My mother-in-law, whom I never met, refused to stock Mein Kampf in the bookshops that she managed.

This is not to say she wouldn’t sell you a copy. Although she was famously a person who did not suffer fools, she might have suffered you, momentarily, if you ordered Hitler’s manifesto from her, having found it absent from her shelves. No doubt she would have held her nose – metaphorically or possibly even literally – during the transaction. But she held to certain principles, stuck to them no matter what, and so would have sold you the book.

To use the parlance of today’s social media, Mein Kampf was only “shadowbanned” in her store. At the same time, the shops she managed gained whispered renown for keeping certain other titles on hand, in the literal shadows under the counter – titles that the apartheid state had banned outright. 

My mother-in-law was no stranger to courage, an important quality in a bookseller, which appears outwardly as a rather meek occupation. In fact, booksellers are regularly obliged to hold their collective nerve in defence of freedom of thought. Bookselling requires mettle; it’s trench warfare against fundamentalism.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants who fled pre-Nazi Europe, my mother-in-law rose to legendary status in South African bookselling circles. She toed an old-school line: sell almost any book but stock only the good ones; and subvert censorship at every opportunity.

I’ve often wondered, but never got the chance to ask her, what it was like to be a bookseller in the aftermath of the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. As we’ve seen this month with the gruesome attack on Rushdie in upstate New York, it’s an aftermath that seemingly has no end.

Like the attack, the violence that attended Rushdie’s fourth novel in the immediate years after its publication was all too real. Several of the Verses’ publishers and translators were stabbed or shot; its Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered; 37 people died in an arson attack in Turkey; bookshops in the US and UK were bombed.

In South Africa, a literary furore erupted when Rushdie was disinvited from the Weekly Mail’s Cape Town Book Week – ironically themed “Censorship under the State of Emergency”. The author’s ban followed both threats of violence and a delicate retreat by the anti-apartheid organisations, in their trademark two-steps-forward, one-step-back style, which had initially approved his visit.

And yet, despite his sudden persona non-grata status, Rushdie did appear at the Book Week after all – in a kind of way. To quote from the excellent piece that Anton Harber, who was then co-editor of the Mail, wrote recalling the moment: 

“It was [artist Gail] Behrmann who found the way to carve a victory out of this. [She] was not going to let anyone stop her when the Book Week moved to Joburg. She set it all up, researched the right technical solutions, deceived the state-owned telephone company into providing the necessary equipment for what they thought was a theatre production (it was happening in the Market Theatre), secured Rushdie’s agreement, and then told us and the publishers about it when it was too late to pull back. […]

“We were astounded when about 500 people crowded into the room to stare at a near-empty stage while Afrikaans writer Ampie Coetzee, sitting in a large armchair, conversed with an absent Rushdie, [whose] voice boomed through speakers and filled the room: ‘I’m very pleased to be with you, if only in this rather ghostly way.’”

I have a feeling that my mother-in-law would have approved. 

Whether she would have openly sold Rushdie’s novel in Joburg is another question, though. She wasn’t in the country that year, having taken up bookselling in Sydney for a stint, where different conditions prevailed. From what I can gather, however, sentiment among many of her colleagues in South Africa was against the Verses. This seems to have arisen from a sense of solidarity with those guiding the cultural policies of the Movement, booksellers being progressive by nature – but also, rather distinctly, from fear. The violence was real, after all.

Others who were around then may be able to help me on this point: was Rushdie’s book “shadowbanned” in South Africa?

If so, I wonder if the occasional stray copy of the Verses found itself tucked away under the counters of certain bookshops, as a secret revolt against censorship and its fundamentalisms. An anti-Mein Kampf, if you will. A holding of the line.

As heartening as it might be to discover that this was, indeed, the case, a world in which the courage of booksellers is tested beyond all reason is best avoided. Beware such a world. I know my mother-in-law would share my dread of its return. DM/ML

Ben Williams is the publisher of The Johannesburg Review of Books.

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