Anti-apartheid author branded racist

Nadine Gordimer said she was insulted

The award winning novelist Nadine Gordimer could be taken off the curriculum in some South African schools because officials say her writing is racist.

The author, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991, had several books banned under the apartheid regime.

Now officials in the province of Gauteng have recommended that her book July's People, published in 1981, be taken off its reading list for schools on the grounds that it is "deeply racist".

The book tells the story of a white family which shelters in the home of their former servant, who is black, as racial tensions in a futuristic South Africa erupt into civil war.

"Deeply racist"

The government officials are reported to have described the book as "deeply racist, superior and patronising" in a report on reading lists for the equivalent of A-Level students.

Nadine Gordimer reacted angrily: "To be called a racist as a white South African and as someone who stayed here through all of the worst time and as someone who identified closely with the struggle - that is just very insulting."

The novelist - who campaigned against censorship during the apartheid era - said: "If the selectors of fiction are looking for moral lessons against racism, few could be more telling than the situation in this novel."

She said the report by the officials of Gauteng province "echoed amazingly the language and attitudes of the old apartheid censorship board".

Shakespeare shunned

According to reports, the same education body also wants many of Shakespeare's plays taken off reading lists for older teenagers.

Plays such as Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello were branded racist; Julius Caesar was said to be sexist because it evelates men.

Works which escaped criticism included Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice.