PARIS - When Big Brother regimes crumble, they sometimes leave an unintended paper trail, a pathway into the dark tradecraft of oppression.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for just one example, many Germans discovered from files kept on them that children or spouses had spied on them for the Stasi secret police. And in Romania, Doru Pavaloiae, an economist, learned that a man he thought of as a friend, a popular singer in his hometown, was an informer for the feared Securitate.

Such epiphanies would scarcely be possible if repressive regimes were not seized with an obsession to accumulate raw data on their citizens - the bytes of betrayal, the grist of control.

So it was for the South African-born writer and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, as an audience at the American University in Paris learned recently when he spoke of his experiences to students, faculty members and at least one American icon - the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 91 .

“Until I was 50 years old my books could be read by my fellow South Africans only after they had been approved by a committee of censors,” Mr. Coetzee, 70, told his listeners.

In those years, apartheid pervaded the land, prescribing where people lived and worked, where they were born and buried, how they traveled, whom they loved . Yet one file, concerning Mr. Coetzee’s “In the Heart of the Country” (1977), seemed to find a way of bypassing those pseudo-moral strictures, noting that “although sex across the color line is described,” the book “will be read and enjoyed only by intellectuals.”

In “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1980), another censor concluded, 22 instances of writing might be found undesirable, but the book’s sexual content was “not lust-provoking.” And “Life and Times of Michael K.” (1983), a third censor opined, “contains derogatory references to and comments on the attitudes of the state, also to the police and the methods they employ in the carrying out of their duties.” Invariably, the censors ruled against suppression.

These South African censors were scholars - academic peers who, Mr. Coetzee came to suspect, listened to Mozart on the stereo as they read Austen and Trollope at home and thought of themselves “as doing a good job.”

One secret reader, Mr. Coetzee recalled, invited him to tea “and we had a long discussion” about literature. “I had not the faintest idea that she was one of my censors.”

At the time, Mr. Coetzee was a professor of English literature in Cape Town. “The intellectual community was not large,” he said. “The fact remains that I was rubbing shoulders in daily life with people who in secret were making judgments about whether or not I was going to be allowed to be published and read in South Africa.”

The apartheid rulers yearned to be seen as spiritually part of a remote, Western society rather than of a continent they depicted as cruel and barbaric. If a censor noted that a work would be read only by “intellectuals,” the assumption seemed to be that such people would not choose to bring down the state.

The secret readers, Mr. Coetzee said, saw themselves as “unsung heroes .”

“ In their eyes, they were on my side,” Mr. Coetzee told his audience.


By ALAN COWELL