TRANSITION / THE ‘UNBANNED’ : Score Card of Censorship Changing Fast in S. Africa : Many books previously forbidden for political reasons are now allowed, and readers and even customs agents can’t keep up.

When South African journalist Linden Birns returned home recently after a year abroad, customs agents interrogated him for four hours about the books in his luggage.

What most concerned them were five titles by anti-apartheid figures Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, leaders of the African National Congress.

“What do you want to do with such ideas?” Birns remembers one of the customs agents asking.

The agents determined that four of the books had been banned, and they confiscated them. But Birns later found three of the titles in a local bookstore, and the censorship board verified what the South African Embassy had told him in London: The books had been unbanned.

The censorship score card in South Africa is changing so fast these days that neither customs agents nor readers can keep up. Every week the Directorate of Publications rules that a few more previously banned publications are, as the bureaucratic say, “not undesirable, on review.”

About 6,000 political publications have been banned in South Africa over the years. Most are pamphlets, long outdated. But about 1,000 books and magazines could return to bookstores in the coming months, now that President Frederik W. de Klerk has removed the controls on black political discourse.

The ban has already been removed on everything from radical essays on the ANC’s armed struggle to biographies of radical black leaders.

De Klerk has not changed any censorship laws, or even the labyrinthine censorship process. But since February he has removed the ban on the ANC and dozens of other anti-apartheid groups, as well as on hundreds of activists whose words previously could not appear in South Africa.

“Our principles haven’t changed, but the facts have,” Braam Coetzee, the chief censor, said. “There aren’t any banned organizations anymore.”

South Africans may now possess and read copies of Sechaba, the ANC’s magazine; Winnie Mandela’s autobiography, “Part of My Soul Went With Him”; Francis Meli’s “A History of the ANC,” and Nelson Mandela’s “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” Also back in circulation is “One Hundred and Seventeen Days,” by Ruth First, an activist who was killed by a parcel bomb in 1982.

Advocating violence against the government, as the ANC has done for 30 years, was once enough to guarantee a book would be banned. Nearly everything written by or about ANC members was banned. But all that has changed.

“On the question of violence, you’ve got to be very careful at the moment,” said Coetzee, a 64-year-old former literature professor who has been head of the Directorate of Publications in Cape Town for nine years.

“We must take cognizance of the fact that there’s a lot of rhetoric in pre-negotiation statements.

“The ANC and others hold onto the concept of violence because they don’t want to let go of everything. We have to ascertain whether this is just rhetoric,” he added. “We can’t very well ban a publication for saying the armed struggle must go on when Mr. Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu are allowed to stand on a stage and say the same thing every weekend.”

These days, only publications that focus on specific methods or targets for violence are banned as threats to the security of the state.

The censorship process--Coetzee calls it “administrative control”--is set in motion by the public. All publications are allowed into the country, but if a single citizen complains about a publication, the censors are required to review it. Coetzee assigns a committee of three or four persons, drawn from a pool of 100 volunteers nationwide, to make a decision. The pool includes only voters, meaning that the voteless black majority is excluded.

The committee’s decision can be appealed to the Publications Appeals Board in Pretoria, where a final ruling is made after a full administrative hearing.

Publications determined to be “undesirable” must wait two years to be reviewed again. But once a publication is found “not undesirable” it can never be banned, no matter how many citizens complain.

The airport customs officials who confronted Linden Birns, using last year’s list of banned publications, confiscated four of his five books.

Birns is philosophical about it. “Perhaps it’s difficult,” he said, “for someone who has been watching for 20 years for the slightest subversive word to suddenly realize that the rule book is being written differently.”