Via Mandela

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 5 · 2 March 1989

From Peter Straus, Geraldine Cooke

R.W. Johnson’s review of Higher than Hope: Rolihlahla we love you (LRB, 5 January) was an extremely curious choice for review. First, it is not available in this country, and has been banned in its country of original publication, South Africa, so no one could obtain it should they want to. Second, the references to its poor content – ‘it stops and starts several times, is full of gaps and factual errors and is clearly a rushed job’ – makes one wonder why the London Review of Books used up 7 per cent of its space on an unavailable book of dubious quality to the reviewer. You should be made aware that Hamish Hamilton, and later Penguin, will be publishing a fully-revised, comprehensively-edited version in June of this year. This edition will be available and will not contain the factual errors mentioned. Nevertheless, it is a tribute to your reviewer’s awareness that he spotted such an important book.

Peter Straus, Geraldine Cooke
Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books,

From Editors, ‘London Review’

It’s odd to take a tone of lofty contempt in order to tell us that we ought not to have reviewed a book that’s been banned in South Africa; and it would have been nice to have had it noticed that R.W. Johnson was among the first to report, for a British publication, on the present state of the black-on-black conflicts there, and on the activities of Mrs Mandela and her bodyguards.

Editors, ‘London Review’

Vol. 11 No. 7 · 30 March 1989

From R.W. Johnson

I was somewhat amazed to read the letter from Peter Strauss and Geraldine Cooke (Letters, 2 March) suggesting that the LRB was behaving oddly by carrying my review of Fatima Meer’s biography of Nelson Mandela. I should like to make several points. 1. Ms Meer’s book was certainly not banned in South Africa while I was there. The book was piled high in bookshops and Ms Meer toured the country promoting it, in company with Winnie Mandela and the Mandela United FC. Many thousands of copies were sold and if the authorities were intending to ban it, they were singularly inefficient about it. 2. Ms Meer is in no position to protest about the banning of books, since she led the demand for the banning of The Satantic Verses in South Africa – a request with which the Government happily complied, for a section of the Left had thus legitimised the whole banning/censorship system. This led to demands from writers such as J.M. Coetzee that the likes of Ms Meer should be regarded as having placed themselves ‘outside the liberation movement’. 3. By the same token, of course, Ms Meer is one of those now calling for severe measures to be taken against Penguin books. I find it pretty ironic that Penguin (to whom I am under contract) should write in criticism of me and in order to boost someone who is no friend of theirs.

R.W. Johnson
Magdalen College, Oxford