‘He was chairman of our theatre committee. And he was truly an intellectual giant and, and … a total alcoholic.’

Fourie remembers Scholtz as a staunch ally who defended his repertoire choices time and again against the performing arts board’s system of internal censorship and who joined him in his fight to have the theatre opened to all races. Yet Scholtz’s contradictions emerge in Fourie’s description of him as ‘very open-minded, a man who knows the theatre very well, who is a citizen of the world, hard Afrikaner, Broederbonder’.4 ‘baie oopkop, ’n man wat die teater baie goed ken, ’n wêreldburger is, harde Afrikaner, Broederbonder.’ In Luwes, ‘Die Stormjare’, 62. Alongside his work at CAPAB, Scholtz was also a key figure in the government’s formal censorship bureaucracy. Beginning in 1963, he served on successive Publications Control Boards. This apparent contradiction – a censor who fought censorship – is best understood with recourse to the history of government censorship and the role Afrikaner literary intellectuals played in it.

Born in 1924 to Afrikaner parents in Utrecht where his father was completing a doctorate, Scholtz grew up in Bloemfontein. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 1950. After a stint as a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, he returned to the Netherlands in 1959 to take up a professorship in Afrikaans following N. P. van Wyk Louw’s resignation. There, Scholtz gained what Fourie describes as ‘a completely refreshing view on literature’ and a familiarity with formalist theory unique to South Africa.5 ‘’n heeltemal verfrissende kyk van literatuur’. Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020. Scholtz returned to South Africa in 1963, but travelled frequently to Amsterdam over the years, a city that left a lasting mark on him. ‘He was truly a free thinker’, his son, Marius, emphasizes.6 ‘Hy was werklik ’n vrydenker gewees.’ Marius Scholtz, author interview, 27 January 2024.

When the newly elected Nationalist government first launched an inquiry into ‘undesirable publications’ in 1954, the commission in question, chaired by Geoffrey Cronjé, consulted Scholtz on literary matters.7 See McDonald, The Literature Police, 22–7. Their report – adopting a formalist view of literature and making provisions for ‘the artistic merit of literary material’ – laid the foundations of literary censorship for decades to come.8 In ibid., 26.

In The Literature Police, Peter McDonald sketches the developments that followed. After the Publications and Entertainments Act was passed in 1963, Afrikaans literary intellectuals made a decisive compromise with the government. Having failed to derail the legislation itself, its fiercest critic, N. P. van Wyk Louw, argued for a central role for literary experts in the newly constituted Publications Control Board to try and limit the damage it could cause. He succeeded, and the first board was dominated by literary academics. One of them was Scholtz, now returned to South Africa. Yet acceding to this demand also counted in the government’s favour – they had succeeded in enlisting the Afrikaans literary establishment in their censorial ambitions. This would have far-reaching effects, as McDonald emphasizes: ‘The most significant consequence of this concession, which proved unworkable in the longer term, was that it put the question of literature – what is it and who decides? – at the centre of apartheid censorship.’9 Ibid., 39.

At best, Scholtz’s role in the censorship apparatus can be considered an example in practice of Louw’s philosophy of ‘lojale verset’ (‘loyal resistance’).10 N. P. van Wyk Louw, ‘Lojale verset’ in N. P. van Wyk Louw, Versamelde prosa 1 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1986), 65–172. Concerned with the continued existence of his volk and with the literature he believed sustained and justified it, Louw was committed to the idea of protest within the context of committed Afrikaner nationalism. In the oft-quoted epigraph of his Lojale verset, he writes: ‘Rebellion is just as necessary in a volk as loyalty.’11 ‘Opstand is net so noodsaaklik in ’n volk as getrouheid.’ Ibid., 66. According to this philosophy, loyalty to one’s people doesn’t equate blind obedience, just as resistance doesn’t require abandoning them or dismantling their cultural and moral foundations. Instead, Louw believed, constructive internal resistance was integral to the preservation of the moral dignity of the Afrikanervolk, a prerequisite to their continued flourishing.

In the same vein, Scholtz’s work on the censorship board was ostensibly aimed at improving a flawed system from within, all the while remaining committed to the volk who had dreamed it up. For example, Scholtz frequently resisted calls to ban avant-garde Afrikaans literature, such as when he mounted a defence of Sestiger Etienne Leroux’s Magersfontein, o Magersfontein! and resigned from the board in 1977 when he did not succeed.

In an interview with McDonald, Scholtz claimed: ‘If it was literature, it was through’.12 McDonald, The Literature Police, 42. Yet, improbably pre-supposing that ‘literature’ could be recognized as plain fact by a panel of ‘neutral experts’, this dictum was only ever subjectively and inconsistently applied. There were incidences in which Scholtz himself argued for the banning of a book deemed injurious to the Afrikaner – for example, Stuart Cloete’s The Turning Wheels, submitted for review in 1967, which depicted Voortrekkers as ‘violent, pious, and promiscuous’.13 Ibid., 51. Indeed Scholtz seems to have applied the label ‘literature’, and the protection it offered, primarily to Afrikaans works.14 See ibid., 45–52. As McDonald demonstrates, this dictum ultimately enabled the board – particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s – to function as the self-appointed guardians of Afrikaans literature, even while much black African and English-language literature was banned. At worst, Scholtz’s involvement in the censorship apparatus served only the interests of his volk and their literature, reflecting his own brand of devotion to the project of Afrikaner nationalism.

On the surface, squaring Scholtz’s role as government censor with his friendship with Pieter Fourie and the role he played at CAPAB isn’t an easy task. His son, Marius, suggests that his father ‘ringfenced’ the former, concluding: ‘I think that was a part of his life that he did because he thought he was doing good and that things would have been worse off if he hadn’t.’15 ‘geringfence’, ‘Ek dink dit was ’n deel van sy lewe wat hy gedoen het omdat hy gedink het hy doen goed en dit sou slegter daaraan toe wees as hy dit nie doen nie.’ Scholtz, interview, 27 January 2024. He remembers that, at CAPAB, his father fought ‘fight after fight to get a play through and performed’, concluding, perhaps somewhat optimistically: ‘I think Pieter’s friendship with him actually proves who he really is.’16 ‘geveg op geveg op geveg om ’n stuk deur te kry of opgevoer te kry’, ‘Ek dink Pieter se vriendskap met hom bewys eintlik nogal wie hy eintlik is.’ Ibid.

A closer look at Scholtz’s twin roles in the arts suggests that they weren’t that contradictory at all. In both, he sought to uphold the right of existence, in particular, for contemporary Afrikaans works, at least those that fit his definition of ‘literature’ and fell within the acceptable bounds of loyal Afrikaner resistance.17 See McDonald, The Literature Police, 43–5; see also 72. Throughout, Scholtz tried to protect works considered controversial. When there was opposition against staging the English translation of Du Plessis’s ’n Seder val in Waterkloof in 1979, he was adamant that it was ‘impossible to have good theatre without being contentious’.18 In Grütter, ‘Interim Progress Report’, 94. He also believed that South African literature had to concern itself with the country’s increasingly compromised political present, arguing that ‘a flourishing indigenous theatre is the medium best equipped to communicate actualities collectively to the community, specifically regarding the sometimes problematic aspects of our South African situation’.19 Ibid., 107.

Ultimately, Scholtz’s position highlights the complexities of living and working in an oppressive system. Like many other Afrikaners, he walked a tightrope between his cultural embeddedness in the oppressing class while trying to remain true to his personal convictions, raising a fundamental question: Is loyal resistance a contradiction in terms? The Afrikaans author Elsa Joubert – a close contemporary of the Sestigers – certainly believed so, rejecting the very idea and arguing instead: ‘Verset moet nie lojaal wees nie. Verset moet skril, sterk, afbrekend wees’ (‘Resistance must not be loyal. Resistance must be shrill, strong, destructive’).20 Elsa Joubert, Spertyd (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2017), 120.

Yet it is precisely within this tension – between loyalty and resistance – that Scholtz’s work at CAPAB must be read. I interpret his 1978 translation of Biedermann und die Brandstifter as an attempt, from within the Afrikaner establishment, to hold up a mirror to contemporary South African society, hoping, like Pieter Fourie, to effect constructive change in a country in crisis. He was unusually well equipped for the task: his position afforded the play a measure of protection. After all, what better strategy to shield a play from censorship than to have it translated, in the first place, by a censor?

Johan Esterhuizen, the assistant director for Die Brandstigters, suggests that Fourie approached Scholtz as translator partly because he believed Scholtz could convey the political message shrouded beneath the many layers of Frisch’s enigmatic play. Both the play’s ambiguity and its political undertones were integral to its successful staging in 1978. ‘How are you going to make a political statement without it being turned down by the committees put in place specifically to take care of that?’ is how Esterhuizen sums up the dilemma of the politically conscious theatre-maker at state-subsidised organizations.21 ‘Hoe gaan jy ’n politieke statement maak sonder dat dit afgekeur word deur die komitees wat in plek gestel is om juis te sorg.’ Johan Esterhuizen, author interview, 7 February 2024. In 1985 he became the head of Afrikaans drama at CAPAB, an experience that left him with first-hand memories of navigating these challenges. He remembers that Danie van Eeden, the organization’s director from 1976 to 1985, once summoned him, requesting: ‘Please, Johan, I get regular visits from the Special Branch. I have to report to them. Please don’t do stuff that isn’t acceptable.’22 ‘Asseblief Johan, ek kry gereeld besoek van die Special Branch. Ek moet vir hulle verslag gee. Moenie goed doen wat nie aanvaarbaar is nie.’ Ibid.

Frisch’s ‘Lehrstück ohne Lehre’ was the perfect vehicle to communicate progressive ideas in an oppressive environment. ‘At first glance, a play like Brandstigters won’t seem political … it’s a parable, it’s a little story, how cute! But beneath, it gives you a wonderful opportunity to play, an opportunity to play mentally, to open up the debate’, Esterhuizen explains.23 ‘So op eerste oogopslag sal ’n play soos Brandstigters g’n politieke … dis ’n parable, dis ’n klein storietjie, hoe oulik! Maar diep onderliggend, en ek dink dis wat ek en Pieter beide gevoel het, dit gee vir jou ’n wonderlike speelgeleentheid, ’n mental speelgeleentheid, om die debat oop te maak.’ Ibid. After all, someone wanting to censor Die Brandstigters had to first make up their mind about what exactly it was trying to say. ‘We knew it was loaded, politically, but what the precise conversation outside the theatre would be among the audience walking out, is not the same for everyone’, Esterhuizen points out; ‘Who are the arsonists?’24 ‘Ons het geweet, it’s loaded politically, maar wat daai presiese gesprek buite die teater sou wees van die gehoor wat uitstap, is nie dieselfde vir almal. Wie is die brandstigters?’ Ibid.