Nadine Gordimer

In 2001, a panel of education policy-makers in the Gauteng province decided to ban Gordimer's book July's People. The panel determined the book was not suitable for students because the "subject matter" was "questionable." Besides failing to encourage "good grammatical practices," the story also came across as being "deeply racist, superior and patronizing," the panel members said, according to a report at the time in Britain's "Guardian" newspaper.

July's People is a futuristic novel about a white family fleeing a war-torn Johannesburg to the countryside, where the family's servant, July, tries to hide his former masters. In the story, Gordimer portrays a bloody South African revolution that, fortunately, never took place.

By having her book banned, however, Gordimer found herself in good company. In addition to July's People, the overzealous officials in Gauteng also banned William Shakespeare's Hamlet and works by the African writers Dambudzo Marechera of Zimbabwe and Njabulo Ndebele of South Africa.

"My first reaction was incredulous laughter," Gordimer told the "International Herald Tribune" in April 2001. "Then, of course, when I saw the spread of books that had been treated in this way, " she added, "I realized that this was a serious matter."

At the same time, the other writers might have been lucky that a writer of Gordimer's international stature was affected, since it meant famous intellectuals like Edward Said and Sir Richard Attenborough would quickly rally to their defense.

The province's education minister, Ignatius Jacobs, quickly lifted the ban and expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the decision of his employees.

When Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991, her friend Per Wästberg wrote that for Gordimer, "the inspiration, rather than the cause of her despair, are the dangerous but rewarding contradictions of South African society today."

Kerstin Steinbrecher