ABSTRACT
In an interview given in 1990, just as South Afica was poised to enter a new phase in its history, J.M. Coetzee was asked about the treatment his work had received by the censors of the ancien régime. His reply was disarmingly candid: 'I regard it as a badge of honor to have had a book banned in South Africa ... This honor I have never achieved nor, to be frank, merited' (Coetzee 1992, 298). Characteristically - he has never been one for easy ways out of ethical difficulties - this put the burden of responsibility as much on himself as on the censors. And yet the five novels he published during various phases of the censorship era - Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986) - were not exactly innocuous. So just how did they manage not to get banned? How was it that Coetzee, unlike many of his contemporaries, was deprived of that particular 'badge of honour'?
