"Banning Lenin": A censorship debacle of the V.I. Lenin Collected Works in apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The censorship organs of the apartheid regime were firmly directed at prohibiting any undesirable literature. As a result of the communist threat to Christian Calvinism in South Africa during the early 1960s, especially with the passing of the Publications Act through Parliament in 1963 to regulate the circulation of literature, many of the publications by political figures, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mao Zedong, and Vladimir Lenin in particular, were banned outright. After 1977, changes in its management and rationale towards publications paved the way for more tolerance towards banned publications. By 1982, pressures from mainly academia demanding access to consult communist literature, most notably the Lenin Collected Works, led to a debate and intense reviewing of the book series between the Directorship of Publications and the Publications Appeal Board. The lifting of the possession ban of the Collected Works at mostly university and legal deposit libraries, and its total unbanning in 1991, could be regarded as a triumph for the right to free access and study of literature of historical significance. This article seeks to analyse and describe the controversial debate revolving around the Collected Works against the background of stringent apartheid censorship.