ∗ A censor committee insisted on deleting a close-up of a tearful eye in a film commercial saying that it was erotic. Another committee, set up to vet scripts of stage-plays, proudly claimed that it not only objected to certain lines of dialogue but that they also made ‘positive suggestions’. ∗ A government circular advises government departments, libraries, educational institutions and autonomous institutions that they should subscribe only to listed ‘balanced’ newspapers (all published by the government-owned National Press Trust). The government also decides to base the granting of government advertisements on the ‘responsible’ attitude of the newspapers rather than their circulation. ∗ Author-advocate Mushtaq Raj was detained under Martial Law for writing a book which attempts to find common ground between religion and Marxism. ∗ The Law of Evidence was promulgated and women were declared unfit to become witnesses to commercial deals on their own. A business contract must be signed by two men, or by a man and two women.
Charter 77 in '85
Authors: VVK  
Published: October 2007

In a review of its work, Charter 77 answers criticism and modifies its role: it wishes to stand for man's humanism, and not just for human rights. Eight years ago, in January 1977, the human rights group known as Charter 77 came into being in Czechoslovakia. The group marked the anniversary by announcing the usual annual rotation of its three spokesmen: Dr Václav Benda, Jiří Ruml and Jana Šternová ceded their positions to Jiří Dienstbier, Eva Kanturkova, and Petruška Šustrová. Both the outgoing and the new spokesmen signed a document reflecting on the eight years of Charter 77. We regard this document as an important insight into the activities of human rights groups in all the European Communist countries (with the possible exception of Poland where those activities have much wider scope), and into the activities of people in an almost totally censored society.
A prize for our team
Authors: Brodsky Joseph 
Published: October 2007

‘It's easier for people to talk about politics or ethics rather than literature, and by making that preference, or being forced into it by their education and temperament, they deceive and rob themselves incredibly.’ The winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature talks to Sally Laird about the effect of poetry, the other members of the team, and ‘this whole business’.
The human rights movement and perestroika
Authors: Lubarsky Cronid 
Published: October 2007

Aside from de-Stalinisation, there's another essential process which hasn't even begun: de-Andropovisation, or getting rid of the current version of Stalinism — which says that if you don't respect the authorities, you've got only yourself to blame. The following speech, slightly edited here, was made at a conference in Denmark in March (see introduction). In a few places, for the sake of clarity, the translation has been made from the longer, written text of the speech rather than from the recorded version. The explanations in square brackets were added by the translator, Sally Laird.
The khaki coat: A short story from Vietnam
Authors: Tien Nhat , Phong Xuan 
Published: October 2007

Nhat Tien, now in his early fifties and one of the best-known Vietnamese writers, lived in South Vietnam until a few years after the Communist take-over in 1975. He has published 16 books (14 novels and two collections of short stories) and received the Vietnamese National Literary Award in 1961 for his novel Them Hoang (‘The abandoned veranda’) in 1961. He was vice-president of the Vietnamese PEN club, director of the Huyen Tran Publishing Co, and editor of the weekly Thieu Nhi In the late 1970s he left Vietnam as a ‘boat person’ and he is now living in the United States. The following short story is reprinted from the collection Tieng Ken (‘ Sound of a clarinet’), published in 1983 by Van Hoc, San Diego, California.